New Books in Literature: Recent Episodes

Marshall Poe

Interviews with Writers about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Dong Li’s The Orange Tree (U Chicago Press, 2023) is a collection of narrative poems that braids forgotten legends, personal sorrows, and political upheavals into a cinematic account of Chinese history as experienced by one family. Amid chaos and catastrophe, the child narrator examines a yellowed family photo to find resemblances and learns a new language, inventing compound words to conjure and connect family stories. These invented words and the calligraphy of untranslated Chinese characters appear in lists separating the book’s narrative sections. This lyrical and experimental collection transcends the individual, placing generations of family members and anonymous others together in a single moment that surpasses chronological time and offering intimate perspectives on times that resonate with our own. The result is an unflinching meditation on family history, collective trauma, and imaginative recovery. In this conversation, Dong and Anna discuss landscape and memory, family and history, and poetry as a medium for storytelling and as a language all its own. Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His poems have been published by Conjunctions, Fence, Kenyon Review, POETRY, and elsewhere. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in creative writing at Colgate University and is a recipient of fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection, The Orange Tree (University of Chicago Press, March 2023), was the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize. Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Frank, conversational, and darkly funny, Gravitas examines the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth writing about. These poems bear witness not only to alienation but also to the bittersweet joy of being forced to invent alternative ways of living and writing. Amy Berkowitz is the author of Gravitas (Éditions du Noroît / Total Joy, 2023) and Tender Points (Nightboat Books, 2019). She lives in San Francisco, where she co-hosts the Light Jacket Reading Series. She's working on a novel that she likes to call Untitled Bisexual Jumpsuits Project. Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Patrick Horrigan’s novel, American Scholar (Lethe Press 2023) centers on James (Jimmy) Fitzgerald, who teaches American Literature at a prestigious university, is in a happy (open) marriage that allows him to enjoy a much younger boyfriend, and has just published a novel about literary critic, Harvard Professor of History and Literature, F.O. Matthiesen, who was forced to hide his love for artist Russell Cheney during a time before homosexual love and marriage were accepted. The sister of Jimmy’s first serious boyfriend shows up at a book signing for Jimmy’s new novel and hands him a letter that sends him spinning back to memories of the first man he ever loved. James describes his sexual awakening and recalls haunting moments with Gregory, whose self-destructive personality was part of Jimmy’s impetus for writing American Scholar. Horrigan’s novel, which weaves in the study of Queer Theory, Jimmy’s sexual awakening, and fears of the AIDS virus then sweeping across the globe. Horrigan whips back and forth from that difficult time to 2016, when his now middle-aged protagonist is now a professor and published author, but political polarization following the presidential election has inspired new fears throughout the gay community. Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Patrick E. Horrigan received his BA from The Catholic University of America and his PhD from Columbia University. He is the author of the novel Pennsylvania Station (Lethe Press; Indie Book Award finalist for best LGBTQ2 fiction) and the novel Portraits at an Exhibition (Lethe Press; winner of the Dana Award for fiction as well as the Mary Lynn Kotz Art-in-Literature Award, sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts). His other works include the memoir Widescreen Dreams: Growing up Gay at the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press), the play Messages for Gary: A Drama in Voicemail, and (with Eduardo Leanez) the solo show “You Are Confused”! He has written artists’ catalogue essays for Thion’s LIMI-TATE: DRAWINGS OF LIFE AND DREAMS (cueB Gallery, London) and Ernesto Pujol’s LOSS OF FAITH (Galeria Ramis Barquet, New York). His essay “The Inner Life of Ordinary People” appears in Anthony Enns’ and Christopher R. Smit’s “Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability” (University Press of America). Horrigan and Eduardo Leanez are the hosts of “Actors with Accents”, a recurring variety show in Manhattan. Winner of Long Island University’s David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching, he taught literature for twenty-five years at LIU Brooklyn. He has played the piano throughout his life and currently works as a tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where he lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The characters in Nishanth Injam’s The Best Possible Experience (Pantheon, 2023), his debut short story collection, are like many in India or in Indian communities in the United States: Working hard and enduring hardships to try to get a better life for themselves. They don’t always succeed—and even those that do lose something along the way. That tension between hope and reality is at the core of many of Injam’s stories, whether it’s a recently migrated Indian family panicking that a white boy is coming to dinner, a college student trying and failing to get a visa, or a young son in Goa, increasingly frustrated with his tour bus driver father , prone to embellishment and exaggeration. Nishanth Injam received an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. He is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar. His work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, ZYZZYVA, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Best Debut Short Stories 2021, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2022. Today, Nishanth and I talk about why he pivoted from tech to creative writing, how his stories relate to the Indian experience, and the trials of Indians and Indian-Americans trying to improve their lives. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Best Possible Experience. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ravage & Son (Bellevue Literary Press, 2023) by Jerome Charyn is a novel set in the Lower East Side of New York City in the early years of the twentieth century when it was America’s most crime-ridden and decadent neighborhood. Featuring an alluring cast of heroes, misfits, and monsters, Ravage & Son is part Jekyll and Hyde, part crime noir, part mystery novel, and ultimately an instant classic – a cinematic kaleidoscope that captures both the intense beauty and utter debauchery of humanity in this bygone era. At the heart of the novel is the menacing Lionel Ravage, a heartbroken powerbroker hell bent on making the world pay for the loss of his soul mate, and his illegitimate son Ben, a poor boy educated at Harvard who becomes a downtown detective for the Kehilla, a quasi-police force slapped with the responsibility of cleaning up the Lower East Side’s layers of dirt and crime. The younger Ravage fights to protect, while his father yearns to burn it all to the ground. They share a deep wound and savage love that chains them together but is too agonizing to relive. Jerome Charyn’s brilliance is in capturing the violence festering behind closed doors and in the streets as forces large and small work in unity to suck the marrow out of the Jewish neighborhood and its inhabitants. The author’s magnificent sentence-by-sentence style is marked both by an intensity and sensitivity that makes the dark tale more human and humane. It is as if Charyn is at war with the past, fully committed to its darkness, but delivering a source of light through his unmatched voice, the essential narrative delivered in what he calls his “music.” With touches of magical realism and an aura of mysticism, Charyn turns the Lower East Side into a portal for looking at that era and our own. The author of more than 50 novels, biographies, histories, graphic novels, and collections, Charyn once proclaimed that his ultimate goal in writing novels has been “to make the reader cry...to break the reader’s heart.” With its stunning, unforgettable portrayal of the forces of light and darkness, Ravage & Son delivers on the author’s aim, presenting humanity in its fully formed depravity, but also capturing life’s poignancy. The interview focuses on Ravage & Son, but Charyn and I discuss other aspects of his renowned career, including discussion of writing style, research, literary influences, and more. Charyn is arguably the most famous writer most readers have never heard of, a bestseller in France and other parts of Europe, and a true “writer’s writer” who continues to publish acclaimed books while being lauded by major authors including Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, and a long list of others. He is a distinctive voice in American literary history. Bob Batchelor is an award-winning cultural historian and biographer. His latest books are Roadhouse Blues: Morrison, the Doors, and the Death Days of the Sixties and Stan Lee: A Life. Visit him on the web at www.bobbatchelor.com or email at bob@bobbatchelor.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Aparna Verma’s debut novel The Phoenix King (Orbit, 2023) takes place in the desert kingdom of Ravence as war brews on its borders and the king is set to step down. The story follows an assassin exiled but struggling to return home as well as both the king and the heir to the throne. In this interview, Verma describes the way her love of the desert shaped Ravence and how the duality of fire shaped its culture. She discusses Indian influences in science fiction, the many ways people are connected to faith, and the ways her work reimagines monarchy. The Phoenix King is so clearly a labor of love and it was so much fun to discuss with the author. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to CK Westbrook about The Judgment (4 Horsemen Publications, 2023), book 3 of "The Impact Series." Kate thought the world was finally safe from Rex and the powerful, terrifying others — but was it? Working together, Kate Stellute, Sinclair, Jo-Ellen, and Rex successfully implemented a risky plan to make space safer for everyone and everything. Kate hoped the others would accept the results and stay away. But when she learns the details of why Rex caused a global mass shooting, she realizes their plan may not have worked after all. Rex suggests a way to protect Kate and her loved ones if the others decide to destroy what is left of humankind, but can Kate trust the violent alien that has already killed millions of people? If she wants to prevent more violence, Kate will need a new plan and new allies if she is to find a way to save the human race from more extraterrestrial wrath. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ala Fox speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Ramadan in Saint-Denis,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Ala talks about weaving together the threads of her experiences living in Paris into an essay that explores a lot of questions but doesn’t try to answer them. The piece dives into the dynamics between neighborhoods, and between native Parisians and immigrant communities, and explores the possibility of creating and sustaining love across language barriers and distance. Ala also discusses why she was nervous about publishing the essay, and how it would be received in the Muslim community. Ala Fox is a Muslim American daughter of Chinese immigrants. She writes in English, Python, memories, and JavaScript. When not coding, she writes about life and love online @alalafox. Her work has been published in Ruminate, Hunger Mountain, and MuslimMatters. She is passionate about racial equity and Oakland. Read Ala’s essay “Ramadan in Saint-Denis” in The Common here. Learn more about Ala here. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Garth Nix’s new collection Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Pupper Sorcerer (Harper Voyager, 2023) gathers together stories written over more than fifteen years for a variety of publications and follows the artillerist knight and his sorcerous, paper mâché companion as they pursue their duties as god-slayers. In this interview, Nix describes the myriad influences shaping his work, the balance of the melancholy and humor in the collection, and what makes the medium of short fiction compelling. As with so much of Nix’s work, Sir Herewood draws on many of the archetypes of fantasy and reimagines them, imbuing them with new life. It was a joy to speak with him. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Marty Wingate about her novel The Orphans of Mersea House (Alcove Press 2022). Olive Kersey is both penniless and alone at 37 – her brother and her boyfriend both died during WWII, her father not long after, and Olive spent all the years taking care of her ailing mother. Now her mother is dead and Olive has to vacate their rental. She lives in Southwold, a small town on the Suffolk coast of England and her choices are limited until her childhood friend Margery suddenly returns home. Margery has inherited a big old house, and hires Olive to run it, but the first two lodgers have secrets. Margery learns that she is the ward of an 11-year-old orphan, daughter of her first love. Olive adds little Juniper, whose legs were compromised by polio and requires braces, to her list of responsibilities in the old Mersea House. The officer in charge of placing children like Juniper begins keeping a close eye on the house, and in a small town, there are always those who want to expose secrets…… Marty Wingate began college life as a journalism major but ended up with an undergraduate degree in theater and a master’s degree in speech pathology from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She worked as a speech therapist in Phoenix, at a school for the deaf in El Paso, and at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, Ireland before settling in the Pacific Northwest where she met her husband and worked in public schools for many years. Her husband’s job as a newspaper and freelance copyeditor drew her back into the world of words by way of horticulture. She returned to school and obtained a second master’s degree, this one in urban horticulture from the University of Washington. She then wrote garden how-to books and magazine and newspaper articles and for several years could be heard taking gardening weekly on KUOW, the local NPR station. She segued from nonfiction to fiction writing with the appearance of her first mystery, The Garden Plot, in 2014. In the past nearly-ten years, Marty has written seventeen books. This includes eight books in the Potting Shed series featuring Pru Parke, a middle-aged American gardener transplanted from Texas to England; four Birds of a Feather mysteries that follow Julia Lanchester, bird lover, who runs a tourist office in a Suffolk village; three books in the First Edition Library series; and two historical fiction standalones including Glamour Girls, about a female, Second World War Spitfire pilot. More books are on the way. A Body on the Doorstep, the first book in The London Ladies Murder Club, set in 1921, will be out January 2024. Marty prefers on-the-ground research whenever possible, so she and her husband regularly travel to England and Scotland, where she can be found tracing the steps of her characters, stopping for tea and a slice of Victoria sponge in a café, or enjoying a swift half in a pub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In the unconscious, coincidence does not exist. A bizarre tragedy drives ten-year-old Paul from his dysfunctional home, leaving his younger sister, Bethany, behind. Paul flees to his estranged father’s apple orchard where he discovers comfort and parenting for the first time. Two decades later, the long-lost siblings settle separately in NYC where a gifted psychoanalyst, Lillian, develops independent relationships with them as all three characters search for seemingly unattainable connection while carrying inescapable demons. In Triskele (Atmosphere Press, 2023) by B. D’Amato, we experience a psychological story that takes us through generations to the research and art departments, galleries and art lecture halls of distinguished Franklin University; an idyllic upstate farm; heart-wrenching therapy sessions; a seminary and the raunchy crime and drug infested NYC streets during the early 1980’s. A kaleidoscope of settings provide symbolic backdrops for the complex, human desires of individuals struggling for emotional wholeness. The story explores the irrational behaviors people embrace and the apparently antithetical, yet underlying motives, for their actions. Rich dream material furnishes complexity and deepens perspective into the conflicts of each character’s internal world, all the while asking: where do we find grace? B. D’Amato is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC. She has written numerous professional papers analyzing the psychic conflicts of literary characters and their authors, i.e., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, R L Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Her most recent publication considers the lyrics in Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” from a hypnogogic (hip·nuh·gaa·juhk) perspective. She has written extensively about dreams, adoption, and the curative potential of human interconnection through emotional communication. Triskele is her first work of fiction. bdamato.com Lexa Roséan is a psychoanalyst practicing in NYC. Lexa is on faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis (CMPS). She also dances and teaches Argentine tango. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Any novel set in Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584) is an instant draw for me; that is, after all, the setting for most of my own fiction. Throw in Baba Yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folklore, and give her a makeover, and I am hooked. Throw out the warts and the cackle, the flying mortar and pestle, the human skulls lighted from within, and even the appellation “Baba” (“granny,” but also “hag” or “crone”). These attributes, according to Gilmore, are part of a vicious plot to discredit her heroine, Yaga—the half-mortal, extremely long-lived daughter of the Earth goddess Mokosh. Born in the tenth century, before the introduction of Christianity cast the old Slavic deities into the shade, Yaga has become a noted healer who doesn’t appear a day over thirty in 1560, when the story begins. Over the centuries, she has acquired a frenemy, Koshey (Koshchei) the Deathless, who for reasons that become clear during the novel has chosen to break his prior deal with Yaga and interfere once more in human affairs, pushing Tsar Ivan the Terrible along his path of suspicion and terror. The first victim is Tsaritsa Anastasia, a friend of Yaga’s before Anastasia’s selection as Ivan’s first royal bride. It’s that connection that draws Yaga into the fight. But the forces opposing her are immortal as well as mortal, complicating her efforts. It’s all very well done, although the impact of Ivan’s atrocities and of Koshey’s insistence on violence as necessary to the survival of Russia is only heightened by Putin’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, which the author could not have anticipated when her book was accepted for publication. The history is mostly sound (allowing for the supernatural element) and the Russian correct, as one would expect of a native speaker. And there is the fun, for those in the know, of watching the author play with familiar (Little Hen, the hut on chicken feet) and new (Yaga’s immortal helpers, the wolf Dyen and the owl Noch, named for Day and Night, respectively) tropes from this set of ancient myths. If you like fantastical takes on history or reexaminations of literary villainesses, this novel is for you. Olesya Salnikova Gilmore was born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in the United States. She writes historical fiction and fantasy inspired by Eastern European folklore. The Witch and the Tsar (Ace Books, 2022) is her debut novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation. On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books Discussed in this episode:

The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany

In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

“The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell

Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!)

A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson

I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein

The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin

More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon

The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein

Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they’ve written-an unparalleled friendship in poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem (Palimpsest Press, 2022), Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and traces the development of her formalist aesthetic across their lifelong back-and-forth. Peacock offers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft and creativity. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself. Levin's most recent work, Mr. Memory and Other Poems, tackles themes of memory and longing and is as expansive and is it detailed. Another unique aspect of this already rare friendship is that they shared a therapist - one who was so beloved that, when she had a stroke and had to close her practice, both Peacock and Levin felt bereft like they'd lost a mother. In a fascinating role reversal, Peacock cared for her therapist after her stroke, and wrote magnificently about the experience and their years-long relationship prior to Joan's stroke in The Analyst (W. W. Nortton and Company, 2017). Peacock is a poet, biographer, and memoirist whose literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others, from poetry to prose and back again to poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem she describes her decades-long friendship with distinguished poet Phillis Levin, quoting their poetry and outlining her personal rules for poetic form. In addition to The Analyst, Peacock's poetry collections include Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems from Biblioasis and W.W. Norton and Company. She is the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Malahat Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Plume and are anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has written two books about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden and Flower Diary. Peacock teaches online for the Unterberg Poetry Center at 92NY. You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

M. A. Carrick’s newest novel Labyrinth’s Heart (Orbit, 2023) is the culmination of their Rook and Rose trilogy, which chronicles the life of the thief Arenza Lenskaya after she returns home to the city of Nadežra to con her way into one of the city’s noble families. The co-writers describe the trilogy’s origins–as the spinoff of a tabletop game–and the influence that their backgrounds in anthropology have had on their work. They discuss the importance of different kinds of family relationships and the power of queernorm stories, how they balanced trauma and joy in the narrative, and what makes vigilante characters so compelling to both write and read. The Rook and Rose trilogy is a fast paced adventure that is simultaneously intricate and empathetic. It is a testament to the things that make fantasy compelling as a genre and it was wonderful to speak with the authors about its conclusion. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Michelle Brafman about her novel Swimming with Ghosts (Keylight Books, 2023). Until her unemployed husband Charlie volunteers to step in as team coach, professional organizer Gillian Cloud has also controlled the neighborhood swim club and its team. She’s a beautiful, much-admired part of the community, but Gillian is living behind a façade, refusing to accept the truth about her father’s alcoholism and philandering, suppressing any unpleasantness in order to present her well-known positivity. Her best friend Kristy learns the truth about her own hidden addictions, which surface in a dangerous way and require the support of a former mentor. It’s the summer of 2012, and after the ghosts of family addictions appear, and a real derecho destroys the clubhouse and destroys the power grid for several days, both Gillian and Kristy need to come to terms with their past trauma. Michelle Brafman is the author of Bertrand Court: Stories and the novel Washing the Dead. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Oprah Daily, Slate, LitHub, The Forward, Tablet, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. She’s worked as a coffee barista, radio advertising salesperson, and television producer, among other jobs. She got hooked on writing fiction while she was producing television because she craved another outlet to tell the stories she was gathering. Brafman grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, earned an MA in Fiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and in addition to writing, her grand passion is helping others find and tune their narrative voices. A former swim mom and NCAA All-American freestyler, Michelle has never lived more than a mile away from a lake, ocean, or river. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

T. Kingfisher’s newest novel Thornhedge (Tor, 2023) is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty that follows Toadling, the person in charge of keeping the fair maiden asleep inside her tower and the thorns surrounding that tower strong. Kingfisher discusses the joys of retellings, her love of plants, and the ways in which a story can be simultaneously murderous and gentle. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

n this episode (originally aired by our partner Novel Dialogue) John and his Brandeis colleague Eugene Sheppard speak with Joshua Cohen about The Netanyahus. Is the 2021 novel a Pulitzer-winning bravura story of the world’s worst job interview? Or is it a searing indictment of ethno-nationalist Zionism–and the strange act of pretense whereby American Jewish writers and thinkers in postwar America pretended that Israel and its more extreme ethno-nationalist strains didn’t concern them? Cohen dramatizes the return of that repressed by imagining the family of the Benzion Netanyahu (actual medieval Spanish historian and father of Israel’s past and present Prime Minister Bibi) landing itself on a would-be assimilated American Jewish family ripped straight from the pages of a Philip Roth or Bernard Malamud novel. With John and Eugene, Joshua dissects the legacy of earlier American Jewish writers like Cynthia Ozick, and offers finer details of how Ze’ev Jabotinksy‘s bellicose views would ultimately take hold in Israel, wisecracking his way to a literally jaw-dropping conclusion… Mentioned in this episode:

Zionist and ethnonationalist Ze'ev Jabotinksy (1880-1940): "We must eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate us."

Novalis (the German Romantic writer Georg Von Hardenberg) says somewhere "Every book must contain its counter-book."

Slavoj Zizek makes the case that everything is political including the choice not to have a politics.

Joshua wants readers to think about why celebrated postwar American fiction by Jewish authors like Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth (starting from his 1959 Goodbye Columbus) largely ignores both the Holocaust and Israel until the 1970s or 1980s. Joshua invokes Harold Bloom's 1973 Anxiety of Influence to explain his relationship to them. He is less interested in Hannah Arendt.

"Shoah Religion" is the way in which the Holocaust came to not only function as a key element in post-war American Jewish identification but also to legitimate the state of Israel (cf Abba Eban's famous quip "There's no business like Shoah business")

Yekke: a German-Jew in Israel or American characterized by an ethos of industrial self-restraint and German culture, satirized in Israeli culture as a man who wears a three piece suit in the middle of summer heat.

Leon Feuchtwanger

"There's hope but not for us" Joshua (subtly) quotes a line of Kafka's that Walter Benjamin (in "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death‟ from Illuminations) apparently lifted from Max Brod ("Oh Hoffnung genug, unendlich viel Hoffnung, — nur nicht für uns.")

Yitzhak La’or "you ever want a poem to become real"

Netanyahu tells the story of the snowy drive to Ithaca (again) in an interview with Barry Weiss.

Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer

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According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired by a woman who just as soon stab you in the back and love you, the first-person narrator is P.I. Cal Sounder, hired by the police to help investigate the murder of a 7’8”, 91-year-old man who by all rights could have lived several more centuries. Sounder’s specialty is investigating crimes against Titans, the one percenters among one percenters, whose access to an exclusive medical treatment known as Titanium 7 enlarges both their bodies and their lifespans. The story is set hundreds of years in the future, when such miracle treatments become possible, but the book also sends roots into the past. The murder weapon, for instance, is a .22 Derringer, a small handgun not too different from the weapon used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. “Killing someone with a gun is noir. Every poster of a noir movie is someone with a gun, whether it's a shadow with a revolver or a kind of Rico Bandello in Little Caesar. The gun is bound up with noir and vice versa,” Harkaway says. Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell. As Harkaway, he is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker (which was nominated for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke award), Tigerman, Gnomon; and the non-fiction The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He has also written two novels under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. His father wrote under the pen name John le Carré. Find out more about Rob Wolf and Brenda Noiseux. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Linda Nemec Foster has published twelve collections of poetry including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Talking Diamonds, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid (2019 Michigan Notable Book) which was created with co-author Anne-Marie Oomen and artist Meridith Ridl. Her work appears in magazines and journals such as The Georgia Review, Nimrod, New American Writing, North American Review, Verse Daily, Paterson Literary Review, Witness, and the 2022 Best Small Fictions Anthology. She has received over 30 nominations for the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Arts Foundation of Michigan, National Writer’s Voice, Dyer-Ives Foundation, The Poetry Center (New Jersey), Fish Anthology (Ireland), and the Academy of American Poets. In 2021 her poetry book, The Blue Divide, was published by New Issues Press and received a featured review in Publishers Weekly. A new collection of prose poetry, Bone Country (Cornerstone Press), was published in 2023 after being honored as a finalist in several national competitions. Recently, she was invited to read an award-winning selection from Bone Country at the West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland. The first Poet Laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan (2003-2005), Foster is the founder of the Contemporary Writers Series at Aquinas College. You can find out more here. Nemec Foster's collection of prose poems is a reflection of the world before COVID. All of the pieces are inspired by other parts of the world-Istanbul, Rome, Krakow, Prague, Vienna, Seville-not the familiar landscape of the United States. But, the narrator is definitely not a native of these countries; they are "the other," "the foreigner," the American with a distinct Midwest sensibility who is trying to make sense of a world on the brink of an unforeseen catastrophe - the world as we used to know it. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Elizabeth Graver about her new novel Kantika (Metropolitan Books, 2023). Rebecca Cohen and her family live in Istanbul, until they lose all their wealth and are forced to leave. It’s also no longer safe for Jews, and many are trying to find a place to go. Rebecca’s father, once a successful businessman, now cleans a synagogue in Barcelona. Rebecca finds work as a seamstress and marries a man who is barely at home. He later dies, leaving her with two young sons to raise on her own, but she’s already started her own business. A second marriage is arranged, but she has to get to Havana to meet her potential husband, and he has to lie to get back to the states faster than the usual bureaucracy allows. Finally, married and in her new home, she’s challenged with helping her disabled stepdaughter, learning yet another new language, and building a new life. Rebecca was a tenacious heroine whose story has been lovingly fictionalized by her granddaughter, author Elizabeth Graver. Elizabeth Graver’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award in Fiction and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. She teaches at Boston College and tends to a field of rocking horses known to her and her family by a secret name but to the wider world as Ponyhenge. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Arin Greenwood about her new book Your Robot Dog Will Die (Soho, 2019). When a global genetic experiment goes awry and canines stop wagging their tails, mass hysteria ensues and the species is systematically euthanized. But soon, Mechanical Tail comes to the rescue. The company creates replacements for “man’s best friend” and studies them on Dog Island, where 17-year-old Nano Miller was born and raised. Nano’s life has become a cycle of annual heartbreak. Every spring, she is given the latest robot dog model to test, only to have it torn from her arms a year later. But one day she makes a discovery that upends everything she’s taken for granted: a living puppy that miraculously wags its tail. And there is no way she’s letting this dog go. Arin Greenwood is an animal writer and former lawyer living in St. Petersburg, Florida, with her husband, Ray, and their beloved pets. Arin was animal welfare editor for The Huffington Post. Her stories about dogs, cats, and other critters have appeared in many publications including The Washington Post, The Dodo, The Today Show's website, Slate, Creative Loafing, the American Bar Association Journal, Best Friends Animal Society's magazine, and more. She now writes and edits for animal nonprofits. Arin is also the author of Tropical Depression and Save the Enemy. Kyle Johannsen is a philosophy instructor at Trent University and Wilfrid Laurier University. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Cecilia Gentili about her new book, Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist (LittlePuss Press, 2022). In this poignant and powerful and sometimes wickedly hilarious book, Gentili looks back at her childhood in a small town in Argentina and at the people who shaped her life, in ways that are by turns joyous and painful. What emerges, as we read her intimate letters, is the portrait of a person—both then and now—fully and beautifully committed to embracing one’s self, with all our splendor and all our faltas. Enjoy my conversation with the singular Cecilia Gentili. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Leanne Kale Sparks about her new book Every Missing Girl (Crooked Lane Books, 2023). The stunning landscape of Colorado's Rocky Mountains are among our greatest natural treasures. But there are deadly secrets lurking in the craggy heights, and FBI Special Agent Kendall Beck and Denver Homicide Detective Adam Taylor team up to investigate a kidnapping. When Taylor's niece, Frankie, suddenly vanishes at a local hockey rink, it's clear that there's a predator on the loose--and now, the case has turned personal. One discovery after another leads Beck and Taylor closer to the truth, as they close in on the devastating truth about the fates of the missing girls--and the many who came before them. Will they be able to find Frankie before it's too late? In this thrilling story, Leanne Kale Sparks weaves the threads of this harrowing drama and builds the intensity to a fever pitch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Amy Grace Loyd’s new novel, The Pain of Pleasure (Roundabout Press 2023), nearly everyone suffers some kind of intense pain. Some find their way to the Doctor, formerly a respected neurologist but now director of a headache clinic in the basement of what was once a Brooklyn church. He experiments with different treatments for a wide variety of migraine sufferers but can’t stop obsessing over Sarah, the patient who suddenly broke off contact with the clinic and disappeared, leaving only a journal that describes her affair with a married man. The Doctor’s salary and the clinic’s costs are underwritten by a wealthy patron, Adele Watson, who, because she believes the doctor was in love with Sarah, is also obsessed. Mrs. Watson hires Ruth, a nurse with her own troubled back story, to spy on the Doctor. And the fragile balance between patient health and trust in The Doctor starts to crumble when a hurricane sweeps through New York, upending or destroying whatever is in its path. Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novels The Affairs of Others, a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection, and The Pain of Pleasure. She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker, in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire. She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire. Amy loves to get lost in music, dance wildly to wild music, walk long distances, often with NO PHONE on hand, just the sounds of the world around her as she moves, especially the sounds of trees (she’s made for trees). She is passionate about silence and solitude and kindness in an unkind world. We all have a lot of healing to do these days and she keeps searching for ways to achieve that for herself and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Writing Latinos, from Public Books, features interviews with Latino (a/x/e) authors discussing their books and how their writing contributes to the ever-changing conversation about the meanings of latinidad. In this episode, you’ll hear our interview with Alejandro Varela about his books The Town of Babylon and The People Who Report More Stress, both published by Astra House. The Town of Babylon was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The People Who Report More Stress is sure to earn similar accolades. We discussed stress as a silent killer in Latinx communities; the challenges of interethnic and interracial relationships; whether it’s possible to partner with someone who doesn’t share your politics; suburbs and cities; the meanings of Latinx literature as a genre; and so much more. Varela is a writer based in New York City. He has a background in public health, which is evident in his writing. His writing has appeared in the Point Magazine, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, The Offing, and other places. Geraldo L. Cadava is a historian of the United States and Latin America. He focuses on Latinos in the United States and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He hosts the podcast "Writing Latinos." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Matt Donovan speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his prose poem “Guy with a Gun,” which appeared in The Common’s fall issue. Matt talks about the conversation that inspired the poem—an encounter with a Sandy Hook parent that highlights the complex gray area around guns and gun ownership. He also discusses how his poetry collection about the issue of guns in the US evolved from a nonfiction book proposal, his aims in undertaking the project, and his job running The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Matt Donovan is the author of three collections of poetry, and a book of lyric essays. His latest collection, The Dug-Up Gun Museum, came out last year from BOA Editions. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature. He serves as director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College. Read Matt’s poems in The Common here. Read more from Matt here. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When Tenzin Dickie was growing up in exile in India, she didn’t have access to works by Tibetan writers. Now, as an editor and translator, she is working to create and elevate the stories she wished she had had as a young writer. Her new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays (Vintage Books, 2023), offers a comprehensive introduction to modern Tibetan nonfiction, featuring essays from twenty-two Tibetan writers from around the world. Taken as a whole, the collection provides an intimate and powerful portrait of modern Tibetan life and what it means to live in exile. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Dickie to discuss the history of the Tibetan essay, why she views exile as a kind of bardo, and how modern Tibetan writers are continually recreating the Tibetan nation. Tricycle Talks is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to CK Westbrook about The Collision (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022), volume 2 of the "The Impact Trilogy." As the world continues to reel from the shooting, Kate must race to save humanity from more horrific violence. After escaping an angry, dangerous mob, Kate Stellute and her neighbor Sinclair set out on a journey to stop Rex––and his kind—from unleashing more pain on the remaining population. The sinister otherworldly being has already made hundreds of millions of people turn their guns on themselves and amidst the suffering and death, no one can predict what he will do next. Kate knows she and Sinclair are up against an impossible deadline to stop Rex's mission before it's too late. Relying on the biophysicist's late wife’s mysterious research to determine what caused the alien's wrath, Kate and Sinclair join forces with NASA, a rogue Space Force agent, and two billionaire space bros. Together they'll attempt to implement an improbable and risky plan. The unlikely team may just be the planet's last chance to save life as they know it. Karyne Messina is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis and am on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the author of Resurgence of Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy (Routledge, 2022). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Jeri Westerson about her book The Isolated Séance (Severn House, 2023). It’s 1895, and Tim Badger, who is quite familiar with the inside of a jail cell, and his intuitive friend Ben Watson, who is Black in a society that is weary of difference, are unlikely detectives. But Tim was once one of the Baker Street Irregular urchins who ran errands and spied for the great Sherlock Holmes, and the two young men are trying to be detectives. They’re struggling with their new detective agency when a potential client staggers in. Thomas Brent is being sought by police after his boss Horace Quinn is murdered during a séance in a closed room in his own house. The only other people in the room in addition to the dead man and his valet, Thomas, were the housekeeper, the maid, and the gypsy woman who led the séance. Thomas Brent hires Badger and Watson, who take turns telling the story. They get into a bit of trouble and occasionally find a clue, but Sherlock Holmes, Badger’s old boss, clearly wants them to succeed. He bails Badger out of jail, arranges a nice place for the two young detectives to live, and although Badger doesn’t realize it, sends clues about the case. Los Angeles native Jeri Westerson authored fifteen Crispin Guest Medieval Noir Mysteries, a series nominated for thirteen awards from the Agatha to the Macavity, to the Shamus. Jeri currently writes two new series: a Tudor mystery series, the King’s Fool Mysteries, with Henry VIII’s real court jester Will Somers as the sleuth and a Sherlockian pastiche series with one of Holmes’ former Baker Street Irregulars opening his own detective agency. She also authored several paranormal series (including a gas lamp fantasy-steampunk series), standalone historical novels, and had stories in several anthologies, the latest of which was included in South Central Noir, an Akashic Noir anthology. She has served as president of the SoCal Chapter of Mystery Writers of America, president, and vice president for two chapters of Sisters in Crime (Orange County and Los Angeles) and is also a founding member of the SoCal chapter of the Historical Novel Society. In her copious spare time, Jeri acts as butler to her senior cat Luna, and loves to travel with her hubby and Luna in her vintage RV. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Steve Fox is the winner of the Rick Bass Montana Prize for Fiction, The Great Midwest Writing Contest, the Jade Ring Award, and a Midwestern Gothic Summer Flash Contest. His fiction has appeared in New Ohio Review, Orca, a Literary Journal, Midwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Whitefish Review, and others. He holds a Master of Arts in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has lived and worked in four continents. Steve now resides in his home state of Wisconsin with his wife, Stephanie, three boys, and one dog. The seventeen unrelenting stories in Steve Fox's debut story collection, Sometimes Creek (Cornerstone Press, 2023), traverse a sub-zero trail of plausible magic and grit from a kaleidoscope of broken ice at a hockey rink in Wisconsin that coils through haunted rivers and around dangling legs of jamón serrano in sweltering Spanish bars and back again to a place where Kafka and Carver meet up on the page. Fox's clean prose takes you by the hand and weaves a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm into that gauzy space that collectively takes shape in your hands as Sometimes Creek. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Jennifer Savran Kelly her new book Endpapers (Algonquin Books, 2023). Dawn Levit has reached a crossroads in life. What seemed like a stable relationship with a gay roommate is becoming ever more complicated; frayed family ties will not mend soon, if they ever do; and half the time Dawn can’t even decide on waking up in the morning whether to dress as a woman, a man, or some combination of both. A job restoring old books for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York brings tactile and professional satisfaction, but it cannot compensate for the artistic inspiration that appears to have deserted Dawn just when it’s needed most. When by chance Dawn discovers, in the endpapers of a water-damaged book, a love letter in German from one woman to another, the urge to identify the writer holds out the possibility of distraction from day-to-day problems. The book dates from the 1950s, making it difficult but not impossible to investigate the circumstances that caused the letter to be written, then hidden, and to discover the person who wrote it five decades ago. The search opens a window for Dawn onto the history of the queer community in New York and elsewhere, offering opportunities for greater self-acceptance and a renewed connection with the artistic muse. Jennifer Savran Kelly is a writer, bookbinder, and editor, as well as the author of Endpapers. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) chronicles the relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, their love story unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends to Naomi—and occasionally Naomi’s responses, as filtered through the speaker’s retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first from the use of found texts, next from the speaker’s personal observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness, and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and its stakes—a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short, but precarious distance. Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) and The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a 2015 National Jewish Book Award. Her poetry has appeared, or will soon, at Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, the Believer, and elsewhere. She is the series editor, since 2016, of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry and serves as assistant poetry editor and reviews editor for AGNI. With Ruth Awad, she edited the anthology The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry for Sundress Publications. Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What happens when you come of age in mid-life? Why is so challenging to figure out your own past? Can you find the permission to be weird? (And can you be happy if you don’t?) Memoirist and English professor Hannah Pittard joins us to explore:

If the personal is ever too personal.

What is a collective memory.

The imperfect way we perceive our own experiences.

Taking risks in writing and in life.

The memoir We Are Too Many.

Today’s book is: We Are Too Many, a memoir about a marriage-ending affair between award-winning author Hannah Pittard’s husband and her best friend. An innovative and genre-bending look at a marriage and friendship gone wrong, Professor Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of conversations that are fast-paced, intimate, and reveal the vulnerabilities inherent in any friendship or marriage. She takes stock not only of her own past and future but also of the larger, more universal experiences they connect with—from the depths of female rage to the ways we outgrow certain people. We Are Too Many examines the unfiltered parts of the female experience, as well as the possibilities in starting life over after a catastrophe. Our guest is: Professor Hannah Pittard, who is the author Visible Empire, Reunion, Listen to Me, The Fates Will Find Their Way, and the memoir We Are Too Many. She is a professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a historian. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

Becoming the Writer You Already Are, by Michelle R. Boyd

Story Genius, by Lisa Cron

Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg

Revise, by Pamela Haag

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

Academic Life episode with Professor Morgan Talty about Night of the Living Rez

Academic Life episode with novelist Erica Bauermeister, who left academia

Academic Life episode with Nancy Thayer, an English professor who left academia to write full time

Academic Life episode on writing memoir with Dr. Rebekah Tausig

Academic Life episode on Shoutin in the Fire with Dante Stewart

Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from today’s experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ivan and Phoebe (Deep Vellum, 2023) spotlights the uproarious generation that led the Ukrainian independence movement of 1990; from subjugation to revolution to post-Soviet rule, it investigates the difficulties and absurdities of societal change and the families that change with it. Ivan and Phoebe chronicles the lives of several young people involved in the Ukranian student protests of the 1990's, otherwise known as the Revolution On Granite or the "First Maidan." The story bounces between politically charged cities like Kyiv and Lviv, and protagonist Ivan's small, traditional hometown of Uzhgorod. As characters come to exercise their rights to free speech and protest, they must also re-evaluate the norms of marriage, family, and home life. While these initially appear to be spaces of peace and harmony, they are soon revealed to be hotbeds of conflict and multigenerational trauma. Married couple Ivan and Phoebe grapple with questions about family, trauma, and independence. Although Ivan tells the story, Phoebe's voice rings through the text as she divulges her own traumas through poetic monologues. The two reflect on the traumatic aftermath of revolution: torture at the hands of the KGB and each other. While Ivan refuses to talk about his pain, Phoebe describes her past through poetic monologues. Lutsyshyna's poetic form allows her to experiment with characterization and genre, creating her own category. Through her characters' vivid voices, Lutsyshyna creates a his- and her-story of Ukraine: a panoramic view of post-Soviet society and family life through social, political, and economic crises. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Elle Marr about her new book The Family Bones (Thomas & Mercer, 2023) Psychology student Olivia Eriksen's family is notorious among true-crime buffs. Faced with a legacy of psychopathy that spans generations, Olivia has spent much of her academic life trying to answer one chilling question: Nature or nurture? Although she's kept a safe distance from her blood relatives for years, Olivia agrees to attend a weekend reunion. After all, her fiancé is eager to meet his future in-laws, and the gathering may give her a chance to interview her elusive grandfather about the family traits. But nothing is ever peaceful among the Eriksens for long. Olivia's favorite cousin is found dead in a nearby lake. Then another family member disappears. As a violent storm isolates the group further, Olivia's fears rise faster than the river. And an uninvited guest is about to join the party. True-crime podcaster Birdie Tan has uncovered a disturbing mystery in her latest investigation--and she's following it right to the Eriksens' mountain resort. There's a deadly twist in the family plot that even Olivia doesn't see coming. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In science fiction, aliens who come to Earth are usually scary and menacing, aspiring to destroy, conquer, or even eat mankind. But the aliens in Karen Lord’s The Blue, Beautiful World (Del Rey, 2023) aren’t interested in conquering or destroying; they’re interested in inviting Earthlings to join a Galactic Council. It turns out, however, that humans need a little time and training before they’re ready to assume the responsibilities of galactic citizenship. And complicating matters is the fact that humans might not be the only Earth dwellers to receive the aliens’ invitation. It’s not surprising that water and oceans figure prominently in Lord’s novel. As a Barbadian writer, she has a lifelong respect—and fear—of the water. “I'm kind of terrified of the ocean,” Lord said. “To give you context, there is literally a part of the island that you can drive to and look around and see three coastlines. But you can't see any other land from any of the coasts. It's an oddly isolating feeling, like you're standing tiptoe on a small rock—and you could tip over and crash into the ocean anytime. “I love living here, but when something bad goes down, it's like, boom, all of a sudden you realize the ocean is not your natural habitat. It's not making things easy for you. We are very much living on the skin part of land. We don't know the ocean. We don't know the surface of the ocean. We don't know the depths of the ocean. There is a huge level of respect and mystery that the ocean commands.” The Blue, Beautiful World is Lord's fifth novel. Her previous books are Redemption in Indigo, which received the William L. Crawford and Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. That was followed later by a sequel, Unraveling. While The Blue, Beautiful World is considered a standalone story, it is set in the Cygnus Beta universe, which is where two of her previous books, The Best of All Possible Worlds and The Galaxy Game, are also set. Rob Wolf is a writer and host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men, focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives. Beginning with the assassination of President Kennedy, we watch the sisters navigate social upheaval, family expectations, and all the usual aspects of growing up, but they were born in a DP camp after WW2 and are children of Holocaust Survivors, now referred to as “Second - Generation Survivors.” They’ve inherited their parents’ guilt (their mother lives a Jewish life but never converted) and emotional trauma (their father’s first family was killed by Nazis) but they live in 1960s and 70s New York and also have to navigate relationships, career dreams, and social expectations for women of that generation. Then Branka, who dreams of becoming a serious journalist but has been relegated to the food column, is asked to cover a neo-Nazi protest, and her eyes are opened to the presence of Hitler acolytes in this country. Meryl Ain is a writer, author, podcaster, and career educator. She received a BA in Political Science from Queens College, holds an MA in Teacher History from Columbia University, and earned a doctorate in Educational Administration from Hofstra University. She has worked as a journalist and her articles and essays were published in many publications, but most of her career was spent working as a high school history teacher and administrator. Her award-winning post-Holocaust debut novel, The Takeaway Men, was published in 2020. She is the host of the podcast, People of the Book, and the founder of the Facebook group, Jews Love To Read! which has more than 4,000 members. Her novels are a result of her life-long quest to learn more about the Holocaust, a thirst that was first triggered by reading The Diary of Anne Frank in the sixth grade. When she's not reading or writing, she enjoys meeting with groups to discuss her books. She's a lifetime member of Hadassah, a member of The International Advisory Board for Holocaust Survivor Day, a supporter of UJA-Federation, as well as Holocaust centers and causes. Meryl lives in New York with her husband, Stewart. Her greatest joy is spending time with their six grandchildren. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jenifer DeBellis, M.F.A., is author of New Wilderness (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Warrior Sister, Cut Yourself Free from Your Assault (Library Tales Publishing, 2021), and Blood Sisters (Main Street Rag, 2018). Her freelance career spans over two decades, allowing her to ghostwrite and edit literary and mass media content. She edits Pink Panther Magazine and directs aRIFT Warrior Project and Detroit Writers’ Guild (501c3). She's featured in Psychology Today and Seattle's My Independence Report and her writing appears in AWP's Festival Writer, CALYX, the Good Men Project, Medical Literary Messenger, Solstice, and other fine journals. A former Meadow Brook Writing Project fellow, JDB facilitates summer workshops for Oakland University as well as teaches writing and literature for Saginaw Valley State University. Find more at JeniferDeBellis.com. DeBelli's latest collection New Wilderness takes readers through the nuances of raising a mentally ill child whose young adult brain cancer experiences transport this daughter and mother into an uncharted wilderness. With little more than a demagnetized compass and crayon-drawn treasure map, the daughter travels deeper into wastelands. Four states away, her mom charts a new topography to smuggle her back to civilization. The poems in this collection build on a triangulated path that moves between life before, during, and after cancer. Despite compounding loss, disappointment, and destruction, Jenifer DeBellis's versified narratives reveal that paths forged with love can lead even the wildest creatures out of bewildering terrain. You can learn more about the interviewer Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Shooting (4 Horsemen Publications, 2022), the first book in a trilogy, CK Westbrook superbly places real-life characters in a fantasy world filled with unthinkable environmental disasters while addressing major issues that face our world today. After almost every gun owner worldwide turns their weapon on themselves in a terrifying fifteen minute window, Kate Stellute, like the rest of the population, searches for answers. The mass-shooting is so enormous in scale and diabolical, no one can figure out who or what caused it, but after a bizarre encounter with an otherworldly stranger, Kate suddenly finds herself the government's prime suspect. A mid-level program analyst for Space Force and proud rule follower her entire life, a confused Kate doesn’t know where to turn. She puts trust in a neighbor, NASA biophysicist Sinclair, and with their combined background, they race to unravel the truth before an angry mob closes in. Kate knows she must formulate a plan to appease the otherworldly stranger, keep herself out of prison, and save the world from more violence…but is she already too late? Karyne Messina is a psychologist and a psychoanalyst with the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. She is on the medical staff at Suburban Hospital of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is author of Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Projective Identification, Blame Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Peter Mann about his book The Torqued Man (Harper Perennial, 2022). Berlin—September, 1945. Two manuscripts are found in rubble, each one narrating conflicting versions of the life of an Irish spy during the war. One of them is the journal of a German military intelligence officer and an anti-Nazi cowed into silence named Adrian de Groot, charting his relationship with his agent, friend, and sometimes lover, an Irishman named Frank Pike. In De Groot’s narrative, Pike is a charismatic IRA fighter sprung from prison in Spain to assist with the planned German invasion of Britain, but who never gets the chance to consummate his deal with the devil. Meanwhile, the other manuscript gives a very different account of the Irishman’s doings in the Reich. Assuming the alter ego of the Celtic hero Finn McCool, Pike appears here as the ultimate Allied saboteur. His mission: an assassination campaign of high-ranking Nazi doctors, culminating in the killing of Hitler’s personal physician. The two manuscripts spiral around each other, leaving only the reader to know the full truth of Pike and De Groot’s relationship, their ultimate loyalties, and their efforts to resist the fascist reality in which they are caught. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nineteen-year-old Catherine Ogden appears to have everything: youth, wealth, birth, breeding, and beauty. No one in New York high society is surprised when she attracts the attention of William Brandt, an up-and-coming business tycoon from California. It’s 1910, and the job of women like Catherine is to marry well and make their families proud. At her aunt’s urging, Catherine agrees to visit the Brandt estate near San Francisco. There she falls in love not with her prospective groom but with his beautiful, sun-filled house and, most of all, the extensive gardens that surround it. When he proposes marriage, she accepts. Yet Catherine is not quite the society heiress her appearance suggests. The daughter of a wealthy man who gave up his fortune for art and love of her mother, Catherine grew up in a household that valued emotional fulfillment more than status and pride. So she can’t ignore the prickles of concern that arise during her conversations with William. For a while, she distracts herself by designing a beautiful garden of her own, but as the wedding day draws closer, a series of surprises force her to confront what she most wants in life. As noted in her bio, Ginny Kubitz Moyer lives and gardens in the area where she has set her novel, and it shows. The exquisite descriptions of the landscape and its effect on Catherine could carry the novel, but they don’t have to. Catherine herself—with her combination of innocence and self-awareness, her unexpected past and its contrasts with her very different present—is the heart of the story. And although we can predict where she might be heading, Moyer keeps us guessing almost to the end as to how her heroine will get there. All in all, a very satisfying read. Ginny Kubitz Moyer is a California native with a passion for local history and an author of both fiction and nonfiction. Ginny’s love for California and its stories inspired her to write The Seeing Garden (She Writes Press, 2023), her debut novel. An avid weekend gardener, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, two sons, and one adorably stubborn rescue dog. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sarah Conover about her book Set Adrift: A Mystery and a Memoir (55 Fathoms Publishing, 2023). When racing yacht “The Revonoc” went down in the Bermuda Triangle’s Sargasso Sea during a freakish storm in January of 1958, the sailing world was dumbfounded. The boat and five people on board, all well-known in the sailing world, completely vanished. Only the dinghy showed up a few days later, but all searches over the following months turned up nothing at all. Sarah Conover, the youngest of the two daughters of Lori and Larry, and granddaughters of Dorothy and Harvey, became an orphan that day. As an adult, Sarah began to ask questions about her parents and grandparents – her memoir weaves interviews with family members, articles, and official Coast Guard reports that Sarah studies to understand her ongoing feelings of loss, loneliness, and depression. Ultimately, her final thought is “There is no true story. Only mercy.” Sarah Conover holds a BA in comparative religions from the University of Colorado, and an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University. She has worked as a television producer for PBS and Internews (an international media NGO), a social worker for Catholic Charities, a public school teacher, and taught creative writing through the community colleges of Spokane, Washington. She is the author of six books on world wisdom traditions and spirituality published by Skinner House Books, the educational publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Her poetry, essays and interviews have been published in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. She is a feature writer and columnist for Tricycle Magazine: the Buddhist Review and has taught meditation for many years at Airway Heights Corrections Center and within the Spokane community. Ms. Conover was a recipient of Washington State’s Grants for Artist’s Projects (GAP grant) and writing fellowships from the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming, and the Willapa Bay Artist Residence Program in Oysterville, Washington. She lives in a condo in Spokane, Washington and in her beloved yurtiverse at the base of the North Cascades in Winthrop, Washington, where she and her husband are building a small hermitage for monastic retreats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to L. R. Lam about Dragonfall (DAW, 2023). Long ago, humans betrayed dragons, stealing their magic and banishing them to a dying world. Centuries later, their descendants worship dragons as gods. But the “gods” remember, and they do not forgive. Thief Arcady scrapes a living on the streets of Vatra. Desperate, Arcady steals a powerful artifact from the bones of the Plaguebringer, the most hated person in Lumet history. Only Arcady knows the artifact’s magic holds the key to a new life among the nobles at court and a chance for revenge. The spell connects to Everen, the last male dragon foretold to save his kind, dragging him through the Veil. Disguised as a human, Everen soon learns that to regain his true power and form and fulfill his destiny, he only needs to convince one little thief to trust him enough to bond completely–body, mind, and soul—and then kill them. L. R. Lam discusses influences to their latest novel—from 90s fantasy to the bubonic plague—issues of consent and point of view, and the ways writing near future science fiction has shaped their work in epic fantasy. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Joan Schweighardt about her book Under the Blue Moon (Five Directions Press, 2023). An automobile accident in front of a homeless shelter causes Lola, a dog trainer/groomer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to renew her battle with the grief she previously pushed below the surface of her daily life. Ben, formerly an architect in the same city, has been abandoned by his family and is currently homeless. Lola sees him on the day of her accident, trying to smuggle something into the shelter while all the people associated with the facility are outside with her, waiting for the ambulance to arrive and watching the drama unfold at the end of the street as the guy who broadsided her runs from the scene and is pursued by police. Ben, who lives on a ledge under an overpass with his 18-year-old cat and two space-mates, wants nothing more than to find a job and get back on his feet (and thereby win back both his dignity and his daughter’s love). Lola wants a second chance for a meaningful life. Their individual pursuits put them on parallel paths that offer not only chance encounters with each other but glimpses into the mysteries of luck, love, art, compassion, and what it means to be human in these times. Joan Schweighardt has worn multiple book-world hats over the course of the last many years. She has been a publisher, an agent, a ghostwriter, an editor and more. Her own projects include Under the Blue Moon (2023), and the Rivers Trilogy—Before We Died (2018), Gifts for the Dead (2019), and River Aria (2020). The Art of Touch: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond—an anthology she conceived and co-edited, containing the work of 38 contributors—will be published by the University of Georgia Press in November (2023). When not reading or writing, Joan enjoys hiking in the foothills of Albuquerque's Sandia Mountains, bike riding on the city’s numerous trails, oil painting, and hanging out with friends and family. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Fatal Illusion (Berkley Books, 2023)—the eleventh installment in Anna Lee Huber’s Lady Darby Mysteries featuring Kiera and Sebastian Gage—opens in Yorkshire in 1832. The two of them have come a long way since their first acrimonious meeting two years earlier; in fact, they have married and produced an infant daughter. Yet Kiera, Lady Darby, is still known by her detested first husband’s title—a courtesy extended by society that she would much rather forgo in favor of being plain Mrs. Gage. On this occasion, Gage has received word that his father has been attacked and left for dead on the Great North Road. Despite years of neglect and mistreatment, Gage rushes to his father’s side, bringing his family with him. After discovering his father alive, if not well, Gage and Kiera set out to discover who attacked him and why, but they have to contend with both the victim’s refusal to share all he knows and resistance from the locals, who are determined to protect a group of highwaymen (or is it a group of smugglers?) whom they believe to be the nineteenth-century equivalent of Robin Hood. As always in these mysteries, the setting comes vividly to life, the problems unknot themselves in satisfying but not always predictable ways, and the characters slowly move toward greater understanding of themselves and others. If you haven’t encountered Kiera and Gage before, you should certainly seek out their adventures. But do yourself a favor and start with book 1, The Anatomist’s Wife. Although you can tackle the books in any order, you will enjoy them more if you read them as I did, from start to finish. Anna Lee Huber is the USA Today bestselling and Daphne award-winning author of the Lady Darby Mysteries, the Verity Kent Mysteries, and the Gothic Myths series, as well as the anthology The Deadly Hours. A Fatal Illusion is her most recent novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Michele Herman is author of the novel Save The Village (Regal House Publishing, 2022) and the poetry chapbook Victory Boulevard (Finishing Line Press) as well as Just Another Jack (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared widely in publications including The Sun, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review and The New York Times. The Recipient of several writing awards, she teaches fiction, poetry and memoir at The Writers Studio, works as a developmental editor and writing coach, writes columns for The Village Sun, translates French songs and occasionally performs her own work in cabaret and theatrical settings. You can learn more at www.micheleherman.com. In Just Another Jack: The Private Lives of Nursery Rhymes, poet and novelist Michele Herman explores a variety of timeless human predicaments - adolescent lust, overprotective parents, dementia, gender confusion and more - by imagining her way into the actual lives of eight familiar nursery-rhyme characters. Many authors have taken fictional or mythological characters and brought them into our contemporary world, but these eight story-poems accomplish something more unusual by roaming around in Mr. and Mrs. Sprat's house to find out what ails them, following little Bo Beep out to the Welsh pasture to learn how she lost track of her sheep, conjuring up a twin brother for Little Miss Muffet, and much more. Save The Village features Herman's beloved home village, which feels itself like a character as alive as any other we meet in this novel as sprawling as it is particular. Life hasn’t turned out quite the way Becca Cammeyer of Greenwich Village – once voted most likely to land on Broadway or in jail for a good cause – had planned. Her only child has moved to another continent, she’s still living in a fifth-floor walkup with her aging dog, still single, still nearly broke, still not on speaking terms with her best friend or mother, and still hearing the ghost of her long-dead father whispering in her ear. But she’s a semi-famous tour guide, and on a perfect October evening, Becca almost believes all is well with her world as she helps a group of South Carolinian tourists fall in love with her beloved Village. The tour concludes, and Becca sends the women on their way, unaware that her world is about to be upended. In the aftermath of a tragedy, Becca must come to terms with her own paralysis, her survivor’s guilt, and the messiness of her life. She embarks on wildly improbable reconciliations and new relationships. At once a love story about Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world, Save the Village reveals how when a community comes together, everyone wins. You can find Save The Village at Regal House Press and at Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mexican American writers make their mark in Science Fiction literature! In this first of a kind anthology, written solely by Mexican Americans, we are taken into space and near future barrios, to the other side of the universe, and onto post-apocalyptic worlds ala raza style. We have seen collections of futures of every kind, but not yet where Chicanada dominate the scene. Enter the world of El Porvenir, ¡Ya! - Citlalzazanilli Mexicatl -Chicano Science Fiction Anthology by Somos en escrito Literary Foundation Press, an independent raza publisher. Authors: Ernest Hogan, Mario Acevedo, Frank Lechuga, Martin Hill Ortiz, Pedro Iniguez, Nicholas Belardes, Armando Rendón, Lizz Huerta, Emmanuel Valtierra, Rios de La Luz, Beatrice Pita, Rosaura Sánchez, R. Ch. Garcia, Ricardo Tavarez, Rosa Martha Villarreal, Carmen Baca, Scott Russell Duncan, Gloria Delgado, and Kathleen Alcalá. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Sex Depression Animals (Ohio State UP, 2023), Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity—one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, “What’s the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil’s image?” Mag Gabbert has received a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review Daily, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Methodist University. Anna Zumbahlen lives in Albuquerque and works in book marketing and publicity at the University of Chicago Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest's The Postcard (Europa Editions, 2023) is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling. 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. AJ Woodhams hosts the "War Books" podcast. You can subscribe on Apple here and on Spotify here. War Books is on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gerardo Sámano Córdova speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Iceberg, Mine,” which appears in The Common’s fall 2022 issue. Gerardo talks about combining the real and the surreal in this story, and using both to show the power of a brief moment of connection. He also discusses the risks and rewards of writing about the fantastical, the process of finding balance through revision, and his debut novel Monstilio, which is out now from Zando. The novel is about a boy who transforms into a monster, a monster who tries to be a man, and the people who love him in every form he takes. Gerardo Sámano Córdova is a writer and artist from Mexico City. His first novel, Monstrilio, is out from Zando. Gerardo holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. His work has appeared in Catapult, The Common, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Chicago Quarterly Review, and others. He’s also been known to draw little creatures. Read “Iceberg, Mine” in The Common at thecommononline.org/iceberg-mine/. Read more from Gerardo at gerardosamanocordova.com, follow him on Twitter @samanito, and explore his artwork on Instagram at @samanito. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, though she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. She also chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her. Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase. Books Mentioned: -Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad -Kazuo Ishiguro -Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet” -Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head -Forna, Happiness -Forna, The Hired Man -Temne – largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today’s book is: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (Milkweed Editions, 2023), by Debra Magpie Earling, which is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told. Keywords from today’s episode include: Sacajewea, Agai River, Appe, Bia, Charbonneau, Lewis and Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Otter Woman, Pop Pank, MMIW, Lemhi Shoshone, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidasta. Today’s guest is: Debra Magpie Earling, who is the author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. An earlier version of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea was written in verse and produced as an artist book during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network. Listeners to this episode may be interested in:

Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling

Sacred Wilderness, by Susan Power

Grass Dancer, by Susan Power

Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty

Indian Horse, by Richard Wagamese

Embers, by Richard Wagamese

Listeners may also be interested in:

This podcast with Morgan Talty discussing Night of the Living Rez

This podcast with Michelle Cyca about Misrepresentation on Campus

This podcast with the editor of Tribal Colleges Journal of American Indian Higher Education

This podcast on The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature

Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tania James' novel Loot (Knopf 2023) is about a young woodcarver who is ordered by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in late 18th century India to carve a large wooden tiger. The tiger seems to devour a life-sized European man. As the apprentice of an alcoholic French clockmaker, Abbas has a short time to create this gift for the sultan’s youngest sons after they return from being held captive by the British. Later, British forces attack Mysore, kill as many as they can reach, and ship everything of value back to England. Abbas survives the attack and then the sea and other adventures in order to reach Rouen, where his teacher’s teacher lives. Spanning 50 years and two continents, Loot is a hero’s quest, a love story, and an exuberant heist novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across the world. Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short-story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, One Story, and A Public Space. Tania has been a fellow of Ragdale, MacDowell, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C. When she's not writing, James likes to dance--whether it's the classical Indian dance form of kuchipudi or simply busting a move in her living room. Her favorite mode of transport is bicycle and her favorite place to chill is the terrace of the Martin Luther King Jr library. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers reflection and instruction informed by their own methods and processes. It’s a beautiful and vibrant book that invites writers, artists, and would-be creators into a feast of play and possibility. Kelcey Ervick is the author of the graphic memoir, The Keeper and other books. Her comics have been published widely, including in The Washington Post, The Believer, and Lit Hub, and two featured comics series of hers have appeared in The Rumpus. She is a professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches creative writing, comics, and literary collage. Tom Hart is the author/artist of The New York Times #1 bestselling graphic memoir Rosalie Lightning and of The Art of the Graphic Memoir. He is the executive director of The Sequential Artists Workshop, an organization and school for comics and graphic novels in Gainesville, Florida. Before founding SAW, Tom was a core instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 10 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Liisa Kovala about her new novel Sisu's Winter War (Latitude 46, 2022). Meri Saari made a promise to her dying mother she would keep the family together, but she was too young to know how a war can pull people apart. As a teenager responsible for her siblings she finds herself following her father to the front lines during the Winter War when he goes missing in action. Forty years later, living in northern Ontario, Meri's past and present collide when she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Responsible for her granddaughter, and navigating a strained relationship with her daughter Linnea, Meri is haunted by the people of her past and by the promises she failed to keep. As she struggles against her inevitable decline, she knows her losses are amassing: her home, her health, and her memories. Meri embarks on one last journey in search of the man she had to give up, and before it's too late. Before everything disappears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The story of middle-aged sisters Zara and Lilly begins in Long’s fast-paced, first novel in this witty series, Nine Tenths of the Law, when Zara recognizes a family menorah in a New York City Museum. She remembers seeing it displayed thirty years before on a visit to the Jewish Museum, when her mother recognized it as a family heirloom. Zara is haunted by her mother’s memory, and schemes to get it back, but the menorah and other Holocaust art works suddenly disappear from the museum. The assistant who might have stolen it is murdered, and Zara hallucinates her mother’s experiences as a young girl in 1939, when Nazis took the family’s possessions and singled her out for “special duties.” In Our Lying Kin (Kasva Press, 2023), Zara and her sister are just coming out of the long pandemic and planning a reunion when a woman calls, claiming to be related and demanding money. Now, Zara is dealing with both her mother’s and her father’s legacy. The sisters learn that the art thief/murderer who nearly killed Lilly has escaped from custody, and now the FBI is involved. The sisters spring into sometimes illegal action in this zany adventure about family, memory, International Art Theft, and figuring out what is worth preserving. Claudia Hagadus Long is the author of six novels which span centuries and serious topics. All are fueled by history, family secrets and hidden scandals. They are also funny. Her own conflicted background provides ample fuel for the imagination. Though born stateside, Claudia grew up in Mexico City, came to the US permanently as a seventh grader, and is the daughter of Hungarians on one side and a Polish-Sephardic Holocaust survivor on the other. She received her BA from Harvard University, her law degree from Georgetown, and promptly fled to California. Besides writing and practicing law, she's a dedicated weaver and a passionate cook. Married, with two grown children and two grandchildren, she lives in the far reaches of Napa Valley, California, land of wine, hot springs, and earthquakes. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A man is arrested for a single typo, a woman gets on buses at random, and two friends reunite in a changed world.... Diverse in form, scope and style, Amanat: Women's Writing from Kazakhstan (Gaudy Boy, 2022) brings together the voices of thirteen female Kazakhstani writers, to offer a glimpse into the many lives, stories, and histories of one of the largest countries to emerge from the breakup of the Soviet Union.The twenty-four stories in Amanat, translated into English from Kazakh and Russian, comprise a groundbreaking survey of women's writing in the Central Asian country over its thirty years of independence, paying homage to the rich but largely unrecorded oral storytelling tradition of the region. Contemplating nostalgia, politics, and intergenerational history in a time altered by modernity, Amanat acutely traces the uncertainties, struggles, joys, and losses of a corner of the post-Soviet world often unseen and overlooked.Utterly absorbing, Amanat is an invitation to listen-the women of Kazakhstan have stories to tell.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Soft sci-fi, gothic body horror” is how Hiron Ennes describes their debut novel, Leech (Tordotcom, 2022). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.Set in an isolated winter chateau, the novel weaves a surreal and atmospheric tale of a doctor who is part of a hivemind parasite, a twisted baron’s family, and a newcomer that threatens to destroy any perceived sense of order.Leech is an exploration of bodily autonomy, trauma, and a desperation to dig up the oppressive structures of the past. It is a multi-layered, multi-threaded slow burn that pays off for the persistent reader as the characters reveal their own monstrous, intertwined attempts at survival in the least hospitable of places.Hiron Ennes is a writer, musician, and medical student based in the Pacific Northwest. Their areas of interest include infectious disease, pathology, and petting your dog.Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Richard Fulco about his novel We Are All Together (Wampus Multimedia, 2022). Stephen Cane is a guitarist – he’s already walked out on one band to join another one that subsequently falls apart. He gets himself to New York City to try to rejoin his first band, the one headed by his best friend and former bandmate, Dylan John. It’s 1967, drugs and girls are everywhere, Dylan is on the verge of becoming a rock n’ roll star, and Stephen makes some extremely poor choices. When Dylan quits just before a big show, Stephen is given a huge opportunity, but it doesn’t take long before he starts making more bad decisions. He’s in turmoil, as is the entire country, and his choices in love and loyalty cause him to spiral into self-doubt. Is being a rock star worth losing everything he holds dear? Richard Fulco’s first novel, There Is No End to This Slope (Wampus Multimedia) was published in 2014. He received an MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College where he was the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship. His plays have either been presented or developed at The New York International Fringe Festival, The Playwrights’ Center, The Flea, Here Arts Center, Chicago Dramatists and The Dramatists Guild. Richard’s one-act play Swedish Fish was published by Heuer Publishing and his stories, poetry, interviews and reviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Failbetter, Across the Margin, Fiction Writers Review and American Songwriter (among others). Richard is a member of the Pen American Center where he is also a mentor in the Prison Writing Mentorship Program. For six years, he wrote about music on his blog, Riffraf. He teaches creative writing and English at an independent high school in New Jersey. Richard interviews writers for his “5 Questions” series at www.richardfulco.com. When he's not writing and teaching, Richard is playing basketball with his twins, Chloe and Connor, watching the Mets play, riding the Peloton bike, or listening to vinyl. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In her new memoir, Missing (Jackleg Press, 2022), children's book author Cornelia Maude Spelman explores her family history and her mother's life. Spelman was encouraged by her friend, the late, legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell to write her life. When Spelman hints at what she thinks of as the failure of her parents' lives, he counters that "in a good novel one doesn't look for a success story, but for a story that moves one with its human drama and richness of experience." Maxwell encourages her to tell her mother's story at their final meeting. Missing is Spelman's response to Maxwell's wisdom. With the pacing of the mystery novels her mother loved and using everything from letters and interviews to the family's quotidian paper trail-medical records, telegrams, and other oft-overlooked clues to a family's history-Spelman reconstructs her mother's life and untimely death. Along the way, she unravels mysteries of her family, including the fate of her long-lost older brother. Spelman skillfully draws the reader into the elation and sorrow that accompanies the discovery of a family's past. A profoundly loving yet honest elegy, Missing is complex and beautiful like the mother it memorializes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ha-Kluv (The Cage) is a Hebrew anthology of selected short stories by Fida Jiryis, which she originally published in Arabic. The stories speak of the life of Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. Through these snapshots of daily life, the book attempts to portray the complex realities of living on both sides of the divide, examining issues of politics, identity, gender, poverty, and the human toll exacted by the Israeli occupation. Fida Jiryis is a Palestinian writer and editor who has written on life as a Palestinian in Israel and the West Bank. She contributed to Kingdom of Olives and Ash, a Washington Post bestseller on five years of Israeli occupation, and Amputated Tongue, a Hebrew-language anthology of Palestinian literature. Fida has published three collections of Arabic short stories depicting life in Palestine, one of which, Al-Khawaja (The Gentleman) was recently made into a theatre production. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to L. M. Weeks about his new book Bottled Lightning (South Fork Publishers, 2022) Top global technology lawyer Tornait "Torn" Sagara knows he shouldn't get involved with his beautiful client, Saya Brooks, whose revolutionary lightning-on-demand invention will solve climate change and render all other energy sources obsolete. But their shared connection as hafu (half Japanese, half American) draws them irresistibly together. Saya's technology could save the world, but what's good for the planet is bad news for those who profit from the status quo. Now, someone wants to stop Saya from commercializing her invention and will go to any lengths-even murder-to do so. When Torn takes Saya for a spin on his motorcycle, they are viciously attacked. That death-defying battle on a crowded Tokyo expressway is only the start of Torn's wild ride. As the violence escalates, Torn discovers that everything he values-his reputation, his family, and even his life-is on the line. Racing from the boardrooms of Tokyo to the wilds of Russia in a desperate search for the truth, Torn is forced to face his own flaws and discover what really matters most. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Elissa Bassist about her memoir Hysterical: A Memoir (Hachette, 2022) For two years author Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical specialists for pain that none of them managed to diagnose or resolve. Some of their treatments led to other medical problems but never relief. Then an acupuncturist suggested that she simply needed to take control of her voice, and Bassist was shocked when it worked. How, as far as we think we’ve come, is it still the case that a girl born in 1984 could have so much in common with generations of women who were expected to be silent, to "get along," to accept whatever was happening even when their souls ached, their heads pounded, and their bodies withered? Bassist was accused of "being dramatic" when she experienced pain and "inappropriate" when she expressed her sadness or suffering. She said “yes,” when she meant, “no,” and accepted others’ opinions that she was too emotional, too loud, or too aggressive. In her justifiably angry voice, the one she had to take control of, Bassist shares her personal journey from broken and bleeding, scared and lonely, to acerbically funny and quick to call out nonsense. She’s straightforward and unashamed in sharing the moments she’s least proud of and the times she’d rather forget, because now she wants to teach other women that it’s okay to "look bad" in service of unmuting their own voices. Elissa Bassist is the editor of the “Funny Women” column on The Rumpus and the author of the award-deserving memoir Hysterical. As a founding contributor to The Rumpus, she’s written cultural and personal criticism since the website launched in 2009. She also teaches humor writing at The New School, Catapult, 92NY, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and elsewhere, and she is probably her therapist’s favorite. Bassist lives in Brooklyn with her dog Benny, a very good boy, and when not writing or reading or teaching, she watches horror movies, rides roller coasters, and does light witchcraft. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In her novels, Nicola Cornick blends a modern perspective with a historical mystery and a paranormal connection between the two. The Winter Garden (Graydon House Books, 2022) revolves around the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, known to every British schoolchild as the origin of Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated on November 5 with fireworks, bonfires, and bobbing for apples, among other things. In the contemporary portion of the novel, Lucy, an internationally renowned concert violinist, has suffered a health crisis that strips her of her ability to perform. Facing the death of her career, she takes the opportunity to recover at a rural English estate. There she experiences bizarre dreams in which she appears to inhabit the body of a Tudor-era woman named Catherine, even as she is increasingly pulled into a relationship with Finn, an archeologist working on the gardens of the estate. Alongside this modern story, we follow the events leading up to the Gunpowder Plot, told by Anne Catesby, the mother of the main conspirator. At first, past and present seem far apart, but as the novel progresses, the links between them become clearer. Anne and Lucy are both strong, determined women fighting circumstances beyond their control—for very different reasons—and they hold our attention to equal degree as they variously navigate the origins of the Gunpowder Plot, the fate of the Knights Hospitaller, and the discovery of a long-hidden treasure in a Tudor garden. Nicola Cornick, a historian raised in the north of England, has become an international and award-winning bestseller. She now writes dual-timeframe novels inspired by the history and legends of Wessex and the Vale of the White Horse. Her latest novel is The Winter Garden. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her next novel, Song of the Storyteller, will appear in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Grant Faulkner. We discuss National Novel Writing Month, of which Grant is the executive director, 100 Word Story, of which Grant is a practitioner and editor, and Grant's book of short stories All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Here's a bit about the book, a book I highly recommend you buy and read. "With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence. Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page-honest, cutting, and wise." Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sindya Bhanoo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Tsunami Bride,” which appears in The Common’s new fall issue. Sindya talks about her experience reporting from India after the 2004 tsunami, and how that experience eventually became a story about a journalist in the same position, told from a local’s perspective. She also discusses how the training and techniques she developed as a journalist have shaped her drafting and revision process for fiction, how food often makes its way into her stories, and how her 2022 story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere came together. Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A longtime newspaper reporter, she has worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She teaches at Oregon State University. Read Sindya’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/tsunami-bride. Read more from Sindya at sindyabhanoo.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Laura Jean McKay about her award-winning novel The Animals in that Country (Scribe, 2020). Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue. As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin. Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying. Kyle Johannsen is an academic philosopher who does research in animal and environmental ethics, and in political philosophy. His most recent book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). You can follow him on Twitter @KyleJohannsen2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the book business. Where once having a translator’s name on a book cover would be sure to kill interest, now there are movements to display author’s and translator’s names together. Ann reads an excerpt in Italian from Primo Levi’s The Truce, followed by her re-translation of the autobiographical story for The Complete Works of Primo Levi. She then offers an extraordinary walk through of her decision-making process by honing in on the difficulty of translating one key word “scomposti.” Listening to Ann delineate and discard choices, we are reminded of Italo Calvino’s assertion (echoed by Ann) that translation is indeed the closest way to read. This season’s signature question on “untranslatables” yields another brilliant meditation on word choice and the paradoxical task of arriving at precise approximations. Plus, Ann and Saskia reveal some of their favorite Italian women writers, several of whom Ann has brought into English for the first time. Mentions: --Elena Ferrante --Jennifer Croft --Primo Levi, The Periodic Table --Primo Levi, The Truce, from The Complete Works of Primo Levi --Stuart Woolf, original translator of Levi, If This is the Man --Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story --Italo Calvino --Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia --Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island --Emily Wilson, only female translator of The Odyssey --Jenny McPhee --Cesare Garboli Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

DC heart surgeon Dr. Steven Leeds is suddenly besieged by a handful of immensely complicated heart attack and stroke cases, all caused by a rare arterial injury--a dissection. And all the victims have first received innocuous-looking cards announcing: "Your heart attack/stroke will arrive within one hour!" Private detective Kirk Miner and FBI agent Jack Mulville investigate, and they immediately suspect Leeds' former lover, Dr. Silvana Moretti, a brilliant research scientist who harbors a grudge against all the victims. Then when prominent people in the U.S. government begin to receive these same threatening cards and almost immediately experience these same deadly cardiac emergencies, it falls to the unlikely team of three--the headstrong FBI agent, the gifted private investigator, and the brilliant but conflicted heart surgeon--to find the actual perpetrators and to snuff out a catastrophic plot that only the medically astute can divine. Dr. Cristina LePort's story is vaguely reminiscent of the artfully nightmarish scenarios in Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp novels, combined with the fast-paced tempo of Robin Cook's medical thrillers. Her Dissection (Bancroft Press, 2022) features page-turning suspense, action-packed climaxes, and thoughtful character development, set against a believable backdrop of medical science informed by her long career as a cardiologist. Her style, though accessible, is more sophisticated than superficial, and, with strong protagonists on both sides of the gender divide, appeals to both male and female readers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Mariah Fredericks about her new novel The Lindbergh Nanny (Minotaur Books, 2022). The kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr in 1932 shocked the country and made international headlines. The famous Charles Lindbergh Sr became an American hero after successfully flying solo across the Atlantic. He was married to the wealthy and beautiful Anne Morrow Lindbergh, also a pilot. Their son Charles Lindbergh, Jr was suddenly kidnapped from his family home in New Jersey, and the case made international headlines. The parents were out on the night of the kidnapping, but the nanny was home. After the baby disappeared from his bed, that nanny, Betty Gow, became a prime suspect, and her life was never the same. She was known thereafter as the Lindbergh Nanny. Mariah Fredericks is the author of the Jane Prescott mystery series, set in 1910s New York and nominated twice for the Mary Higgins Clark award. She was born and raised in New York City, graduated from Vassar College with a degree in history and was the head copywriter for Book-of-the-Month Club for many years. Mariah lives with her husband and teenager in Queens and has a beloved French bulldog named Dita. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Stay True (Doubleday: 2022), the new memoir from Hua Hsu, is a coming-of-age story about the writer’s time in the University of California in Berkeley, where he tries to become a writer–and becomes a bit of a music snob. He builds a close friendship with another Asian-American student, Ken, very different from Hua, about which he writes in the book: "All the previous times I had met poised, content people like Ken, they were white. It’s one of those obscure parts of an already obscure identity that Japanese American kids can seem like aliens to other Asians, untroubled, largely oblivious to feeling like outsiders." But Ken is killed in a robbery gone wrong, forcing Hua to grapple with the death of his friend. In this interview, Hua and I talk about his story in Stay True, including his unbelievably non-stereotypical parents, his dive into college music, and his attempt with Ken to put together an homage for the Berry Gordy-produced martial arts film, the Last Dragon. Hua Hsu is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor of Literature at Bard College. Hua serves on the executive board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. He was formerly a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. He is also the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (Harvard University Press: 2016) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Stay True. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A road trip novel, The Revivalists (Harper, 2022) is intimate, funny, and at times, shocking. It has only the dystopian setting in common with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While Cormac’s characters are shadow figures on a stage devoid of meaning, our narrator, Bill, and Penelope, his wife, seem like people we know, or even, reflections of ourselves. Their concerns and reactions serve as mirrors for us to imagine ourselves in a future where 70% of the population died, and the conveniences of modern life have vanished. Bill, a psychologist, and his wife, Penelope, a skilled fund manager, have experienced different stages of their marriage, including initial intimacy followed by the challenges of raising a willful daughter. Bill, easy-going, perhaps almost lethargic at times, is conflict averse, but Penelope, a Black woman who fought for everything she’s ever had, is determined to steer her daughter in the right direction in life. When the pandemic separates parents and daughter on different sides of the continent, and they learn through the ham radio that their daughter is joining a dangerous cult, Penelope is galvanized into action, insistent that they must come to the rescue. There ensues an odyssey through the USA, and encounters with idealists and opportunists of varying ideologies, as well as the lonely or loony. A love story about two people with different dispositions, as well as the damaged people they come into contact with, The Revivalists is a meditation on how far we’re willing to go for someone we love, as well as an exploration of what happens when the fabric of society unravels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Karen Odden about her new book Under a Veiled Moon (Crooked Lane Books, 2022). When the Princess Alice pleasure boat collides with a huge iron-hulled cargo ship on the Thames River, it’s split in half, and only 130 of the 650 passengers and crew members survive. It’s 1878, and clues point to sabotage by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which has already used violence in hopes of restoring Home Rule. Inspector Michael Corravan, who was born in Ireland, orphaned, and raised in London by an Irish family, knows that the British will never allow Home Rule in Ireland if the IRB is to blame for the disaster. Meanwhile, violence is rising in his old neighborhood, and Colin Doyle, the youngest of his adopted family, has joined one of the violent Irish gangs. He refuses Corravan’s offer of help, which puts the entire family in danger. With support from colleagues, his good friends Mr. Gordon Stiles and Mrs. Belinda Gale, Inspector Corravan presses on to uncover the truth. KAREN ODDEN received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University, writing her dissertation on Victorian railway disasters and the origins of PTSD. She has taught at UW-Milwaukee, written essays for numerous books and journals, and edited for the journal Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP). She freely admits she might be more at home in Victorian London than today, especially when she tries to do anything complicated on her iPhone. All of her mysteries are set in 1870s London. Her first novel, A LADY IN THE SMOKE, about a young woman in a 1874 railway crash, was a USA Today bestseller. In A DANGEROUS DUET, Nell Hallam, an ambitious young pianist stumbles on a notorious crime ring while playing in a Soho music hall. In A TRACE OF DECEIT, Annabel Rowe, a young painter at the Slade School of Art, must delve below the glitter of the art and auction world to uncover the truth about her brother's murder. A member of Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime, Karen was awarded a 2021 Grant from Arizona Commission on the Arts. Under a Veiled Moon is the second novel in her Inspector Corravan series, following Down a Dark River. An avid desert hiker, Karen lives in Scottsdale, Arizona with her family and her rescue beagle muse, Rosy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Meera Nair speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “The Desire Tree,” which appears in The Common’s new fall issue. Meera talks about the long process of writing this piece, which explores loss and longing through a visit to a banyan tree in Kerala, India that is said to grant prayers. She also discusses writing from memories, finding the right length for a piece, and teaching revision strategies to her creative writing students. Meera Nair is the author of Video: Stories, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Threepenny Review, Calyx, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere. She lives in Jackson Heights in Queens, New York. Read Meera’s essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-desire-tree. Read more from Meera at meeranair.net, or follow her on Twitter at @MeeraNairNY. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Alastair Reynolds’ Eversion (Orbit, 2022), the setting keep changing—the epoch, location, and technology—but the characters remain more or less the same as they carry out an expedition to a mysterious object at the behest of a private investor. The novel starts on a tall ship in the early 1800s in waters in the Arctic, then jumps to a paddle-steamer near the Antarctic, then a dirigible over Antarctica, and eventually concludes in the future on a submarine-like explorer under the ice of Europa, the Jupiter moon. The story is a puzzle, challenging the reader to figure out which if any place and time is real. Adding to the mystery is the reader’s dependence on a first-person narrator Silas Coade, the expedition’s physician. Is the story a book he is writing, a delusion, a series of alternate realities or something else? Reynolds says his original intention with Eversion was to “recap the entire history of science fiction … We were going to start in a kind of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe mode. And then it was going to go into sort of Jules Verne and then maybe a bit of H.G. Wells, then a sort of early pulp sleuth thing.” That would have been followed by classic space opera and episodes in the styles of Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov followed by 1960s and ’70s new wave. “But once I started writing the book, I realized that there was no way I could bring sufficient variety to the craft to make those episodes work,” he says. “So I cut it down drastically to four or five episodes for the finished product. Reynolds is a former research fellow at the European Space Agency. He’s been writing fiction full-time since 2004 and has 19 novels and more than 70 short stories to show for it. His work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Arthur C Clarke and Sturgeon awards. He’s won the Seiun, Sidewise, European Science Fiction Society and Locus awards, and his stories have been adapted for stage and television. Brenda Noiseux are Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How does identity and experience inform your writing? This episode explores:

Professor Talty’s journey from community college student to college professor.

The importance of supportive mentors and professors.

Using identity and experience ethically in fiction and nonfiction.

Why finding the right form for your story matters.

A discussion of the book Night of the Living Rez.

Our guest is: Professor Morgan Talty, who is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He is the author of the story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Professor Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode may also be interested in:

A Calm and Normal Heart by Chelsea T. Hicks

The Removed by Brandon Hobson

There There by Tommy Orange

Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp

Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How does a pilot see the cities of the world? Unlike residents, who live there full-time, or tourists, who travel once and perhaps never again, pilots are brief, but regular visitors to the hubs of the world. In Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World (Chatto & Windus / Knopf: 2022), Mark Vanhoenacker helps to give us an answer. In his book, Mark charts his flights all over the world, to cities like Hong Kong, Jeddah, Rio, Cape Town, Sapporo, Delhi, and many more. But the book also regularly returns to his home town: Pittsfield, Mass., near the state border with New York. In this interview, Mark and I talk about his travels around the world, from the (relatively) small town of Pittsfield to the snowy streets of Sapporo. Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial airline pilot and writer. The author of the international best seller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot (Knopf: 2015) and How to Land a Plane (The Experiment: 2019), he is also a regular contributor to The New York Times and a columnist for the Financial Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, he trained as a historian and worked in business before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He now flies the Boeing 787 Dreamliner from London to cities around the world. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Imagine a City. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

London, 1679. Combining the color and adventure of Alexandre Dumas and the thrills of Frederick Forsyth, early scientists Harry Hunt and Robert Hooke of the Royal Society stumble onto a plot to kill the Queen of England. The Poison Machine (Melville House, 2022) is a nail-biting and brilliantly imagined historical thriller that will delight readers of its critically acclaimed predecessor, The Bloodless Boy. Tune in as we speak with Robert J. Lloyd about his recent novel set in Restoration England, The Poison Machine. Robert J. Lloyd, after a twenty-year career as a secondary school teacher, has returned to painting and writing, and is now working on the third book in the Hunt and Hooke series. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In her new essay collection, Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman (Delphinium Books 2022), Eileen Pollack covers her life in snippets or by delving into history, but the overall picture is of an extremely talented writer, a brilliant woman with a degree in physics and a long list of respected publications who is still somewhat bewildered to find herself alone. She tells stories about her childhood home, her grandparents, her father the dentist, her mother’s closets, her ex-husband who thought his work took precedence, her son who turned into a socialist, and assorted neighbors, friends, and men who drifted through her life. In her distinctive voice, she sometimes slips humor into the most horrendous situations, maybe because that’s how she survived. This is an author who dissects her thoughts, words, and actions without worrying about having a big bow to tie it all together. Eileen Pollack is a writer whose novel Breaking and Entering, about the deep divisions between blue and red America, was named a 2012 New York Times Editor’s Choice selection. Her essay, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” was published in the Sunday, October 6, 2013, issue of The New York Times Magazine and went viral; the essay is an excerpt from her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still A Boys’ Club, published in 2015 by Beacon Press. A native of the Catskill Mountains, Eileen also is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes and Paradise, New York, as well as two collections of short fiction, In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic. Her innovative work of creative nonfiction called Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain, Sam Rockwell, and Michael Greyeyes. A long-time faculty member and former director of the Helen Zell MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, she now lives in Boston and offers her services as a freelance editor and writing coach. When she isn’t reading, writing, or teaching, Eileen loves to play tennis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai's latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai (Blair, 2022) explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality--always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power. These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai's stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cora’s Kitchen by Kimberly Garrett Brown (Inanna Publications 2022) is a striking novel told in letters, journal entries, and a series of stories written by an educated young Black mother, wife, and librarian. Cora, who works at Harlem’s 135th Street library, reads a powerful poem by the young Langston Hughes, who begins to offer advice about her own writing. She’s awakened to thoughts about society and the role of women, prejudice, and the plight of Black women. Cora is ambitious, but loyal, and stepping in to help a family member leads to a series of events that could destroy her life. She’s ultimately surprised to find herself longing to be back in her tiny apartment cooking for her own family, raising her kids, and working in the library stacks. The experience gives her the fortitude to plunge ahead as a writer. KIMBERLY GARRETT BROWN is Publisher and Executive Editor of Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems and Personal Narratives, The Feminine Collective, Compass Literary Magazine, Today’s Chicago Woman, Chicago Tribune, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Cora’s Kitchen, was published by Inanna Publications in September 2022. It was a finalist in the 2018 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and the 2016 Louise Meriwether First Book Prize. She earned her MFA in creative writing at Goddard College. When she’s not writing, Brown loves taking pictures, painting, and drawing. She has three adult children and currently lives in Boca Raton, Florida, with her husband and pampered Shih Tzu. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Maaz Bin Bilal about Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras by Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (India Penguin Classics, 2022). The poem ‘Chirag-e-Dair’ or Temple Lamp is an eloquent and vibrant Persian masnavi by Mirza Ghalib. While we quote liberally from his Urdu poetry, we know little of his writings in Persian, and while we read of his love for the city of Delhi, we discover in temple Lamp, his rapture over the spiritual and sensual city of Banaras. Chiragh-e-Dair is being translated directly from Persian into English in its entirety for the first time, with a critical Introduction by Maaz Bin Bilal. It is Mirza Ghalib’s pean to Kashi, which he calls Kaaba-e-Hindostan or the Mecca of India. Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of postmodernist postcolonial literatures, transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, and film studies. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Agatha Christie hardly needs an introduction. The Queen of Mystery has reigned since the 1920s, and the recent release of films based on her books shows that her popularity is in no danger of waning anytime soon. It takes a certain audacity to create an amateur detective who, while managing Christie’s household, outpaces her employer in solving crimes. But Colleen Cambridge pulls off this task with aplomb. In a nod to one of Christie’s best-known and most highly regarded novels, the series opens with a body in the library at Mallowan Hall, the rural estate where the author lives with her second husband. Phyllida—who admires Hercule Poirot, Christie’s most famous creation—seeks to apply his principles of detection to that dead body in the library, and she succeeds admirably. When the second book, A Trace of Poison (Kensington Publishing, 2022), begins, Phyllida is organizing a village celebration aimed at raising the necessary funds to repair the roof of an orphanage run by the local Catholic church. Four famous mystery writers—Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, Anthony Berkeley, and Christie herself—have agreed to sign copies of their books and to award a short-story prize guaranteeing international publication to one lucky local writer. But at the reception on the first evening, someone is murdered. The stolid but unimaginative police are called in, and again it is up to Phyllida to find out what really happened. There can be few things more fun to write than fiction about other writers, and it’s clear that Cambridge is having a blast with every tongue-in-cheek reference. The crimes are inventive, the solutions satisfying, but at least as interesting are Phyllida’s interactions with her staff and the villagers of Listleigh. She has her flaws, and we learn early on that she has secrets. At the same time, she is observant, caring, perceptive, and daring, and watching her figure out the clues that befuddle even the police is pure joy. Colleen Cambridge is the author of Murder at Mallowan Hall and A Trace of Poison, both featuring Phyllida Bright. Her next novel, Mastering the Art of French Murder, is due in the spring of 2023. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her next novel, Song of the Storyteller, will appear in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Mally Becker about her new book The Counterfeit Wife: A Revolutionary War Mystery (Level Best Books, 2022). Philadelphia, June 1780. George Washington's two least likely spies return, masquerading as husband and wife as they search for traitors in Philadelphia. Months have passed since young widow Becca Parcell and former printer Daniel Alloway foiled a plot that threatened the new nation. But independence is still a distant dream, and General Washington can't afford more unrest, not with food prices rising daily and the value of money falling just as fast. At the General's request, Becca and Daniel travel to Philadelphia to track down traitors who are flooding the city with counterfeit money. Searching for clues, Becca befriends the wealthiest women in town, the members of the Ladies Association of Philadelphia, while Daniel seeks information from the city's printers. But their straightforward mission quickly grows personal and deadly as a half-remembered woman from Becca's childhood is arrested for murdering one of the suspected counterfeiters. With time running out-and their faux marriage breaking apart-Becca and Daniel find themselves searching for a hate-driven villain who's ready to kill again. Mally Becker combines her love of history and crime fiction in mysteries that feature strong, independent heroines. She is the Agatha Award-nominated author of The Turncoat's Widow, which Kirkus Reviews called, A compelling tale ... with charming main characters. Her first novel was also named a CIBA Mystery & Mayhem finalist. A member of the board of MWA-NY, Mally was an attorney until becoming a full-time writer and an instructor at The Writers Circle Workshops. She is also a member of Sisters in Crime and the Historical Novel Society. Mally and her husband live in New Jersey, where they raised their wonderful son and spend as much time as they can hiking and kayaking. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Set during the Ming Dynasty that ruled over China, The Empire's Bladesmen: Forbidden Relics (Amored History, 2021) by Clay Vagrant is a gripping story of adventure, secret assassins, and mythic creatures. This interview will include discussions not only about the novel itself, but many of the historical and fantasy elements related to Chinese history and traditional folklore. Clay Vagrant is an Asian American millennial who loves martial arts, military history and civilizations, and then reading and writing about them. He trains in the martial arts, reads books and plays video games often. He helped start the Armored History brand dedicated to students and fans of the study of world military history and historical fantasy genres. He does all his own stunts, artwork, design, and illustrations for book covers, marketing materials, and promotional media kits. Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Analysis, Big History, Historical Sociology, War studies, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An intimate memoir about coming of age in a tight-knit working-class family during Iraq's seemingly endless series of wars. Faleeha Hassan became intimately acquainted with loss and fear while growing up in Najaf, Iraq. Now, in a deeply personal account of her life, she remembers those she has loved and lost. As a young woman, Faleeha hated seeing her father and brother go off to fight, and when she needed to reach them, she broke all the rules by traveling alone to the war's front lines--just one of many shocking and moving examples of her resilient spirit. Later, after building a life in the US, she realizes that she will coexist with war for most of the years of her life and chooses to focus on education for herself and her children. In a world on fire, she finds courage, compassion, and a voice. A testament to endurance and a window into unique aspects of life in the Middle East, Faleeha's memoir War and Me (Amazon Crossing, 2022) offers an intimate perspective on something wars can't touch--the loving bonds of family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements (Riverhead Books, 2022) is a gripping saga about what might happen in a world in which climate change can wreak havoc on life, even for those who have everything. Just before the world’s first category 6 hurricane hits the ground, Daphne, a proficient ceramicist whose pieces are selling for high prices, manages to get the kids packed and in the car. Her husband, a surgeon, is helping evacuate patients at the hospital and can’t be reached when the car runs out of gas, Daphne’s purse is missing, and they family is bussed hundreds of miles away to a FEMA mega shelter in Oklahoma. Knowing that their home is destroyed and there’s nothing to go home to, all they can do is struggle along with all the other evacuees, including the drug dealers and those who hate anyone who is different. No one knows what will happen next. Bruce Holsinger is a novelist and literary scholar based in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is the author of the USA Today and Los Angeles Times-bestselling novel The Gifted School (Riverhead Books, 2019). A Book of the Month Club main selection and described by The Wall Street Journal as "the novel that predicted the College Admissions Scandal," The Gifted School won the Colorado Book Award and was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by NPR and numerous publications. He is also the author of A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015), award-winning historical novels published by William Morrow (HarperCollins). His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, Slate, and many other publications.). Holsinger also teaches in the English department at the University of Virginia and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. His next nonfiction book, On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age, will appear from Yale University Press in February 2023. His previous books have won major awards from the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Musicological Society, and his academic work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. When he’s not teaching or writing, Holsinger plays clawhammer old-time music on his open-back banjo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hard to say exactly when the human species fractured. Harder to say when this new talent arrived. But Lion Zorn, protagonist of Last Tango in Cyberspace, is the first of his kind--an empathy tracker, an emotional forecaster, with a felt sense for how culture evolves and the future arrives. It's also a useful skill in today's competitive business market. In Steven Kotler's The Devil's Dictionary (St. Martin's Press, 2021), when a routine em-tracking job goes sideways and em-trackers themselves start disappearing, Lion finds himself not knowing who to trust in a life and death race to uncover the truth. And when the trail leads to the world's first mega-linkage, a continent-wide national park advertised as the best way to stave off environmental collapse, and exotic animals unlike any on Earth start showing up--Lion's quest for truth becomes a fight for the survival of the species. Packed with intrigue and heart-pounding action, marked by unforgettable characters and vivid storytelling, filled with science-based brilliance and cult comic touches, The Devil's Dictionary is Steven Kotler at his thrilling science fiction best. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ellen Doré Watson speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “In Which Raging Weather is a Gift,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Ellen talks about the importance of letting a poem surprise you as the first draft comes together. She also discusses her thoughts on the revision process, her work translating poetry and prose, and the years she spent running the Smith College Poetry Center. Ellen Doré Watson’s fifth full-length collection is pray me stay eager. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Orion, and The New Yorker. She has translated a dozen books from Brazilian Portuguese, including the work of Adelia Prado. Watson served as poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review and director of the Poetry Center at Smith College for decades, and currently offers manuscript editing and workshops online. Read Ellen’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/ellen-dore-watson. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Tanvi Berwah about Monsters Born and Made (Sourcebooks Fire, 2022). In our narrator Koral’s world—an oceanic world full of sea monsters, brutal heat, and only a few islands—choices are limited. Koral belongs a to class of people called Renters, who don’t own land, or in many cases, even have proper dwellings. The Landers live protected inside a cool place called the Terrafort, safe from the dangers that the Renters experience every day. Koral’s angry father, quiet mother and sick little sister depend on her and her brother Emrik to earn enough to keep the simple dwelling they live in, and to buy her sister’s medicine. Koral’s family are, by tradition, Hunters, a special class of Renters which have a few more privileges, than most others. Hunters catch and train the wild sea monsters called maristags, which are used in the Glory Race held every four years. This year, however, it looks like Emrik and Koral’s luck has run out. They have one maristag, a female, left, but fail to catch a male to breed her with. In desperation, Koral finds a way to participate in the Glory Race, although she will be the first Renter to do so. Not only must she race with a barely tamed maristag and a decrepit chariot, she must also bear the hostility of both the Landers and the other Renters for not knowing her place. The three days of the race are nonstop action, with unexpected attacks by swarms of aqua bats, rebel Renters, and other charioteers looking to scare Koral off, as well as tense encounters with Dorian, a former Lander friend of Koral’s who is competing against her. It seems like almost no one believes that Koral can win this race. Except her sick little sister. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Karen Heenan about Coming Apart: A Novel of the Great Depression (2022). Ava has always been poor, so she doesn't think the Great Depression will change anything. But when her mother dies and her coal miner husband loses his job, Ava's certainty falters. The last thing she needs is a letter from her estranged sister, asking for the impossible. Claire has everything she could ever want, except the child she promised her husband. When her sister's life falls apart, she reaches out to help - and finds the missing piece of her own marriage. With everything at stake, Ava must choose: give up one child to save the rest or keep the family together and risk losing it all? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern (Melville House 2022) by Rita Zoey Chin is equal parts coming of age, epic travel tale, quest to find a mother who disappeared, and journey of personal discovery. The story begins as Leah Fern is planning to commit suicide. She hears someone banging on her door, which is strange since she has no friends. The visitor is a lawyer who shares a box that sends Leah on the road following clues that she hopes will lead to the mother who abandoned her when she was six, 15 years before. North to Canada and west to the ocean, Leah consumes copious amounts of candy as she surmounts obstacles, learns how to navigate with a piece of magnetite, and recounts her happy carnival life, before her mother, the magician, disappeared. Rita Zoey Chin is the author of the widely praised memoir, Let the Tornado Come. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and is the recipient of a Katherine Anne Porter Prize, an Academy of American Poets Award, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. She has taught at Towson University and at Grub Street in Boston. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Tin House, and Marie Claire. Outside of writing, Zoey can often be found hiking with her dogs, making silver amulets in her metalsmithing studio, and concocting herbal brews in her kitchen. This is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kristina Marie Darling’s Daylight Has Already Arrived (Black Lawrence Press, 2022) spans six years and countless styles. Motifs and images reappear, but the formal choices are wide-ranging. The poet utilizes prose, analysis of Shakespeare, erasure, and even footnotes to create neither memoir nor mediation, but a deeply intimate perspective on a vast landscape of ideas. Darling creates a sense of urgency without ever sacrificing her delicate, but firm grip on her work. Darling is the author of thirty-six books, which include Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle; Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women's Poetry; Silence in Contemporary Poetry; Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry; Angel of the North; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess). Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Yan Ge and Jeremy Tiang are both writers who accumulate languages. Sitting down with host Emily Hyde, they discuss their work in and across Chinese and English, but you’ll also hear them on Sichuanese, the dialect of Mandarin spoken in Yan Ge’s native Sichuan province, and on the Queen’s English as it operates in Singapore, where Jeremy grew up. Yan is an acclaimed writer in China, where she began publishing at age 17. She now lives in the UK. Her novel Strange Beasts of China came out in English in 2020, in Jeremy’s translation. Jeremy, in addition to having translated more than 20 books from Chinese, is also a novelist and a playwright currently based in New York City. This conversation roams from cryptozoology to Confucius, from the market for World Literature to the patriarchal structure of language. Yan reads from the “Sacrificial Beasts” chapter of her novel, and Jeremy envies the brevity and compression of her Chinese before reading his own English translation. Throughout this warmhearted conversation, Yan and Jeremy insist upon particularity: upon the specificity of language, even in translation, and the distinctiveness of identity, even in a globalized world. We learn more about Yan’s decision to write in English, and Jeremy’s cat chimes in with an answer to our signature question about untranslatability! Tune in and keep a look out for Yan’s English-language debut, Elsewhere, a collection of stories, due out in 2023. Mentions: -Yiyun Li -Liu Xiaobo -Jhumpa Lahiri -Confucius -Strange Beasts of China -Tilted Axis Press -State of Emergency -Yu char kway -Wittgenstein Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Part mystery, part thriller, with a splash of cyberpunk, Victor Manibo’s debut novel The Sleepless (Erewhon, 2022) imagines a near-future New York City where a quarter of the population has lost the need for sleep. Ahead of a corporate takeover, investigative journalist Jamie Vega discovers his boss is dead. Driven to discover the truth, Jamie continues to delve deeper, even as his own Sleeplessness spirals out of control. The world feels lived in and the mystery fits snugly within it. With good pacing and fully-realized characters, who bring their own morally ambiguous motivations to the table, The Sleepless keeps you guessing at what the characters could plausibly have done or could do next. Victor Manibo is a speculative fiction writer living in New York City, and his writing is influenced by his experiences as an immigration and civil rights lawyer. As a queer immigrant and a person of color, he also writes about the lives of people with these identities. Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Immigration problems, climate issues, dysfunctional families, road barricades, and the division between haves and have nots play a role in this dream-like novel. Set in Wisconsin’s stunning Northwoods, News of the Air (Black Lawrence Press, 2022) by Jill Stukenberg centers on a mother, father, and their teenage daughter, who voice the story from each of their perspectives. The novel opens with a pregnant Allie recalling her divorce, worried about her future, avoiding roadblocks to get to work at a Chicago museum, and frantic because of nearby eco-terrorism. In the next chapter, Allie and her husband Bud are proprietors of a far north rustic resort, and their previously homeschooled daughter Cassie, is about to finish her schooling in the local high school. Then two children show up in a canoe, and there is confusion about who they are and what they’re doing in the Northwoods. Jill Stukenberg’s short stories have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, The Collagist (now The Rupture), Wisconsin People and Ideas magazine, and other literary magazines. News of the Air, her debut novel, won the Big Moose prize from Black Lawrence Press. Stukenberg is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, has received writing grants from the University of Wisconsin Colleges, and has been awarded writing residencies at Shake Rag Alley and Write On, Door County. Jill is an Associate Professor of English at University of Wisconsin Stevens Point at Wausau. She grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and has previously taught in New Mexico and the Pacific Northwest. Jill enjoys cross country skiing, hiking, and sailing on Green Bay in a small, very old, but still bright blue sailboat with a cracked wooden tiller. She lives in Wausau with the poet Travis Brown and their eight-year-old. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jane Satterfield speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Letter to Emily Brontë,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Jane talks about her longstanding interest in the Brontë sisters, and why this pandemic poem is directed to Emily in particular. She also discusses letter-writing as a structure for poetry, and reads another poem published in The Common, “Totem,” which reflects on a childhood memory through more adult understanding. Jane Satterfield’s most recent book is Apocalypse Mix, which was awarded the Autumn House Poetry Prize selected by David St. John. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship, the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry from Bellingham Review, the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize, and more. New poetry and essays appear in DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Orion, Literary Matters, The Missouri Review, The Pinch, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore, where she is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland. Read Jane’s poems and other writing in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/Jane-Satterfield. Read more from Jane at janesatterfield.org. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Miss del Río (Graydon House Books, 2022) explores the biography of a real-life actress, Dolores del Río, who became a silent movie star in Hollywood, navigated the transition to talkies, and eventually played a role in the establishment of the film industry in her home country of Mexico. The story plays out against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which influences the lives of the characters in ways both direct and subtle. Add to all this a dramatic tale of the fictional María Amparo (Mara)—Dolores’s hairdresser, confidante, and wry chronicler—and you have a novel that breaks new ground in interesting ways. The novel opens with Mara late in life, remembering a friend whose commemoration Mara herself is too old and frail to attend. From there, we move back to the outbreak of the Mexican revolution, with Mara a small child being dragged through the streets by her caretaker, a rough woman known as Tía Emi throughout the book. Through Mara’s eyes, we see her first encounter and budding relationship (whether it is truly friendship is an ongoing theme) with the child Dolores, whose background is very different from Mara’s. Mujica then follows the lives of both women as they interact, overlap, and at times separate throughout Dolores’s career. But Mara has a story of her own: to find out who her mother was, what happened to her, and how Tía Emi became Mara’s caretaker. It’s a tale even more compelling than Dolores’s fight to be taken seriously in her chosen career, and through it, Bárbara Mujica pulls us along to a dramatic finale and a satisfying conclusion. Bárbara Mujica, professor emerita of Spanish literature at Georgetown University, is also a novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic. Her novels include I Am Venus, Sister Teresa, Frida, and Miss del Río. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gravity Hill (Madville Publishing 2022) is the story of a small town in Connecticut grappling with the tragic death of three teenage boys. What first appears to be a drunk driving tragedy leads back to a mysterious accident (based on the real Revere Textile Mill Superfund site in Sterling) that has plagued the town for years. The sister of one of the boys nearly spins out of control before embarking on a journey to clear her brother’s name. She questions the presence of someone from the Environmental Protection Agency, finds a hidden toxic waste site, and begins the process of healing everyone who was affected. Susanne Davis is the daughter of a sixth-generation dairy farmer and grew up in Sterling, where her brother still operates the family dairy farm just a couple of miles from Gravity Hill. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a short story collection, The Appointed Hour. Individual stories have been published in American Short Fiction, Notre Dame Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and other literary journals. Her work has won awards and recognition, including 2nd place in Madville's Blue Moon Literary Competition. Davis also teaches writing at the college level. When she's not writing or reading, she loves spending time with her family, sailing, photographing the very photogenic family cats, Zoey and Bear, and baking chocolate chip cookies for anyone who will eat them! G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Manga historian Ryan Holmberg introduces the influential alternative manga artist Murasaki Yamada (1948-2009) to English readers through a scholarly translation of Talk to My Back (1981-1984), Yamada’s feminist examination of the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams. The manga is paired with an extensive essay by Dr. Holmberg, in which he positions Yamada’s oeuvre within the history of alternative manga and Yamada’s manga within her life. Alternative manga is primarily associated with male artists in the United States, but Holmberg illuminates why that came to be and how that image varies from reality through his examination of Yamada’s oeuvre. Talk to My Back (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022) portrays a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family. Ryan Holmberg is a comics historian and translator. He is the author of The Translator Without Talent (2020) and Garo Manga: The First Decade, 1964-1973 (2010). He has edited and translated over two dozen manga, including the 2014 Eisner Award-winning edition of Tezuka Osamu’s The Mysterious Underground Men. His many essays and reviews can be found in such venues as The Comics Journal, Artforum International, and The New York Review. He has advised on exhibitions at the British Museum and the Honolulu Museum of Art, and is currently Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He can be found on social media @mangaberg. Amanda Kennell is an Assistant Teaching Professor of International Studies at North Carolina State University who researches Japanese culture and contemporary media. Her book, Alice in Japanese Wonderlands: Translation, Adaptation, Mediation, is forthcoming in 2023 from the University of Hawai’i Press. She consulted on the British Museum’s exhibition on manga, and her work has appeared in the Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, Film Criticism, and the Washington Post, among other publications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ship Life: Seven Months of Voluntary Slavery (2022) is written in the form of a diary of a Ukrainian girl who worked as a bar server on an American cruise ship. Day after day, the author recreates from memory the real events of the seven months spent on board, sharing her impressions, discoveries, and experiences. Readers of this diary have the opportunity to visit more than 20 countries in Europe, North and Central America with the author, and most importantly - to learn firsthand what it is - ship life. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). In her dissertation on Richard Brautigan, she focuses on postmodernism in American literature. Currently, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian program at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Boubacar Boris Diop is the author of Murambi: The Book of Bones, (Indiana UP, 2016; translated by Fiona McLaughlin), an unforgettable novel of the Rwandan genocide that blends journalistic research with finely drawn characterizations of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In this episode, Mr. Diop reads from Murambi, translated from French by Fiona McLaughlin, and speaks to Duke professor Sarah Quesada and host Aarthi Vadde about how his work on the novel spurred him to rethink his language of composition. Mr. Diop wrote his first five novels in French, but after Murambi, shifted to Wolof, the most widely spoken language in his home country of Senegal. Asked to describe the difference between writing in French and writing in Wolof, Mr. Diop sums it up memorably: “When I start writing in French, I shut the door; I shut the window…I don’t hear the words I’m writing. When I write in Wolof, I hear every word.” Sarah and Mr. Diop discuss whether translation can be an ally to a Wolof worldview or whether the sounds that Mr. Diop hears through his window will inevitably be lost to readers who encounter his Wolof novels in English or French. Their dialogue suggests that, while Wolof represents a form of linguistic emancipation from the legacy of a French colonial education, there is also discovery and freedom in raising the literary profile of Wolof for an international audience. Mr. Diop’s Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks is the first Wolof novel to be translated into English and an excerpt from his second Wolof novel Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma is available in translation here. In response to our signature question of the season, Mr. Diop proposes that the Wolof word “keroog” is very difficult to translate but not impossible. And it spurs an impromptu comparison to the Spanish word “ahorita,” which like “keroog,” blurs the distinctions between present, past, and future. In an episode about personal and political memory, nothing could be more fitting! Mentioned in this episode: --Toni Morrison --Gabriel Garcia Marquez --Mario Vargas Llosa --Ernesto Sábato --Léopold Sédar Senghor --Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks --Les Petits de la guenon (French Translation of Doomi Golo) --Bàmmeelu Kocc Barma – literally translated as Kocc Barma's Grave (Diop’s second Wolof novel) --Malaanum Lëndëm – Diop’s third Wolof novel --Alice Chaudemanche (French translator of Malaanum Lëndëm) --Pierre Nora – French historian --Marianne Hirsch --“Sites mémoriaux du génocide” – memorial sites of genocide (term used by UNESCO that qualify as heritage sites.) --Rwandan term – “ejo” (similar to keroog) from the language: Kinyarwanda Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Three Muses (Regal House Publishing, 2022) by Martha Toll, John Curtin survives the Holocaust by singing for the entertainment of the kommendant who murdered his family. He’s sent to America, probably by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, to be adopted by a family whose son was killed fighting the war. The nourishment, love, and kindness of his new parents allows him to thrive. Years later, John is forced by Dr Roth to relive the worst moments of his life during therapy he’s required to do as part of his psychiatric training. Meanwhile, after seven-year-old Katherine loses her mother, her aunt enrolls her in ballet classes, never realizing how it will change Katherine’s life. The first thing to change is her name – Boris Yanakov, the director and choreographer, changes her name to the more Russian-sounding Katya Symanova. He seduces Katya and makes her a star, but also controls her every movement. When John sees Katya perform in Paris in 1963, he’s bewitched and can’t stop thinking about her. The next time they meet, in New York, John thinks he’s found the love of his life, but Katya is still under Boris’s control. John’s experience with the three muses of Song, Discipline, and Memory is completely different than Katya’s, but they are both forced to claw their way through doubt, despair and loneliness. Martha Anne Toll, whose debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, and reads anything that’s not nailed down. Martha brings a long career in social justice to her work covering BIPOC and women writers. She is a book reviewer and author interviewer at NPR Books, the Washington Post, The Millions, and elsewhere; and publishes short fiction and essays in a wide variety of outlets. She has recently joined the Board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. When she’s not interviewing or writing Martha likes to have lunch with friends, swim, walk, and spend time with her family. She lives just outside Washington D.C. area. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

"The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them." So writes Chris Belcher, who appeared destined for a life of conventional femininity after she took first place in an infant beauty contest--a minor glory that can follow you around a working-class town of 1,600 people in rural West Virginia. But when she came out as queer, the conservative community that had once celebrated its prettiest baby turned on her. A decade later, living in Los Angeles and trying to stay afloat in the early years of a PhD program, Belcher plunges into the work of a pro domme. Branding herself as LA's Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix, she specializes in male clients who want a domme to make them feel worthless, shameful, and weak--all the abuse regularly heaped upon women for free. A queer woman whom men can trust with the unorthodox sides of their sexualities, Belcher is paid to be the keeper of the fantasies that they can't enact in their everyday relationships. But moonlighting as a sex worker also carries risks, like the not-so-submissive who tries to turn the tables and the jealous client out for revenge. As Belcher moves between the embodied world of the pro domme and the abstract realm of academia, she discovers how lessons from the classroom apply to the dungeon, and vice versa. Still, fear that her doctoral program won't approve burdens her with a double life. Pretty Baby: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster, 2022) is her second coming out. In this sharp and discerning memoir, we see through Belcher's eyes how power and desire can be renegotiated--or reinforced. Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL: MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (University Press of Mississippi, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.” Mentioned in this Episode: --Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) --W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A violent ex-con forces his son to commit crimes in this unforgettable memoir about family and survival. Growing up on the Navajo Indian Reservation, David Crow and his three siblings idolized their dad, a self-taught Cherokee who loved to tell his children about his World War II feats. But as time passed, David discovered the other side of Thurston Crow, the ex-con with his own code of ethics that justified cruelty, violence, lies—even murder. Intimidating David with beatings, Thurston coerced his son into doing his criminal bidding. David’s mom, too mentally ill to care for her children, couldn’t protect him. Through sheer determination, David managed to get into college and achieve professional success. When he finally found the courage to refuse his father’s criminal demands, he unwittingly triggered a plot of revenge that would force him into a deadly showdown with Thurston Crow. David would have only twenty-four hours to outsmart his father—the brilliant, psychotic man who bragged that the three years he spent in the notorious San Quentin State Prison had been the easiest time of his life. Raw and palpable, The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story (Sandra Jonas Publishing, 2019) is an inspirational story about the power of forgiveness and the strength of the human spirit. David Crow spent his early years on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Through grit, resilience, and a thirst for learning, he managed to escape his abusive childhood, graduate from college, and build a successful lobbying firm in Washington, DC. Today, David is a sought-after speaker, giving talks to various businesses and trade organizations around the world. Throughout the years, he has mentored over 200 college interns, performed pro bono service for the charitable organization Save the Children, and participated in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program. An advocate for women, he donates a percentage of his royalties from The Pale-Faced Lie to Barrett House, a homeless shelter for women in Albuquerque. David and his wife, Patty, live in the suburbs of DC. Visit him at davidcrowauthor.com, on Facebook @authordavidcrow, on Twitter @author_crow, and on Instagram @dravidcrowauthor. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, found at https://fifteenminutefilm.podb... and on Twitter @15MinFilm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A clever magical mystery which needs your full attention, Comeuppance Served Cold (Tordotcom, 2022) challenges this podcaster to write a review without a spoiler. The novella begins with what appears to be the murder of a young dark-haired woman, followed by the departure of a masked person who might be the perpetrator. Or maybe not. Nothing what it seems like, except that the pompous powerful Mr. Earnshaw, and his misogynist son Francis really are as despicable as they first appear to be. (They do get their comeuppance, though). Earnshaw, whose nickname is the White King, runs a commission to license magicians. His son Francis leads a group called the Order of Saint Michael, which metes out punishment when his father wishes his own hands to stay clean. The White King and Francis have targeted people from the waterfront, such as Violet, a Black speakeasy owner, and her brother, a shape shifter, in their efforts to clean up Seattle and regulate magic. The battle lines are drawn. But what does Dolly White, a no-nonsense caretaker for Mr. Earnshaw’s drunken daughter, Fiona, have to do with any of this? Corpses on ice, magical jewels, a bespoke suit, and a precious mask will all make their appearances as this sly tale unwinds. Marion Deeds was born in Santa Barbara, California and moved to northern California when she was five. She loves the redwoods, the ocean, dogs and crows. She’s fascinated by the unexplained, and curious about power: who has it, who gets it, what is the best way to wield it. These questions inform her stories. Fun Fact: She once lost her glasses when they fell into a glacier. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Village Idiot by Steve Stern (Melville House, 2022) opens with a marvelous boat race on the River Seine in 1917. The already well-known artist Amedeo Modigliani is in a bathtub ostensibly being pulled by a flock of ducks, but actually being hauled by immigrant painter Chaim Soutine. Soutine, a poorly educated, rough, and unmannered immigrant from a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement, is disoriented by the recycled air he breathes into his helmet. As he trudges along the river bottom pulling the bathtub along, he considers his past and future life. Soutine painted as a child even when it led to humiliation and beatings by his father and brothers. Neither the collectors who supported him, the friends (like Modigliani) who stood up for him, or the women who fought over him could get in the way of his painting. But then the Nazis swept across Europe, destroying everything Jewish in their path, including a generation of talented Jewish artists. Some, like Soutine, managed to evade capture. Stern’s gorgeous novel is a sweeping, imaginative story of a great artist who was uniquely brilliant but simultaneously unpleasant and unwashed. Steve Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, and left to attend college, then to travel before ending up on a hippie commune in the Ozarks. He studied writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, at a time when it included several notable writers who've since become prominent, including poet C.D. Wright and fiction writers Ellen Gilchrist, Lewis Nordan, Lee K. Abbott and Jack Butler. In his thirties, Stern accepted a job at a local folklore center where he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore. His first book, Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, 1983 won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award. By decade's end Stern had won the O. Henry Award, two Pushcart Prize awards, published more collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven (which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction) and the novel Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, and was being hailed by critics, such as Cynthia Ozick, as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Stern's 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post. Stern, who teaches at Skidmore College, has also won some notable scholarly awards, including a Fulbright fellowship and the Guggenheim foundations Fellowship. He splits his time between Brooklyn and Balston Spa, New York and enjoys hiking, climbing, biking, and kayaking. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

People have always cared about their social status and how others perceive them, but advances in technology have changed how we ascend the social ladder, giving us new tools to manipulate our image and new measures of success as we seek “friends,” “likes” and the ever-elusive virality. In Joma West’s debut novel Face (Tordotcom, 2022), climbing the ladder is everything. The way you act and dress, who you couple with, how you move and talk—it all adds up to “face,” which, in turn, determines your job, where you live, who you befriend and the quality and quantity of opportunities available to you. Every second—at home, in public or on the “In”(ternet)—is carefully choreographed. It’s a cold world, where even children are curated to advance social standing. With everyone—even enslaved “menials”—hiding their thoughts and feelings, people turn to anonymous confessors to express their emotions. Through a Rashomonic narrative where the reader re-experiences the same scenes from different characters’ points of view, West reveals the tensions underlying every interaction and the emotional cost of living in a society that values external success over internal well-being. “Face is a game, a way of life, a survival mechanism,” West says. “It's essentially everything that you are when you're on the hierarchy. If you're a menial you have no face, so it doesn't matter, but if you're someone on the social ladder of any kind, your face is everything. And it is what ensures that you are at the level that you're at, and it also ensures how you climb the ladder as well.” Joma West is a third culture writer whose work straddles both fantasy and science fiction. Rob Wolf is a writer and co-host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Davida Breier talks about her debut novel Sinkhole (University of New Orleans Press, 2022). Humidity, lovebugs, and murder. Lies from the past and a dangerous present collide when, after fifteen years in exile, Michelle Miller returns to her tiny hometown of Lorida, Florida. With her mother in the hospital, she's forced to reckon with the broken relationships she left behind: with her family, with friends, and with herself. As a teenager, Michelle felt isolated and invisible until she met Sissy, a dynamic and wealthy classmate. Their sudden, intense friendship was all-consuming. Punk rocker Morrison later joins their clique, and they become an inseparable trio. They were the perfect high school friends, bound by dysfunction, bad TV, and boredom—until one of them ends up dead. Forced to confront the life she turned her back on fifteen years ago, she begins questioning what was truth and what were lies. Now at a distance, Michelle begins to see how dangerous Sissy truly was. An ingenious debut from editor and publisher Davida Breier, Sinkhole is a mesmerizing, darkly comic coming-of-age novel immersed in 1980s central Florida. A disturbing and skillful exploration of home, friendship, selfhood, and grief set amidst golf courses, mobile homes, and alligators. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This stories in this collection ask the reader to evaluate the humanness of the characters as well as readers’ own humaneness and capacity for empathy. A man recently released from prison returns to the dating scene and struggles to find the right time to reveal his long-past murder conviction. A grieving mother considers her own role in her son’s death. A boy enables the destructive addiction of the person he’s in love with. A dog, witness to his owner’s violent acts, begins to sweat. Each story in Rebecca Bernard’s Our Sister Who Will Not Die (Madcreek Books, 2022) brings the reader face to face with the frailties of human character—and demonstrates how the yearning for love and connection allows beauty and resilience to emerge from darkness. In questioning traditional formulations of good and evil, Bernard’s stories ask us to recognize our own culpabilities and acknowledge our shared humanity. None of us is the worst thing we’ve ever done, these stories compel us to believe. Hope is always worth letting in. Iqra Shagufta Cheema is a writer, researcher, and chronic procrastinator. When they do write, they write in the areas of transnational feminisms, gender and sexuality studies, film studies, and postmodernist postcolonial literatures. Check out their latest book chapter Queer Love: He is also Made in Heaven. They can be reached via email at IqraSCheema@gmail.com or Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Instructions for the Working Day by Joanna Campbell (Fairlight Books, 2022), Neil Fischer has inherited his father's former hometown of Marschwald in East Germany. He drives there from England, remembering stories about his father’s brutal behavior, the split from his mother and sister, and the loneliness he experienced throughout his childhood. He picks up a chatty hitchhiker who helps him get through part of the journey. An inability to understand people, especially his father, has always plagued Neil, but now he faces the task of deciphering his demanding father's last wish and restoring the derelict village to its former glory. He plans to renovate and revive Marschwald, but is met with hostility, mistrust and underlying menace by nearly all the old people in the town. His only friend in Marschwald is Silke, who is coming to terms with her traumatic experiences during the Cold War and has recently uncovered a shocking truth, concealed from her for years by her controlling brother. As tensions rise, a series of surreal encounters force Neil to contend with his own troubled past – but right now, all signs point to danger. Joanna Campbell lives in Gloucestershire, England. She studied German at university and as a student spent a year living in West Germany. Joanna has worked as a teacher of both German and English, and now writes full-time. She is very interested in the Cold War − particularly the communist state of East Germany − partly as a result of studying the era for her university course and also from living with West Germans devastated by the division of their country and separated from their loved ones. She loves to write about the themes of separation and isolation as a result of this interest. She is learning to paint and most of her efforts involve abstract cityscapes reminiscent of battle-scarred Berlin. Her debut novel Tying Down the Lion was published in 2015, and her short story collection When Planets Slip Their Tracks (2016) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. Her novella Sybilla won the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Novella-in-Flash Award. Her short fiction has been published in many anthologies and literary magazines and has won several awards including the London Short Story Prize. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Laurie R. King about her new novel Back to the Garden: A Novel (Bantam, 2022). Inspector Raquel Liang of the San Francisco Police Department has reached a crossroads in her career. A recent incident ended with her transfer to the Cold Cases Unit and instructions to do everything by the book from now on if she wants to keep her job as the SFPD’s psychological investigator. So when news comes of old bones found under a concrete slab at the spiffy Gardener Estate in San Mateo County—a modus operandi associated with a serial killer from the 1970s known as the Highwayman—Raquel finds herself dealing with a case outside her jurisdiction but definitely within her area of expertise. An added incentive for Raquel is that the Highwayman has just been identified, but he’s in the hospital with terminal cancer—and even after fifty years, he’s still playing games with the law. If the police can identify one of his victims, he will cooperate by supplying information on another, unknown to them. But time is running out, and more than a dozen victims remain unnamed. The body at the Gardener Estate may therefore answer the questions of two grieving families. Interspersed with Raquel’s search for information on the victim, we follow the events preceding the murder in 1979, when—for reasons explained in the novel—the pristine Gardener Estate hosted a hippie commune devoted to organic gardening, free love, and a steady supply of drugs. As we move back and forth between past and present, the complex story of one exceedingly troubled family slowly emerges, the link between the commune and the Highwayman is revealed, and Raquel’s commitment to do everything by the book is tested—until one final, dramatic twist forces her to decide what matters most. Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-seven novels and other works, including the Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series. She is probably the only writer to have both an Edgar and an honorary doctorate in theology. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Karinne Keithley Syers is the founding editor of 53rd State Press, and Astrs is the play that inspired that long-running experiment in publishing avant-garde texts for performance. This is a play that takes place in a "53rd state" of rabbit terrorists and Blanquist ennui, where text can be sung, spoken, projected, or read. In this conversation, we discuss the play, studying with Mac Wellman at Brooklyn College, and the founding mission of 53rd State Press. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation (DX Varos, 2022), Larry Sommers opens in 1853 in Norway, where only firstborn sons inherited their father’s land and estate. Other children had to fend for themselves. Anders realizes that the only way he can live a life of honor is to flee to America. He escapes his uncle’s home, hides in a boat builder’s barn, and is nearly killed by Maria, a childhood friend. But they talk, and he tells her about his plans to be a farmer in southern Illinois. Anders nearly ruins his chance of reaching Illinois when he tries to stop someone from apprehending a runaway slave. It’s a crime punishable by jail time and a hefty fine, but luckily, a kind gentleman intervenes and ends up hiring Anders to help on his farm. When Daniel, the runaway slave, turns up a few years later, Daniel and Maria hide him in their barn. This is a novel about immigrants, home, slavery, freedom and living a life of honor. Larry F. Sommers is a Wisconsin writer of historical fiction, seeking fresh meanings in our common past. He won Honorable Mention in The Saturday Evening Post’s 2018 Great American Story Contest for “The Lion’s Den,” a tale of childhood in the 1950s, and has published other, similar stories in the online version of The Saturday Evening Post. He served as editor of The Congregationalist, a national church-related quarterly magazine, from 2009 to 2016 and previously worked 23 years in the Public Affairs Office of the Wisconsin National Guard/Wisconsin Emergency Management as a writer, editor, photographer, writing coach, and public affairs consultant in a fast-paced environment punctuated by crisis communication events. A Vietnam-era veteran of the U.S. Air Force, he is active in church work and is a member of the Sons of Norway and two local writers’ critique groups. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and dog. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gabel's eatery is always open, feeding hungry hearts, bodies, and souls. When Strad, a young man at odds with life, wanders in, an uncanny encounter propels him on a journey to the hidden Fifth-Dimension of Altruego. He meets a people with ancient roots and a mysterious mission, whose curious customs and odd-sounding ideas somehow snap the missing puzzle pieces of Strad's life into place. Tune in as we speak with Ben Ackerman about his mystical novel: Open When You Are: Discovering the forgotten secret that makes life make sense. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus (IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Fine Chao, a Chinese restaurant in the town of Haven, is known for its food and its boisterous owner, Big Leo Chao. Leo is loud, assertive and aggressive, sexually explicit in a way unmatched in his three sons, Dagou, Ming and James, who all take after–and despise–their father in differing ways. The Chao family are the protagonists of Lan Samantha Chang’s newest novel, appropriately titled The Family Chao (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022). What starts as a family drama turns into a crime novel, with references to the struggles and challenges faced by the Chinese-American community–and with echoes to other classic works of literature. In this interview, Samantha and I talk about The Family Chao, its focus on the Chinese-American population, and how it uses classic ideas to explore that community’s place in the United States. Lan Samantha Chang is the author of a collection of short fiction, Hunger, and two novels, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. She has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Family Chao. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Daisy Rockwell, translator of Geetanjali Shree's novel Tomb of Sand (Tilted Axis Press, 2021) An eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention – including striking up a friendship with a hijra (trans) woman – confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more 'modern' of the two. To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist. Rather than respond to tragedy with seriousness, Geetanjali Shree's playful tone and exuberant wordplay results in a book that is engaging, funny, and utterly original, at the same time as being an urgent and timely protest against the destructive impact of borders and boundaries, whether between religions, countries, or genders. Daisy Rockwell is an American Hindi and Urdu language translator and artist. Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Liesl Schwabe speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “The Marching Bands of Mahatma Gandhi Road,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Liesl talks about the time she spent in Kolkata, India listening to the mostly-Muslim marching bands perform at Hindu weddings and religious ceremonies, and what drew her to this subject. She also discusses the research, writing, and revision that went into this essay, her approach to teaching creative writing, and her next writing projects. Liesl Schwabe’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Words Without Borders, Creative Nonfiction, The Rumpus, and Off Assignment, among other publications and anthologies. A former Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in Kolkata, India, Liesl now lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Read Liesl’s essay “The Marching Bands of Mahatma Gandhi Road” in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-marching-bands-of-mahatma-gandhi-road. Follow her on Twitter @Liesllibby, and read more at lieslschwabe.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In R. F. Kuang’s Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (Harper Voyager in 2022), we meet Robin Swift. Orphaned by Cholera in Canton in 1828, he is brought to London by a mysterious Professor Lovell, who trains him in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, to prepare him for enrollment in Oxford University’s Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. Yet as Robin soon finds out, the glamour and glory of Babel is not all it seems, and thriving at the center of knowledge and power demands complicity in the violence and militarism of empire…. Tune in to this NBN episode to hear Rebecca discuss what motivated her to write Babel, the inspiration behind Babel’s magical system of silver-working and the histories of anti-colonial struggle she wanted to illuminate in her writing, how real-life friendship inspired the friendships of Babel, the importance of sensitivity readers to imagining more diverse and complex characters, the joy of learning languages and the importance of collaboration to writing such a multilingual book, how her writing process has changed and grown since working on The Poppy War trilogy, the intersections and divergences between fiction and academic writing, and her current draft-in-progress on magician PhD students in Hell. R. F. Kuang is author of The Poppy War trilogy and a PhD student in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this 2011 episode from The Vault, Hilton Als reads from, and discusses, His Sister, Her Monologue, a novella he published in Mcsweeney's #35. Als is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and his theater criticism was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2017. He is the author of two books. The Women, published in 1996., and White Girls, which came out in 2014. "A Pryor Love," His New Yorker profile of Richard Pryor appeared in 1999. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Howard Jay Smith about his new novel Meeting Mozart (The Sager Group, 2020). It’s 1946, and a young army intelligence officer is awakened early by a gruff priest who needs another tenor for his church service. But Corporal Jake Conegliano has been invited to see a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and his ride is leaving soon. The Abbe Luigi Hudal won’t take no for an answer, and threatens eternal damnation, until Jake says that he’s Jewish, but will be happy to sing in the choir the following week. The priest tells him that having a Jewish heathen in his church would be like bringing Satan himself to his door. As luck would have it, that’s the day Jake meets the love of his love and sets in motion a journey to discover both his own history and the history of a famous ancestor, known to history as the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. He was a Catholic priest who wrote the librettos for three of Mozart’s most beloved operas, and he was also Emmanuel Conegliano, a converso from a Jewish community in Italy. In rich detail, Smith weaves stories from different centuries and countries into the saga of a family that continued to be proud of its Jewishness despite expulsions, antisemitism, royal maneuvering, political intrigue, and wars. And even as the centuries progressed, their love of Mozart’s music is a binding force. Howard Jay Smith is an award-winning writer who recently won a John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts, Literature Division Scholarship, The James Buckley Excellence in Writing Award. Smith is a former Bread Loaf Scholar and Washington, D.C. Commission for the Arts Fellow, who taught for many years in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and has lectured nationally. His articles and photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, the Beethoven Journal, Horizon, the Journal of the Writers Guild of America, and the Ojai Quarterly. While an executive at ABC Television, Embassy TV, and Academy Home Entertainment, he worked on numerous film, television, radio, and commercial projects. He serves on the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Symphony and is a member of the American Beethoven Society. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to about Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir (Athabasca UP, 2018). This book is available open access here. As a precocious young girl, Surekha knew very little about the details of her mother Amma’s unusual past and that of Babu, her mysterious and sometimes absent father. The tense, uncertain family life created by her parents’ distant and fractious marriage and their separate ambitions informs her every action and emotion. Then one evening, in a moment of uncharacteristic transparency and vulnerability, Amma tells Surekha and her older sister Didi of the family tragedy that changed the course of her life. Finally, the daughters begin to understand the source of their mother’s deep commitment to the Indian nationalist movement and her seemingly unending willingness to sacrifice in the name of that pursuit. In this re-memory based on the published and unpublished work of Amma and Surekha, Meenal Shrivastava, Surekha’s daughter, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi’s national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves these written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Women Could Fly (Amistad, 2022) is set in our contemporary world with one big difference. A belief in witches gives rise to laws and a culture that encourages women to be married by the age of 30, locking them in a 1950s-style domesticity with the threat that they can be burned at the stake for merely being accused of violating the rules. In Megan Giddings’ second novel, the reader must first grapple with the question: Are witches real? As the story progresses, the question shifts: Even if witches exist, why are they considered nefarious? “On a basic level, I just really wanted to write about magic,” Giddings says. “I wanted to write about a world where anything seems possible, but still people lean into their worst impulses and keep things small. … I wanted to show the ways that people constrain themselves. And I thought magic—something that could be limitless, something that could change anything—was the right way to get in there.” Megan Giddings is the author of Lakewood. She has degrees from the University of Michigan and Indiana University and is a recipient of a Barbara Deming Memorial fund grant for feminist fiction. Brenda Noiseux are Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rena Rossner is a literary agent at The Deborah Harris Agency, based in Jerusalem, Israel, which represents Israeli, Palestinian and other Internationally-based authors. She is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars Program, studied at Trinity College, Dublin and holds an MA in History from McGill University. She is the author of the cookbook Eating the Bible (Skyhorse, 2014) and the novel, The Sisters of the Winter Wood (Redhook/Orbit, 2018). In our interview we talk about her most recent novel, The Light of the MIdnight Stars (Redhook/Orbit, 2021) and her career as a literary agent. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In or, on being the other woman (Duke UP, 2022), Simone White considers the dynamics of contemporary black feminist life. Throughout this book-length poem, White writes through a hybrid of poetry, essay, personal narrative, and critical theory, attesting to the narrative complexities of writing and living as a black woman and artist. She considers black social life—from art and motherhood to trap music and love—as unspeakably troubling and reflects on the degree to which it strands and punishes black women. She also explores what constitutes sexual freedom and the rewards and dangers that come with it. White meditates on trap music and the ways artists such as Future and Meek Mill and the sonic waves of the drum machine convey desire and the black experience. Charting the pressures of ordinary black womanhood, White pushes the limits of language, showing how those limits can be the basis for new modes of expression. Brittney Edmonds is an Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies at UW-Madison. I specialize in 20th and 21st century African American Literature and Culture with a special interest in Black Humor Studies. Read more about my work at brittneymichelleedmonds.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Extraordinary by Brad Schaeffer (Post Hill Press 2021) tells the story of a family that is forced to confront both autism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fourteen-year-old Wes is unable to communicate with anyone except his father, who calls him an Ex (extraordinary). Most others are Ords (ordinary). Wes’s father is a captain in the Marine Corp and returns home broken in body and spirit after a third tour in Iraq. Wes has no idea how to adapt to this new version of his father. He needs order – his day is regimented, and he follows a timed sequence that includes watching the entire movie version of Sound of Music every morning. Wes’s relationship with his mother and two siblings is constrained and sometimes confusing – he only feels love from his father. This is a lovely and emotional tale about how a family can be easily torn and not so easily put back together. Brad Schaeffer was born in Baltimore, MD but grew up in a suburb of Chicago. After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he lived in Chicago where he embarked on his dual career as both a commodities trader and author/novelist. He currently resides in New Jersey. His prolific and eclectic writing can be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Daily Wire, and other well-read publications. His interests, as reflected in his articles, encompass a wide swath from business, to science, education, the arts, history, politics, social issues, and general day-to-day living. He is also an accomplished guitarist and pianist and can be found playing in local New Jersey clubs with one of several rock bands in which he has played over the years. He is the author of Of Another Time and Place (2018), which takes place in World War II Europe. It is a study of the conflicts that good men confront when compelled by national loyalty and indoctrination to fight for morally reprehensible causes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ben Stroud speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Three Omens of Federico da Montefeltro,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The story fictionalizes a moment in the lives of historical figures from fifteenth-century Italy. In this conversation, Ben talks about finding his interest in writing stories set in ancient and medieval times, and what kind of research and play is required to blend fact and fiction in those stories. He also discusses his process for revising his work and teaching creative writing. Ben Stroud is the author of the story collection Byzantium, which won the 2013 Story Prize Spotlight Award and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize for fiction. His stories have been published in Harper’s, Zoetrope, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, VICE, and One Story, among other places, and have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, New Stories from the South, and The Best American Mystery Stories. He is currently associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Toledo. Read Ben’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/three-omens-of-federico-da-montefeltro. Follow Ben on Twitter at @bencstroud. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A trained killer without a drop of human compassion shows up early in Laurie Buchanan’s second Sean McPherson thriller (Iconoclast (Spark Press 2022)). She has no problem murdering a woman and taking her place at a writer’s retreat in beautiful Washington State. But she’s controlled by a Seattle-based crime family that is spreading its tentacles across the Bellingham Bay, a perfect location for trafficking drugs and people across the Pacific Ocean. The book opens with the murder of a priest, who turns out to be the brother of the retreat’s proprietor, and a gourmet cook. The lovely Pine and Quill offers several cabins, one for each writer, and enticing-sounding gourmet meals. The iconoclast is there to kill someone who might know too much, and it takes some time before Sean McPherson, a former cop, is pulled in. Can he save his fiancé and protect the other guests? Laurie Buchanan, who earned a PhD in Holistic Health with a emphasis in energy medicine from National University of Natural Medicine in Portland, Oregon, writes the Sean McPherson novels— fast-paced thrillers set in the Pacific Northwest that feature a trifecta of malice and the pursuit and cost of justice. A cross between Dr. Dolittle, Nanny McPhee, and a type-A Buddhist, Buchanan is an active listener, observer of details, payer of attention, reader and writer of books, kindness enthusiast, and red licorice aficionado. Her books have won multiple awards, including Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Gold Winner, International Book Award Gold Winner, National Indie Excellence Awards Winner, Crime Fiction/Suspense Eric Hoffer Awards Finalist, PenCraft Award for Literary Excellence, and CLUE Book Awards finalist Suspense/Thriller Mysteries. In addition to reading, her passions include long walks, bicycling, camping, and photography— because sometimes the best word choice is a picture. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on New Books in Literature, a channel on the New Books Network. Today I interview Kathleen Rooney about her new collection of poems, Where Are the Snows (Texas Review Press, 2022). The book takes its title from the famous refrain of François Villon's 15th Century poem "Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past." Like that poem, the book wonders, "Where are they?" as in "Where are the ones who came before us?"—the beautiful, the strong, the virtuous, all of them? In keeping with that long tradition, these poems offer a way to think about life's transience—its beauty, its absurdity, and of course its mortality. Allusive and associative, anti-capitalist, and unapologetically political, aligned somewhere between comedy and anger, this poetry juxtaposes the triumphs and tragedies (mostly tragedies) of our current age with those of history, and—by wondering "Where are they?"—explores the questions of where we are now and where we might be going. Join me in encountering the keen and brilliant novelist, critic, editor, and poet, Kathleen Rooney. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

After author Judith Berlowitz found both Gestapo and Soviet records about a relative named Klara Philpsborn, she began thinking about writing Home So Far Away (She Writes Press 2022). Set in diary form, the novel opens in 1925 with a visit from Berlin to an uncle living in Sevilla, Spain. "Onkle" Julius has not told his wife and children that he is Jewish, so his visiting family can only celebrate a quiet, hidden Passover, but Klara is intrigued by the language, food, and culture of Spain. A few years later, she takes a job as a chemist in Madrid. 1n 1936, when the Spanish Civil War breaks out, Klara, now Clara, enlists and ends up putting both relationships and her life at risk. Although she must hide her Jewish and communist identity in Spain, Clara is passionate about fighting for human rights and equality. The tale ends in 1938, just as the Nazi movement is picking up steam in Clara’s homeland. Los Angeles-born genealogist Judith Berlowitz fluttered through various career phases before settling on historical fiction as her life’s work. Tools acquired during all these phases are visible in her debut novel, Home So Far Away (She Writes Press, 2022). Her years as a musician (classical guitar, oboe, singer, arranger), language teacher (Spanish), cultural studies teacher, tour guide, peace activist, and genealogist converge in a fictional diary about a relative from Germany in the Spanish Civil War. Judith lives in San Francisco with her husband and sings in the San Francisco Bach Choir while serving as a volunteer curator with the genealogical website, Geni.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A longtime Institute member, Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her column for The Nation magazine, “Subject to Debate” won a National Magazine Award in 2003. In this episode from the Institute’s Vault, Pollitt talks about her 2007 book, Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, a collection of personal essays. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Anu Kumar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “The Woman in the Well,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Anu talks about the vivid memories from childhood that inspired this essay about ghosts, fear, family dynamics, and violence against women in India. She also discusses the revision process for the essay, her interest in writing women’s untold stories, and her current writing projects. Anu Kumar’s most recent works are the novel The Hottest Summer in Years and the collection A Sense of Time and Other Stories. Her nonfiction work on the lives of early South Asians in America appears this year from Simon & Schuster India and Yoda Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Maine Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Numéro SANK, Past Ten,TheJuggernaut.com, Atlas and Alice, and elsewhere. She lives in New Jersey and has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Read Anu’s essay “The Woman in the Well” in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-woman-in-the-well. Follow Anu on Twitter @anuradhakumar01. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Our first August rebroadcast was John and Pu's 2019 interview with SF superstar Cixin Liu (you may want to re-listen to that episode before this one!). Here, they reflect on the most significant things that Liu had said, and to ponder the political situation for contemporary Chinese writers who come to the West to discuss their work. They consider whether our world is like a cabinet in a basement, and what kind of optimism or pessimism might be available to science fiction writers. They compare the interview to a recent profile of Liu in The New Yorker, and ponder the advantages and disadvantages of pressing writers to weigh in on the hot-button topics of the day. Discussed in this episode:

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End

Jiayang Fan, “Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds” (New Yorker interview/profile)

Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Isaac Asimov, The End of Eternity

George Melies (dir.), A Voyage to the Moon

Fritz Lang (dir.), Metropolis

Frant Gwo (dir.), The Wandering Earth

Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov

Transcript available here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Twelfth-century Europe was not a good time or place to be born female. Even queens had few rights, garnered little respect, and were tolerated largely for their ability to produce male heirs—preferably in quantity and without exhibiting any unfortunate qualities such as independence or intelligence. One notable exception was Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England thanks to her marriage (following a scandalous affair and divorce) to Henry II of England—although Eleanor spent many of her later years imprisoned by her no longer loving husband, who suspected her of conspiring with their sons against him. In The Falcon's Eyes (Harper, 2022), Eleanor appears first as a shining if distant example for Isabelle, a young countess whose impoverished family is delighted to marry her off to the wealthy if less distinguished Gerard de Meurtaigne. Isabelle initially welcomes the match, but her new husband soon shows a disturbing need for control over his dependents, including his wife. Budding friendships with her maid, her steward, and even the noble Lady Fastrada attract Gerard’s ire, leaving Isabelle yearning for the one sure escape available to medieval women: the convent. Specifically, she longs to join the convent at Fontevraud, which attracts both nuns like Lady Fastrada’s sister and well-endowed laywomen in search of a quiet refuge. But she never expects to find herself face-to-face with Eleanor of Aquitaine. Francesca Stanfill’s multilayered story offers a rich and absorbing picture of medieval life at all levels, from the sorceress living in a hut in the woods to the falcons’ mews and the exigencies of travel. Her sure hand and light touch make this both a memorable and an enjoyable read. Francesca Stanfill’s previous novels are Shadows and Light and Wakefield Hall. Her enduring fascination with Eleanor of Aquitaine inspired The Falcon’s Eyes. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Mark Andryczyk, translator of Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s novel Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2022). A mondegreen is something that is heard improperly by someone who then clings to that misinterpretation as fact. Fittingly, Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love explores the ways that memory and language construct our identity, and how we hold on to it no matter what. The novel tells the story of Haba Habinsky, a refugee from Ukraine’s Donbas region, who has escaped to the capital city of Kyiv at the onset of the Ukrainian–Russian war. His physical dislocation—and his subsequent willful adoption of the Ukrainian language—place the protagonist in a state of disorientation during which he is forced to challenge his convictions. Written in beautiful, experimental style, the novel shows how people—and cities—are capable of radical transformation and how this, in turn, affects their interpersonal relations and cultural identification. Taking on crucial topics stirred by Russian aggression that began in 2014, the novel stands out for the innovative and probing manner in which it dissects them, while providing a fresh Donbas perspective on Ukrainian identity. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD candidate in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Indiana University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Leanne Kale Sparks, author of The Wrong Woman: A Novel (Crooked Lane Books, 2022). The only survivor of Denver's notorious "Reaper" serial murders, FBI Special Agent Kendall Beck grapples with the ghosts of her past by seeking justice for victims of abuse. She's neck deep in a particularly ugly case involving the disappearance of five-year-old Emily Williams--but her investigation is derailed when her best friend and roommate, Gwen Tavich, turns up dead floating in a nearby lake. Devastated by the news of Gwen's death, Kendall teams up with Denver detective Adam Taylor to find the killer. Gwen's fiancé, Ty Butler, is being evasive about the last time he saw Gwen, and as the evidence mounts against him, he's arrested for the murder. With every new clue, Kendall questions how well she really knew her friend. And when Gwen's dark secrets begin spilling out one by one, she begins to understand the devastating magnitude of her murder. The Reaper has returned to Denver--and he's not stopping at just one victim. As the trauma of Kendall's past comes roaring back, she and Adam have no time to spare before more bodies start piling up. And then Kendall makes a shocking discovery that reveals the horrifying truth behind Emily Williams's disappearance. Now, Kendall must confront her darkest fears as she and the Reaper face off one more time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A nameless young woman from This Place, and a nameless young man from That Place are stuck together when That Place, the occupying force, imposes another curfew on This Place. Author Nandita Dinesh never identifies the country, but the two protagonists share a language and much of their culture. They’re also falling in love. The young woman from That Place is a De-programmer, whose job involves interviewing the military troops now patrolling outside the house where she’s holed up with the young man. He is a Protest Designer, skilled at waiting out curfews, although his brother is supposed to be getting married the next day and there’s a lot of conversations about that. While confined with the young woman, the young man explains his strategies for passing time while under curfew. He wonders how his family and neighbors will react if he marries her. Where would they live? They swap stories about their families and respective homelands, and want to imagine strategies for ending the conflict, but nothing seems doable. This is an allegory for military occupations, like what we’re currently seeing in Ukraine, but it’s happened all over the world. This Place That Place (Melville House, 2022) is also a glimpse at what it might be like for hapless citizens to be imprisoned in their own homes. Nandita holds a PhD in Drama from the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and an MA in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. An amateur cook who loves experimenting with Indian cuisines, Nandita has conducted community-based theatre projects across a range of contexts and in 2017, she was awarded the Elliott Hayes Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dramaturgy by Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. She was born and raised in Coimbatore, India and now lives in San Francisco with her husband and a 90-pound Doberman Mix named Mila. Nandita is currently working on projects across literary genres — a book that lies somewhere between a novel, a memoir, and a play being the next in line! G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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

Chantel V. Johnson, Post-Traumatic

Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Math for the Self-Crippling

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The rich worldbuilding of a never-colonized North America sets the stage for this unusual murder mystery debut by B. L. Blanchard. Chibenashi is a broken man. He’s a peacekeeper for a small village, mentally stuck in place and trauma from the murder of his mother, the separation from his father who confessed to her murder, and his isolation from caring for his sister for the past 20 years. When another murder hits close to home, Chibenashi becomes closer to the investigation than perhaps he should be. The path to solving the crime sets him on a journey to discover the truth, but at what cost? Though the plot device may feel familiar, the world adds additional twists. Set in a modern, 21st century industrialized indigenous society surrounding the Great Lakes, the foundational elements such as the value of community and a non-punishment focused criminal justice system offer a unique lens to examine the threads of the case and Chibenashi’s understanding of what he’s taken as truth. B. L. Blanchard is a graduate of the UC Davis creative writing honors program and was a writing fellow at Boston University School of Law. She is a lawyer and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Brenda Noiseux is a host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Victory Colony, 1950 (Yoda Press, 2020) by Bhaswati Ghosh is a story of resilience about East Pakistani refugees who were forced to leave their homes in East Pakistan because of their Hindu faith. After Amala’s parent are killed in the violence following the partition of India in 1947, she and her brother manage to survive until they reach Calcutta. Within moments of disembarking from their train, Amala loses Kartik, and comes close to being hauled off by groping policemen. She’s saved by several young volunteers who steer Amala away and into a refugee camp. Manas, a student and the volunteer leader, comes from a privileged, wealthy family that doesn’t approve of fraternizing with refugees. But he cares about these poverty-stricken people, especially Amala. When conditions start deteriorating in the refugee camp, a group men and women manage to occupy a vacant plot of land nearby. There they begin to rebuild their lives with backbreaking work, in a society of their own making. Bhaswati Ghosh has written and translated fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from Bengali into English, and is the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship for Translation, for My Days with Ramkinkar Baij. Her writing has appeared in several literary journals including Literary Shanghai, HELD, Cargo Literary, Pithead Chapel, Warscapes, The Maynard as well as Indian Express, Scroll, The Wire, and the Dhaka Tribune. Bhaswati lives in Ontario, Canada and is currently working on a nonfiction book on New Delhi, India. The pandemic-induced lockdown inculcated a strange new interest -- watching a day-in-the-life vlogs of single Asian women -- mostly Japanese and South Korean. The presenters record their everyday lives -- cooking, cleaning, working at home or office; the unhurried ordinariness and simplicity of the videos helps Bhaswati relax and stay grounded even as the world keeps spinning into chaos and uncertainty. She also likes to sing, birdwatch, and explore new cuisines. Victory Colony 1950 is her debut novel. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The stories in Bombay Hangovers (Vishwakarma Publications, 2021) are laced with the grit, sleaze and dynamism of Bombay. They explore the nerve centre of a great metropolis with caustic wit and uncompromising realism. From the red-light corner of Kamathipura and the race course of Mahalaxmi, from South Bombay where a perfume maker works on exotic fragrances to the throbbing epicentre of Thana and the township of Kalyan, from Bandra to Andheri, the city is brought alive through memorable characters, piquant situations and no holds barred language. With the occasional foray into Goa, the poet Rochelle Potkar makes an impressive debut in short fiction, a genre unfairly neglected by most publishers in India. Sharonee Dasgupta is currently a graduate student in the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Eda Gunaydin joins us today to talk about Root and Branch: Essays on Inheritance (NewSouth, 2022). Lots of themes: Turkey, Australia, Sydney, family, friends, media, food, essays. That there is no easy translation for ‘awkward’ in other languages suggests that I’m only myself in English. This feels like a loss, because I’d like to think of myself as Turkish, too. There is a Turkish saying that one’s home is not where one is born, but where one grows full – dogdugun yer degil, doydugun yer. Mixing the personal and political, Eda Gunaydin’s bold and innovative writing explores race, class, gender and violence, and Turkish diaspora. Equal parts piercing, tender and funny, this book takes us from an overworked and underpaid café job in Western Sydney, the mother-daughter tradition of sharing a meal in the local kebab shop, to the legacies of family migration, and intergenerational trauma. Root & Branch seeks to unsettle neat descriptions of belonging and place. What are the legacies of migration, apart from loss? And how do we find comfort in where we are? Eda Gunaydin is a Sydney-based write and teaches at the University of Sydney. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Palestinian writer Suhail Matar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Granada,” translated by Amika Fendi. The story appears in The Common’s new spring issue, in a special portfolio of Arabic fiction from Palestine. Suhail talks about the inspiration and process behind the story, which explores the complex ways in which Palestinians connect when they meet and interact abroad. Suhail also discusses the difficulties of translation, the history and modern realities of Palestinians living within Israel’s current borders, and his PhD work exploring how the brain processes and reacts to language. Suhail Matar was born in Haifa in 1987, where he also grew up. He is finishing a PhD in neurocognitive sciences at New York University. The story “Granada” belongs to his short story collection North of Andalusia, West of the Homeland, which was jointly awarded the Al Qattan Foundation’s 2012 Young Writer of the Year Award. Read Suhail’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/granada. Learn more about Suhail at suhailmatar.com or follow him on Twitter at @SuhailMatar_. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fifty years ago, President Richard Nixon stepped off a plane in Beijing: a visit that changed the course of China, the U.S., the Cold war and the world. The stories in Gish Jen’s newest story collection, Thank You Mr. Nixon: Stories (Knopf: 2022), covers stories spanning the fifty-year relationship since then, from a Chinese woman press-ganged into translating for her Western tour group, to an English professor struggling to teach the wealthy Chinese students at his university. Gish Jen is the author of one previous book of stories, five novels, and two works of nonfiction. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fulbright Foundation. Her stories have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr., Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University. She and her husband split their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Vermont. In this interview, Gish and I talk about why she wrote this story collection, covering fifty years of encounters and connections between Chinese, Americans, and Chinedse-Americans. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Thank You Mr. Nixon. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

John and Pu Wang, a Brandeis professor of Chinese literature, spoke with science-fiction genius Cixin Liu back in 2019. His most celebrated works include The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. When he visited Brandeis to receive an honorary degree, Liu paid a visit to the RTB lair to record this interview. Liu spoke in Chinese and Pu translated his remarks in this English version of the interview (the original Chinese conversation is at 刘慈欣访谈中文版 Episode 14c). Mr. Liu, flanked by John and Pu (photo: Claire Ogden) They discuss the evolution of Mr. Liu’s science fiction fandom, and the powerful influence of Leo Tolstoy on Mr. Liu’s work, which leads to a consideration of realism and its relationship to science fiction. Science fiction is also compared and contrasted with myth, mathematics, and technology. Lastly, they consider translation, and the special capacity that science fiction has to emerge through the translation process relatively unscathed. This is a testament to science fiction’s taking as its subject the affairs of the whole human community–compared to the valuable but distinctly Chinese concerns of Mo Yan, or the distinctly Russian concerns of Tolstoy. Discussed in This Episode:

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Stanley Kubrick (dir.), 2001: A Space Odyssey

E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops“

Mo Yan, Red Sorghum

Read the transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Yussef El Guindi's In a Clear Concise Arabic Tongue (Broadway Play Publishing, 2021) collects short plays and monologues from almost twenty years of this exciting playwright's career. Guindi writes mainly about Arab and Muslim character, but does so within the framework of the American immigrant story. These are stories of characters caught between the reductive ideas wider American society holds about them and the much more complex reality they know is obscured by stereotypes. These plays are funny, moving, political, personal, epic, and miniature. They represent the arc of a playwright coming to artistic maturity, and should be a welcome addition to any theatre or school festival of short work. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Los Angeles in the 1870s is not the sprawling city we know today. A rapidly growing pueblo of perhaps 7,000 residents, it features vineyards and ranchos, worked by an army of transient men as likely to shoot one another up in bars as stagger home after a heavy night’s drinking. Although ethnically diverse, it is riven by racism, and its relatively small female population is relegated either to the home or to its brothels. When the son of Robert Gaines, one of the pueblo’s wealthier citizens, sets out to rob his sister of her lawful inheritance, he raises eyebrows, but even the town judge has to admit that the son’s behavior is entirely within the law. In this simultaneously repressive and unbridled town, Maddie Wilcox stands out. As a widow who owns her dead husband’s vineyard and rancho, she has a degree of freedom that most women lack (although Maddie takes care not to defy convention too obviously). And as a licensed doctor, her profession takes her all over Los Angeles as she visits patients in need of care. So when Lavina Gaines, that young woman whose inheritance is now filling her brother’s pockets, dies of strangulation, Maddie sets out to seek justice for her friend. This is, after all, the third suspicious death in the pueblo since the court ruling against Lavina, and Maddie has been called in to assess the circumstances of all three. This is the fourth Old Los Angeles mystery by Anne Louise Bannon, and readers may want to begin with the first, Death of the Zanjero, before working their way through the series. But even if you start here, you’ll enjoy plunging into Maddie Wilcox’s world. These are fast-moving, well-paced mysteries that often incorporate actual historical incidents and personages and open a vista on Los Angeles that we seldom see. Anne Louise Bannon is an author, journalist, former TV critic, and blogger. In addition to the Old Los Angeles series, she has written the Freddie and Kathy mystery series, set in the 1920s; the contemporary Operation Quickline series; several stand-alone novels; and, with Serita Stevens, Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons. She lives in southern California, where she and her husband make wine from their home-grown grapes. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Speed of Dark (She Writes Press, 2022) by Patricia Ricketts opens with a black man getting off Metra train in Northbrook, Illinois to search for someone who might be hiding in the woods. Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. The man he finds is a different one though, and he’s gone when Mosely wakes up, stiff and frozen the next morning. He’s forgotten the way back to the station and knocks on Mary M. Phillips’s door to ask for a glass of water and directions. Mosely has the gift of seeing when people need help, and he knows that Mary Em is desperate. He wants to help her, but the lake, (Mishigami – its Ojibwe name) wants her in its icy waters. Told by Mary Em, Mosely, and Mishigami, Speed of Dark is a story about human connection, the plight of the great lakes, and the power of kindness, friendship, and love. Patricia Ricketts inherited a lifelong love of music, the written word, the visual arts, and healthy arguing from her Irish Catholic household. While teaching English to many wonderful students, Patricia raised two fine daughters and a stand-up son and now has six beautiful grandchildren who live in the Kansas City area. Throughout her life, she penned essays, short stories, poems, and novels; however, her passion for writing escalated after being awarded a scholarship for creative writing from the University of Edinburgh. Since then, she has had short stories published in New Directions, Slate, Meta, Blue Hour, Realize Magazines, and on NPR’s “This I Believe” website. The Peninsula Pulse awarded her third place among hundreds of entries in its short story contest. She is currently working on a new novel, tentatively titled The End of June. Patricia lives in Chicago with her partner, artist and photographer, Peter M. Hurley. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

King Rao–one of the protagonists from Vauhini Vara’s novel The Immortal King Rao (W. W. Norton & Company: 2022)—is like many of the tech founders we idolize today. King comes from humble beginnings—born into a Dalit family in a coconut grove in India–moves to the U.S., and launches a company that ends up dominating the world. But Vauhini’s novel is also the story of King’s daughter Athena, living in the world created by her father’s company: a world of social credit, “hothouse earth” and “Shareholder Government”. The Immortal King Rao presents a techno-dystopia that may be recognizable for us today. But it’s more than just a warning about the future–Vauhini’s novel weaves together scenes from the past and the near future to tell a story about caste in India and the growth of our modern-day tech sector. Vauhini Vara has worked as an editor at the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and as a journalist for those publications and others, including the Wall Street Journal, where she began her career. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Tin House and McSweeney's and has been honored by the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the O. Henry Prize, and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her essay about grieving her sister's death, “Ghosts”—published in The Believer and adapted by This American Life—will be anthologized in The Best American Essays 2022. She is the secretary for Periplus, a mentorship collective serving writers of color, and a mentor for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s Book Project. In this interview, Vauhini and I talk about The Immortal King Rao, how the experience of her family’s Dalit heritage motivated her to write the book, and what companies, perhaps, inspired the techno-dystopia seen in her novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Immortal King Rao. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Taking its inspiration from Great Expectations, Furnace Creek (Eyewear Publishing, 2021) teases us with the question of what Pip might have been like had he grown up in the American South of the 1960s and 1970s and faced the explosive social issues--racial injustice, a war abroad, women's and gay rights, class struggle--that galvanized the world in those decades. A guilty encounter with an escaped felon, a summer spent working for an eccentric man with a mysterious past, conflicted erotic feelings for his employer's niece and nephew--these events set the stage for a journey of sexual and moral discovery that takes Newt Seward to New England, Rome, and Paris--all before returning home to confront his life's many expectations and disappointments. Deftly combining elements of coming-of-age story, novel of erotic discovery, Southern Gothic fiction, and detection-mystery thriller, Furnace Creek leaps the frame of Dickens' masterpiece to provide a contemporary meditation on the perils of desire, ambition, love, loss, and family. Joseph Allen Boone is a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California and the author of Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism and Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington, the Stanford Humanity Center, and the American Council of Learned Societies and has been in residency at the Liguria Center at Bogliasco, the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center, and the Valparaiso Foundation.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Justice of Kings (Orbit, 2022) opens with our young narrator, Helena, traveling from town to town as clerk to the King’s Justice, a learned and idealistic man called Vonvalt. The first few chapters build towards a pivotal incident, the razing of the village of Rill and the immolation of its inhabitants. Vonvalt, who has leeway on how he applies common law, has discovered the village still worshipped the old gods, and imposed a fine as punishment, privately cautioning the local Lord to worship more discreetly. However, Patria Claver, the priest who traveled with Helena’s party, had his own ideas about how to handle pagans and returned with a party of crusading soldiers to mete out death to the inhabitants. This sets up the central conflict between Vonvalt, a rational man who prides himself on a measured and appropriate response, and the nobles who back Claver, amassing a private and punitive army of crusaders. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

London, 2017. Lucille will do anything for her beloved grandmother. So when Granny Sylvie volunteers to send her to Paris to retrieve a beloved Dior creation left in the city many years ago, Lucille accepts. Why not escape for the weekend, when home means dealing with her hostile, demanding boss and a mother so uncaring that she’s forgotten Lucille’s birthday for five years in a row? Not long after arriving in Paris, however, Lucille discovers that the one dress is actually eight, and two of those are missing, including the Maxim’s, which she was specifically tasked with bringing back to London. Soon she is searching all over the city, in the company of her new friends Veronique and Leon, while her boss screams his frustration over the phone. This present-day story intertwines with one set in Paris in 1952, featuring Alice Ainsley, the young, newlywed wife of Britain’s ambassador to France. Alice’s wealth and her position in society require her to look and act the part of the perfect hostess. Who better to dress her for that role than Christian Dior, whose New Look is taking the fashionable world by storm? Alice soon becomes the envy of her insulated social set, but her apparently blissful existence conceals great insecurity and hurt. Her husband has lost interest in her since the honeymoon, and the couple only grows farther apart over time. Jade Beer does a wonderful job of interweaving these two timelines, keeping us guessing as to how they connect well into the book. And the contrast between Lucille’s modern approach to life, even when it lets her down, and Alice’s more limited options, despite her apparent prosperity, reveal the vast gulf between the 1950s view of women and our own, as well as the subtle ways in which one generation’s choices influence those of the next. Jade Beer is an award-winning editor, journalist, and writer. In addition to The Last Dress from Paris (Berkely Books, 2022), she has published the contemporary novels The Almost Wife and What I Didn’t Say. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Proof of Life (Write Choice Ink 2021) is the second book in author Sheila Lowe’s Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series. In the first book (What she Saw 2013), a woman wakes up on a train with no idea about who she is or where she’s going. When the train stops, she gets off and starts walking, and someone recognizes her and gives her a ride home. She’s shocked to learn that she has two sets of identification, two completely different identities, neither of which seem familiar. Three hundred pages of character building, plot twists, extreme bravery, and scary science gone mad lead to startling revelations. The second book in the series, Proof of Life, is a gripping tale that centers on Jessica Mack, a character who hears the voices of dead people. It’s affecting her both mentally and physically and she needs to figure out how to handle it before she gets hurt. The story includes a disappointed FBI agent, a passing bicyclist with important information, a minister who understands the five “clairs,” and a possible love interest. Jessica learns how to manage her new talent, and now she’s praying that the voices she hears can help her locate a missing child. One who is hopefully still alive. Sheila Lowe writes psychological suspense mysteries that place regular people into extraordinary circumstances. Like the fictional character Claudia Rose from her award-winning Forensic Handwriting series, Sheila is a real-life forensic handwriting expert who testifies in court cases and has written several widely sold books like Handwriting of the Famous and Infamous (2001). She’s also known for serious books such as Advanced Studies in Handwriting Psychology (2018) and Succeeding in the Business of Handwriting Analysis (2019). In her Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series (What She Saw 2019, Proof of Life 2021), her character Claudia Rose shows up as a side character. Sheila writes that she began researching what happens after death when her daughter was killed by a boyfriend in 2000. She was comforted to learn that there was life after earth, and three different mediums told her that her daughter, Jennifer, would channel the book through her. When she isn’t writing, Sheila teaches handwriting analysis to students around the world, and she lives in Ventura, California. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Outrageous Fortune: Gloomy Reflections on Luck and Life (Oxford UP, 2020), William Ian Miller offers his reflections on the perverse consequences, indeed often the opposite of intended effects, of so-called 'good things'. Noted for his remarkable erudition, wit, and playful pessimism, Miller here ranges over topics from personal disasters to literary and national ones. Drawing on a truly immense store of knowledge encompassing literature, philosophy, theology, and history, he excavates the evidence of human anxieties around scarcity in all its forms (from scarcity of food to luck to where we stand in the eyes of others caught in a game of musical chairs we often do not even know we are playing). With wit and sensitivity, along with a large measure of fearless self-scrutiny, he points to and invites us to recognize the gloomy, neurotic, despondent tendencies of reasonably sentient human life. The book is a careful examination of negative beliefs, inviting an experience of bleak fellow-feeling among the author, the reader and many a hapless soul across the centuries. Just what makes you more nervous, he asks, a run of good luck, or a run of bad? William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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. 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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Elan Barnehama’s new novel, Escape Route (Running Wild Press 2022), it’s 1968 and 13-year-old Zach is about to become a bar mitzvah. That’s when his sister changes his life by switching his radio from AM to FM. Zach’s family lives in Queens, and he’s comfortable roaming the New York City subways, heading to the public library, the Metropolitan Museum, and all kinds of diners. Zach is in accelerated classes, smart but confused. He worries about his older sister at Columbia, the war in Vietnam, his grandparents, and how his parents escaped Europe during the Holocaust. He meets a cute girl and is beyond relieved to have his first girlfriend, his first kiss. He thinks about music, math, religion, drugs, and more than anything else, baseball. He doesn’t know when to stop asking annoying questions or irritating the people around him with his goofiness. And just in case there’s another Holocaust and they have to leave the country; he joins the AAA auto club and figures out an “Escape Route.” Elan Barnehama grew up in Queens, NYC, has lived in several places on both coasts, and currently lives in Boston. He earned an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a BA from Binghamton University. He writes literary fiction, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction, which has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, RedFez, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, Public Radio, and elsewhere. Barnehama was a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in Fairhope, AL. He’s the fiction editor at Forth Magazine LA, and at different times has taught college writing-currently at American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, coached high school baseball, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. When he’s not reading or writing, Barnehama likes running and walking urban landscapes, travelling to see friends, seeing new places, coffee shops, diners, libraries, and public spaces. He remains a Mets fan. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Tracy Lawson about her novel Answering Liberty's Call: Anna Stone's Daring Ride to Valley Forge (Gray Lion Books, 2021). In 1778, war is men's business. That doesn't stop Anna Stone from getting involved in the fight. As the wife of a preacher-turned-soldier, a healer, and mother of three, Anna knows her place in this world. She tends to things at home while her husband and brothers fight for liberty. But when her loved ones face starvation at Valley Forge, she refuses to sit idly by. Armed with life-sustaining supplies, Anna strikes out alone on horseback over 200 miles of rough and dangerous terrain. Despite perilous setbacks along the way, sheer determination carries her toward her destination. When she learns of a plot to overthrow General Washington, her mission becomes more important than ever. With the fate of the American Revolution in her hands and one of the conspirators hot on her trail, Anna races to deliver a message of warning to Valley Forge before it's too late. Based on events in the life of the author's sixth-great-grandmother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

John and Elizabeth look back at Recall This Book’s terrific 2019 conversation with Zadie Smith , so you may want to listen to that again before proceeding Elizabeth and John try their best to unpack Zadie Smith’s take on sincerity, authenticity and human sacredness; the “golden ticket” dirty secret behind our hypocritical academic meritocracy; surveillance capitalism as the “biggest capital grab of human experience in history;” and her genealogy of the novel. If we had to sum the day up with a few adjectives: funny, provocative, resplendent, chill, generous, cantankerous. Discussed in this episode:

Tony Judt, Postwar

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy

Nicholas Lehmann, The Big Test

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge

Doris Lessing The Fifth Child

Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means

Stephen McCauley (with JP on RTB) Barbara Pym and the Comic Novel

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black (and others…)

Joseph O’Neill, Netherland

J. P. Toussaint, The Bathroom

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own, “Moments of Being”

Philip Roth, The Counterlife, Exit Ghost

Listen to the episode here: You can read the transcript here: RTB 15x Ferry and Plotz on ZS Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Black Cloud Rising (Grove Press 2022), author and scholar David Wright Faladé tells the story of Richard Etheridge, who towards the end of the Civil War joined America’s first and only “African Brigade.” Later recognized as a state hero, Etheridge is a young man when he joins the brigade in late 1863. Led by the one-armed General Edward Augustus Wild and Captain Alonzo G. Draper, the mission is to flush out rebel guerrillas, “bushwackers,” who continue to fight in Union-won territory. Their other mission is to prove that freed slaves can be trusted as combat soldiers. Set mostly in the swampy barrier islands of northeastern North Carolina, Richard is the son of the master of the house and a black slave. As children, he played with his cousins Patrick (Paddy) and Sarah, until they learned that he was a slave, and they the masters. The Etheridge family sign loyalty to the Union, but Paddy joins the Confederate Partisan Rangers. As the African Brigade moves forward, their raids free those still being held as slaves, and Richard moves closer to reuniting with his childhood love, Fanny. This is a novel about identity, integrity, and the fight for human dignity. David Wright Faladé is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Raised in the Texas panhandle, he’s the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, and has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more. Faladé is co-author (with Luc Bouchard) of the young adult novel Away Running and coauthor (with David Zoby) of the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (a New Yorker Notable Selection and the St Louis-Post Dispatch Best Book of 2021). G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Adrienne G. Perry speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Flashé Sur Moi,” which appears in The Common’s new spring issue. Adrienne talks about the questions that inspired this essay: questions about memory and friendship and coming of age, questions about what it means to desire someone and be desired, and what we do to appear desirable to others. She also discusses her approach to teaching creative writing, her interest in writing about place, and her current works-in-progress. Adrienne G. Perry grew up in Wyoming, earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College, and earned her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. From 2014 to 2016 she served as the editor of Gulf Coast. A Hedgebrook alumna, she is also a Kimbilio Fellow and a member of the Rabble Collective. Adrienne’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Meridians, and elsewhere. She teaches at Villanova University. Read Adrienne’s essay “Flashé Sur Moi” in The Common at thecommononline.org/flashe-sur-moi. Read more from Adrienne at adriennegperry.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

One could call The Kaiju Preservation Society (Tor Books, 2022) a pandemic novel because a) John Scalzi wrote it during the pandemic and b) the pandemic serendipitously leads the main character, Jamie, to a new job that sets the action in motion. But the book is not about the pandemic. It’s about Kaiju, Godzilla-like monsters who live in an alternate Earth. This alternate Earth is rich in radioactive elements, and the Kaiju produce energy from their own internal biological reactors. This makes them a danger when, say, they end their lives with in nuclear explosion that thins the walls between Earths, but it also makes them an object of fascination for unscrupulous humans seeking new sources of cheap energy. “So much of the way plant life and animal life on Earth works is through sunlight, which is just another type of radiation,” Scalzi says. “Plants photosynthesize, animals eat plants, other animals eat the animals that eat the plants and so on and so forth. But sooner or later it all comes back to sunlight. The only places where you don’t have that happen are in very specific places where, for example, there are sulfurous heat sources at the bottom of the ocean. And then things have evolved to take advantage of the energy source there. Well, in this alternate Earth, things like uranium and thorium in the crust are another possible energy source. It makes sense to me that life would evolve to take advantage either wholly or in part of that additional energy source. And then, of course, I just built out from there.” Scalzi has contributed in myriad ways to the art of science fiction through many novels, his past leadership as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and the platform he provides other writers on The Big Idea, a feature that appears regularly on his website. His writing has earned numerous awards, including what was once upon a time known as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Hugo Award for Best Novel, Hugos for Fan Writer and Best Related Book, and the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Zhanna Slor about her novel At the End of the World, Turn Left (Agora Books, 2021). 19-year-old Anna’s parents won’t pay her college tuition if she studies art, the one thing she loves most. She’s been drifting from one class to another, one boyfriend to another, and can’t stand being stuck in Milwaukee. When she receives an online message from a woman in Ukraine claiming to be a long-lost sister, Anna responds despite all the warnings that she’s being scammed. She also meets a handsome ‘train-hopper’ who lures her into his risk-filled life. Anna’s sister Masha, a linguist who has been happily living in Israel, receives a one-way ticket from her father when it becomes apparent that Anna has disappeared without leaving a message. Masha hacks into Anna’s computer and starts following the trail – had she flown to Ukraine? Hopped a train with her blue-haired druggie boyfriend? And why was she wanted for questioning by the police? This is a novel about linguistics, identity, and the meaning of home, especially for the children of immigrants. Zhanna Slor was born in the former Soviet Union and moved to the Midwest in the early 1990s. She completed her undergraduate degree at University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and her master’s degree at DePaul University. She has been published in many literary magazines, including Ninth Letter, Another Chicago Magazine, and Michigan Quarterly Review, as well as contributing to the popular news publication The Forward. Her debut novel, At the End of the World, Turn Left, was called "elegant and authentic" by NPR and named by Booklist as one of the "Top Ten Crime Debuts" of 2021. Her second novel, Breakfall, a mystery/thriller set in Chicago, is due out in Spring 2023. When she’s not writing, Zhanna spends most of her free time chasing her three-year-old daughter or doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this stunning debut collection, Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn't always follow through. These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. Some of My Best Friends: Essays on Lip Service (Atria/One Signal, 2022) takes on the cartoon industry's pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law's refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems, and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

"I was not prepared to be a father--this much I knew." Keith Gessen was nearing forty and hadn't given much thought to the idea of being a father. He assumed he would have kids, but couldn't imagine what it would be like to be a parent, or what kind of parent he would be. Then, one Tuesday night in early June, the distant idea of fatherhood came careening into view: Raffi was born, a child as real and complex and demanding of his parents' energy as he was singularly magical. Fatherhood is another country: a place where the old concerns are swept away, where the ordering of time is reconstituted, where days unfold according to a child's needs. Whatever rulebooks once existed for this sort of thing seem irrelevant or outdated. Overnight, Gessen's perception of his neighborhood changes: suddenly there are flocks of other parents and babies, playgrounds, and schools that span entire blocks. Raffi is enchanting, as well as terrifying, and like all parents, Gessen wants to do what is best for his child. But he has no idea what that is. Written over the first five years of Raffi's life, Raising Raffi (Viking, 2022) examines the profound, overwhelming, often maddening experience of being a dad. Gessen traces how the practical decisions one must make each day intersect with some of the weightiest concerns of our age: What does it mean to choose a school in a segregated city? How do you instill in your child a sense of his heritage without passing on that history's darker sides? Is parental anger normal, possibly useful, or is it inevitably authoritarian and destructive? How do you get your kid to play sports? And what do you do, in a pandemic, when the whole world seems to fall apart? By turns hilarious and poignant, Raising Raffi is a story of what it means to invent the world anew. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this 2019 episode, John interviews the celebrated British writer Zadie Smith. The conversation quickly moves through Brexit (oh, the inhumanity!) and what it means to be a London–no, a Northwest London–writer before arriving at her case against identity politics. That case is bolstered by a discussion of Hannah Arendt on the difference between who and what a person is. Zadie and John also touch on the purpose of criticism and why it gets harder to hate as you (middle) age. She reveals an affection for “talkies” (as a “90’s kid,” she can’t help her fondness for Quentin Tarantino); asks whether young novelists in England need to write a book about Henry VIII just to break into bookstores; hears Hegel talking to Kierkegaard, and Jane Austen failing to talk to Jean Genet. Lastly, in Recallable Books, Zadie recommends Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s The Bathroom. Transcript of the episode here. Mentioned:

Zadie Smith, White Teeth, NW, Swing Time, “Two Paths for the Novel” “Embassy of Cambodia,” Joni Mitchell: Some Notes on Attunement” “Zadie Smith on J G Ballard’s Crash“

Willa Cather, Song of the Lark (1915, revised 1932)

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

Charlotte Bronte, The Professor and Villette

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Pauline Kael, various film reviews

Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood

Ursula Le Guin, “The Story’s Where I Go: An Interview”

Doris Lessing, The Fifth Child

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black and Wolf Hall

Dexter Filkins, “The Moral Logic of Humanitarian Intervention” (on Samantha Power)

Patti Smith, Just Kids

Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again

Gary Winick (dir.), Thirteen Going on Thirty (starring Jennifer Garner, not Anne Hathaway)

Sally Rooney, Normal People

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Matthew Lopez, The Inheritance

Jean-Philippe Toussaint, The Bathroom

Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Watkins Glen (Mayapple Press, 2021) is the story of Susan -- a woman in her sixties -- who finds herself taking care of her estranged older brother Mark, who has Alzheimer's. They are the children of a father who worked in his brothers' upholstery factory for most of the year but in the summers; escaped with his family to Watkins Glen; where he was the best outlaw drag racer in a town that primarily caters to high-end road racing. After a life spent in New York City; Susan has moved back to Watkins Glen where she takes her brother to live--temporarily; she thinks. In the throes of his illness; Mark has developed a rare but well-known symptom of dementia called Acquired Artist Syndrome; whereby people who have never even thought about painting suddenly become obsessed with the art. Once Mark gets to Watkins Glen; he becomes possessed by the idea that there is a Loch-Ness like monster living in Seneca lake and he begins painting the creature. In this conversation we go far beyond the plot to discuss the balance of re-contextualizing memory while getting older, the importance of familial love and witnessing, fantasy and imagination, and dual landscapes. Lerman also shares a bit about her childhood in NYC, meeting Leonard Cohen, and the relationship with her brother. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely drinking mushroom tea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

As we soon find out in this opener to a new series set in 1830s London, Lady Caroline Morton’s illustrious heritage has been tarnished by the financial ruin and suicide of her father a few years earlier. The economic opportunities available to young women—especially noblewomen—in Victorian Britain are extremely limited. Caroline’s family has offered to support her, but life as a poor relation doesn’t appeal to her. As a result, she has broken with tradition and taken a position as companion to a wealthy but less-cultured widow, Mrs. Frogerton. One of her responsibilities is to prepare Mrs. Frogerton’s teenage daughter for her debut into society. Caroline is settling into her new life when her Aunt Eleanor arrives to announce that she’s sponsoring a house party and expects Caroline to attend. To sweeten the deal, Aunt Eleanor invites Mrs. Frogerton and her daughter as well. Miss Morton (she considers the “Lady” inappropriate for a paid companion) can’t refuse when it’s pointed out that the house party provides a perfect setting to introduce Miss Frogerton to London’s high society. Caroline also wants to check on her younger sister, still living at their aunt’s house. Caroline’s worst fears are realized when, not long after her entry to the estate, she encounters the man she was engaged to marry, only to have him turn his back on her without so much as a greeting. Bad turns to worse, including the troubling disappearance of a trusted servant, followed by a gruesome murder that Aunt Eleanor and her family insist must be an accident. Only the country doctor agrees with Caroline that an investigation is warranted. Meanwhile, the killer appears to be leaving clues in the nursery as to the identity of the next victim. All this takes place in a classic locked-room setting, where torrential rains flood the Fens and prevent anyone within the house party or on the staff from leaving the estate. Catherine Lloyd weaves a gripping tale that pits a vividly imagined and complex set of characters against one another and the elements. If you’re a fan of historical mysteries, you won’t be able to put this one down. Catherine Lloyd is the author of eight Kurland St. Mary mysteries, set in Regency England, and Miss Morton and the English House Party Murder (Kensington, 2022). C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Songs by Honeybird, Peter McDade (Wampus Multimedia 2022) tells the story of Ben and Nina, two people who meet at a college outside of Atlanta. The chapters alternate between the voices of Ben and Nina, how they met and became a couple before unravelling and slowly moving on with their lives. Ben’s story focuses on his life as a graduate student and the research he does into a possible dissertation about an integrated band from the late 1960’s before two of its members died in a fire. Nina’s story involves her quest for meaning, philosophical discussions with her talking dog who is possibly an incarnation of the Buddha and facing the untimely death of her father when she was too young to understand. The author, a talented, working musician, wrote and recorded a soundtrack of original songs to accompany the novel. In addition to being about fathers, race, growing up, relationship, and understanding one’s history, this is a novel about seeking the truth. As a drummer (who started playing at eight-years-old) for the rock band Uncle Green, Peter McDade spent fifteen years traveling the highways of America in a series of Ford vans. While the band searched for fame and a safe place to eat before a gig, he began writing short stories and novels. Uncle Green went into semi-retirement after four labels, seven records, and one name change; Peter went to Georgia State University and majored in History and English, eventually earning an MA in History. His first novel, Weight of Sound, was published in the fall of 2017, and like Songs by Honeybird, has an accompanying soundtrack of original songs created with help from friends in the music world. He teaches history to college undergrads in Atlanta, plays drums for Paul Melançon & the New Insecurities, and spends time writing, making music, and with his family, trying to understand how to raise teenage girls. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cheryl Collins Isaac speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Spin,” which appears in The Common’s new spring issue. “Spin” is about two Liberian immigrants making a new life in Appalachia. In this conversation, Cheryl talks about the inspiration behind this story: writing from music and toward beautiful, sensual language. She also discusses Liberia’s interesting cultural history, her writing and revision process, and what it’s like to do a writing residency in Edith Wharton’s bedroom. Cheryl Collins Isaac immigrated to the United States in 1996 from Liberia, West Africa. She is a 2022 Edith Wharton Straw Dog Writer-in-Residence and the recipient of the 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship at MacDowell. She has had fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Ocean State Review, Hawai`i Pacific Review, South Writ Large, Prime Number Magazine, and more. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Tampa. Read Cheryl’s story “Spin” in The Common at thecommononline.org/spin. Follow Cheryl on Twitter at @CherylCIsaac. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Cassandra Rose Clarke about her book The Beholden (Erewhon Books, 2022). Two impoverished sisters, one with magical gifts and one with ladylike manners and pretty dresses, brave the wilds of the jungle to find the River Goddess and compel her to grant them a boon. They’re accompanied by a former pirate, Ico, who is hired to protect them. But wishes are never granted for free. Years later, Celestia’s wish has come true. She’s happily married to a renowned former adventurer, Lindon, who had the money to save her family’s planation, and the know-how to make it thrive. Celestia is content with the resumption of her privileged life, and her long-desired pregnancy. Her sister Izara is studying magic at the secret Academy, now that her duty to her sister and the plantation is done. As for Ico, he’s cavorting with a beautiful and lusty Goddess in her ice palace. Life just can’t stay so good. The River Goddess has not forgotten, and now she has a perilous quest she demands of the three. A dark Mage, long presumed gone from this world, is making his presence known. There are disturbing rumors from the far north of corpses that cannot rest but continue to walk as if alive. The alarming news causes the Emperor to command Celestia’s husband, the former adventurer, to join a party to hunt down the Mage and destroy him. The River Goddess has other plans. She wants the Mage brought to her safely. Celestia and her husband Lindon now find themselves on opposite sides, each a pawn of a greater force. Can their marriage survive the struggle? Can Celestia and Izara, two very different people, work together as a team with the unwilling former pirate, Ico? Only the end of the journey will reveal those answers. Cassandra Rose Clarke's novels have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her poetry has placed second in the Rhysling Awards, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appeared in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, and elsewhere. Fun fact: Cassandra Rose does ballet to unwind. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital.Sorrel can take no more and she persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. Daylight Come (Peepal Tree Press, 2020) is a great story, a call to action, and a meditation on love and lost beauty. Diana McCauley has been an environmental activist for many years. Here, she uses her storytelling powers to produce a world that is both unrecognizable and familiar.

Alejandra Bronfman is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies Latin American, Caribbean & U.S. Latino Studies at SUNY, Albany. @alebronf Website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The House of Marvellous Books by Fiona Vigo Marshall (Fairlight Books 2022) describes a publishing house called The House of Marvelous Books that houses an old library in the center of London and hovers on the brink of financial disaster. Told in journal entries over the course of a year by Junior editor Mortimer Blakely-Smith, the publishing house seems to stumble into one disaster after another. The publisher focuses on safety issues, his assistant has cataracts and is nearly blind, and the chief editor is obsessed with finding a famous missing manuscript buried somewhere in the building. Mortimer grapples with his elderly uncle, annoying co-workers, a close friend who is in prison for stealing precious books from libraries all over the world, and hearsay about mysterious Russian buyers. Along the way, he attends fabulous concerts, reads Proust, and works on his own novel, about the patron saint of navigation. Fiona Vigo Marshall was born in London and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her debut novel Find Me Falling, published by Fairlight Books in 2019, was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2020. The House of Marvellous Books is her second novel. Her short stories and poems have been nominated for numerous awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, which she won in 2016 with her short story ‘The Street of Baths’. Her work has appeared in Prospect, Ambit, The Royal Society of Literature Review, Orbis International Literary Journal, and The London Journal of Fiction. When not writing or reading, Fiona enjoys walking, swimming in the sea, and attending to her allotment or garden. She has a lifelong love of classical music. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Fierce Appetites: Loving, Losing and Living to Excess in my Present and in the Writings of the Past (Sandy Cove, 2022), Dr. Elizabeth Boyle weaves together the past and the present together, creating a beautiful memoir and reflection. To quote the book blurb, “Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedeviled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion, and occasional dark humour.” This book is for academics and non-academics alike and for those interested in musings on the Middle Ages, a multifaceted life, and the events of 2020. Fierce Appetites was published by Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Books, in 2022. Dr. Elizabeth Boyle is a lecturer in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University and former Head of the Department. She is the author of numerous works, including the History and Salvation in Medieval Ireland (Routledge, 2021) which was featured on a previous New Books in Irish Studies podcast. Dr. Danica Ramsey-Brimberg is a multidisciplinary researcher, who recently graduated with her PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is an editorial assistant for the Church Archaeology journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1977, Jeanne’s German nationalist ex-husband, Klaus, tells her he’s gotten a new job and wants to take their three-year-old daughter and six-year-old son away for a long weekend to celebrate. Jeanne relents. But Klaus never returns and instead sends Jeanne a letter, delivered by a mutual friend, in which he declares that he has fled to Germany and she will never see him, or her children, again. The next four months are filled with agony, despair, and anger as Jeanne seeks legal support but quickly learns that federal parental kidnapping laws will offer her little help. She reflects on her tumultuous ten-year marriage to Klaus and the unsettling events that followed their divorce. A product of the patriarchal culture of the 1950s, Jeanne’s nice-girl mentality is being tested and reshaped by the feminist movement of the 1970s, and she finds that the kidnapping ultimately becomes a doorway to unexpected strength. You'll Never Find Us: A Memoir (She Writes Press, 2021) is the story of a young mother coming into her own power, regardless of past mistakes, bad judgment, and fears; the story of a woman who realizes she must tap into her newfound resilience and courage to find her stolen children—and steal them back. Jeannette Cockroft is an associate professor of history and political science at Schreiner University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This intricate, yearning work from award-winning poet Alison Calder asks us to think about the way we perceive and the ways in which we seek to know ourselves and others. In Synaptic (University of Regina Press, 2022) each section explores key themes in science, neurology, and perception. The first, Connectomics, riffs on scientific language to work with and against that language’s intentions. Attempting to map the brain’s neural connections, it raises fundamental questions about interiority and the self. The lyric considerations in these poems are juxtaposed against the scientific-like footnotes which, in turn, invoke questions undermining authority and power. The second section, Other Disasters, explores ways of seeing or and being seen, from considerations of folklore to modern art to daily life. Sine Yaganoglu trained as a neuroscientist and bioengineer (PhD, ETH Zurich). She currently works in innovation management and diagnostics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Three members of a loving Minnesota family have a voice in Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s new thought-provoking novel-in-stories, Geographies of the Heart (Fomite 2022). Sarah, the eldest daughter, Al, Sarah’s husband, and Glennie, Sarah’s younger sister take turns telling their story. The book begins with Sarah and Al’s courtship, their relationships with Sarah’s aging grandparents, their courtship trials, and their dream of being parents. There are moving chapters about Sarah and Glennie’s grandfather, his army buddies, his slow decline, and chapters about the family quilt, the aunt who disappeared, Sarah’s relationship with her grandmother. There are also heartbreaking chapters describing Sarah’s painful relationship with Glennie, her sister, whose dream of going to medical school and later career as an OB/GYN are all-consuming. Sarah is constantly disappointed by Glennie’s absence, until one day, everything changes. Everyone grows in one way or another throughout the course of this novel, which is ultimately about remembering and respecting the past, initiating or accepting forgiveness, and showing up for those we love. Caitlin Hamilton Summie earned an MFA with Distinction from Colorado State University, and her short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Wisconsin Review, Puerto del Sol, JMWW, Mud Season Review, Belmont Story Review, Hypertext Magazine, and more. Her story collection, TO LAY TO REST OUR GHOSTS, won the fourth annual Phillip H. McMath Book Award, Silver in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, and was a Pulpwood Queen Book Club Bonus Book. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART, her debut novel, was inspired by three stories in her story collection. She spent many years in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Colorado before settling with her family in Knoxville, Tennessee. She co-owns the book marketing firm, Caitlin Hamilton Marketing & Publicity, founded in 2003. When she’s not writing or marketing books, Caitlin loves pending time with her family, including their Aussiedoodle. She also loves reading, movies, and taking walks. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nathan Jordan Poole speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Idlewild,” which appears in The Common’s new spring issue. In this conversation, Nathan talks about doing seasonal work at Christmas tree farms, the workers from all walks of life he met there, and how those experiences and those people helped to inspire this story. He also discusses his writing and revision process, his story collections and future projects, and why he chooses to write unromantically about rural life. Nathan Jordan Poole is the author of two books of fiction: Father Brother Keeper, a collection of stories selected by Edith Pearlman for the Mary McCarthy Prize, and Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost, selected by Benjamin Percy as the winner of the Quarterly West Novella Contest. He is a recipient of the Narrative Prize, a Milton Fellowship at Seattle Pacific University, a Joan Beebe Fellowship at Warren Wilson College, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at Sewanee School of Letters, and a North Carolina Artist Fellowship. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Blue Ridge, South Carolina. Read Nathan’s story “Idlewild” in The Common at thecommononline.org/idlewild. In this conversation, Nathan recommends The Art of Subtext by Charles Baxter, available here from Graywolf Press. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Drawing inspiration from the life of Harriet Tubman, Cynthia Parker-Ohene's poetic narratives follow a historical arc of consciousness of Black folks: mislaid in potters' fields and catalogued with other misbegotten souls, now unsettled as the unknown Black denominator. Who loved them? Who turned them away? Who dismembered their souls? In death, they are the institutionalized marked Black bodies assigned to parcels, scourged beneath plastic sheets identified as a number among Harriets as black, marked bodies. These poems speak to how the warehousing of enslaved and somewhat free beings belies their humanity through past performances in reformatories, workhouses, and hospitals for the negro insane. To whom did their Black lives belong? How are Black grrls socialized within the family to be out in the world? What is the beingness of Black women? How have the Harriets--the descended daughters of Harriet Tubman--confronted issues of caste and multiple oppressions? The poems in Daughters of Harriet: Poems (UP of Colorado, 2022) give voice to the unspeakable, the unreachable, the multiple Black selves waiting to become. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lea Roback was a feminist and labor activist who was raised in a large Jewish family in Quebec, Canada. In the novel Lea (Linda Leith Publishing, 2022), Ariela Freedman describes a strong, vibrant woman whose life spanned the 20th century. Lea Roback spoke four languages, and wherever she was in the world, she fought for workers’ rights, votes for women, access to contraception and abortion, pay equity, social housing and free education. She was often in the center of world history—in Berlin during the rise of Nazism and Moscow during Stalin’s reign of terror. She was intelligent, passionate about equality, and ultimately worked in factories as a union organizer. The real Lea is remembered by the work of the Lea Roback Foundation, which offers scholarships to women, the Lea Roback Research Centre, which focuses on inequality and public health; and the Maison Parent-Roback, which links community organizations that advance women's rights and social justice causes. Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia's Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her family. Her debut novel, Arabic for Beginners (LLP, 2017), was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and won the 2018 J. I. Segal Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, A Joy to be Hidden (LLP, 2019), was shortlisted for the Segal Prize in 2020, and was a finalist for the The Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. When she isn’t reading, writing or teaching, Freedman loves riding her bike, hiking in the countryside, and wandering through the city. For the last two years, she has deeply missed travelling. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, co-translators Suhyun J. Ahn and Archana Madhavan discuss their Korean-to-English translation of Glory Hole by Kim Hyun (Seagull Books, 2022). Released as part of The Pride List from The University of Chicago Press, Glory Hole is a fantastical collection of queer poems that are uncomfortable, bodily, fluid-filled, and delightfully puzzling to read. Across fifty-one bewildering poems, Kim both engages and confuses readers with puns, distorted retellings of American popular culture, dystopian landscapes, robots, and more, all to a relentlessly queer backdrop of longing and sexual desire. Tune in to hear Suhyun and Archana read some of their favorite translations from this collection, talk about their own journeys to translation and translating Glory Hole, and share the challenges and joys of bringing this work into the English language: the Korean wordplay that they reimagine in English; their collaborative process of making sense of these poems in both Korean and English; some favorite (and most frustrating) parts of the translation process, and more! Suhyun J. Ahn is a Korean-English translator who is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Studies at Princeton University. Archana Madhavan is a Korean-English translator who works a day job in tech. Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Set against the backdrop of coal-rich, hard-scrabble West Virginia and "civilized," segregated Virginia, W. Jeff Barnes' Mingo (Little Star, 2021) reveals the deep divide between corporate might and those seeking a fair wage for an honest day's work. The novel plumbs the depths of brotherly love, betrayal, and the power of reconciliation amidst the deadly struggle to unionize America's coalfields. The Matney brothers are tragically fated to divergent paths: fourteen-year-old Bascom to the coal mines with his father, and younger Durwood to the care of distant family in far-off Richmond. Shaped by circumstances and time, the brothers form deeply held, conflicting beliefs about the world and their places in it. Bascom is resolved to a life underground but dreams of escape and a reunion with his brother; Durwood thrives in a life cushioned by wealth but disciplined by the promise of returning home as soon as things "settle down." Things rapidly unsettle in Mingo. The Matney brothers find themselves separated by more than the Appalachian Mountains when Mother Jones, "the most dangerous woman in America," begins stirring up the coalfields with ideas about the collective good. They become embattled in the West Virginia Coal Wars and the largest armed uprising since the Civil War, setting coal miners and their families against the notorious Baldwin-Felts detectives, pitting brother against brother. Thoughtfully researched, beautifully written, and culminating in the historic Battle of Blair Mountain in the summer of 1921, Mingo delivers unforgettable characters while exploring themes of class struggle and racial division that continue to roil America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Few writers are as qualified to set their book in a circus as Khan Wong, who has not only performed in a circus but is an internationally recognized hula hoop virtuoso. While Wong’s descriptions of acrobats, clowns and fortunetellers are grounded in real life, the pleasure moon that is the setting of his debut novel, The Circus Infinite (Angry Robot, 2022) arises entirely from his formidable imagination. Persephone-9 is a Las Vegas-like destination for members of the 9-Star Congress of Conscious Worlds, an alliance of nine species that includes humans. Into this diverse and raucous setting comes Jes, a young man with the unique power to manipulate gravity. A self-described asexual panromantic, Jes is on the run from a sadistic researcher who has tortured him in the name of science. And yet just as Jes starts to find love and acceptance in the circus, he confronts a new nemesis: a blackmailing crime boss who seeks to exploit his psionic abilities. Writing an asexual character “was liberating,” Wong says. “I myself have come to realize my own identity as being on the asexual spectrum later in life. When I was younger, I didn't have the vocabulary. And certainly there was no Internet to find community about it growing up. ... But I always found myself kind of uncomfortable in hypersexualized spaces and never really understood why.” “Also, I was fascinated by the idea of an asexual empath in a hypersexualized location like a pleasure moon. A lot of people are there to party and to get laid and to indulge their kinks and whatever. The book doesn't go super into explicit detail on that front—it's not erotica. But I was fascinated by a character who had empathic abilities, who could sense these feelings from other people but didn't really experience them naturally himself.” As an internationally known hula hoop teacher and performer, Khan Wong has toured with a circus, taught workshops all over the world, and produced circus arts shows in San Francisco. He’s worked in the nonprofit arts for many years, most recently as an arts funder for a public sector grantmaking agency. The Circus Infinite is his first novel. Rob Wolf is a writer and co-host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rajiv Mohabir is a dazzling poet of linguistics crossovers, who works in English, Bhojpuri, Hindi and more. He is as prolific as he is polyglot (three books in 2021!) and has undertaken a remarkable array of projects includes the prizewinning resurrection of a forgotten century-old memoir about mass involuntary migration. He joined John and first-time host Ulka Anjaria (English prof, Bollywood expert and Director of the Brandeis Mandel Center for the Humanities) in the old purple RtB studio. During the conversation, Rajiv read and in one case sang poems from his wonderful recent books, Cutlish and Antiman. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about:

How the Common got started

What is involved in running a literary journal

Why grants and institutional support matter so much in the literary arts

The importance of finding mentors and building a network

How the Common creates community

Our guest is: Jennifer Acker , who is the founder and editor in chief of The Common, and author of the debut novel The Limits of the World, a fiction honoree for the Massachusetts Book Award. Her memoir “Fatigue” is a #1 Amazon bestseller, and her short stories, essays, translations, and reviews have appeared in Oprah Daily, Washington Post, Literary Hub, n+1, and The Yale Review, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches writing and editing at Amherst College, where she directs the Literary Publishing Internship and LitFest. She lives in western Massachusetts with her husband. Our guest is: Elizabeth Witte, who is a writer and editor based in western Massachusetts. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council's Artist Fellowships in Poetry and author of the chapbook, Dry Eye (Dancing Girl Press); her work appears in a variety of journals, including Prelude, Word For/ Word, and Denver Quarterly. She is Associate Editor of The Common and directs the journal's education program The Common in the Classroom. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator and co-producer of the Academic Life. She is a historian of women and gender. Listeners to this episode might also be interested in:

Fatigue, by Jennifer Acker

Amherst College

The Bennington Writing Seminars https://www.bennington.edu/writing-seminars

The Common

More about the Common in the Classroom can be found here The Common in the Classroom,

The Common Young Writers Program

A podcast from The Common magazine on The New Books Network “This is the Place”

Amherst College LitFest

The Whiting Literary Magazine Prize

Learn more about The Alternative Press conversation with co-founder Ken Mikolowski (courtesy of Centre For Print Research, UWE Bristol); and the Press’s Multiple Originals project

The Poetry Foundation

You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood has created a swiftly mutating story about a woman who is either a loving mother, a famous artist, or a teacher. Constellations of Eve (Texas Tech University Press 2022) portrays deviations from an initial story that revolves around Eve, Pari, Liam, and a child named Blue. Eve meets Liam, a tall, gentle man who is either philandering husband, a kind partner, or a scheming benefactor. Eve’s best friend is Pari, who is either her best friend and college roommate, a stunning model, or mentally fragile and suicidal. Eve loves, obsesses over Pari, or encourages her to hang herself. Liam is good or not, loving or not, solid, or not. We don’t know if Eve is kind-hearted or crazy, loving or obsessive. We watch these three people weaving around each other, and the child, Blue, has something to say in each iteration of Eve’s life. Eve needs to figure out which part of herself is going to dominate, and who or what is going to control her destiny – will it be love, motherhood, or art? Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood is a Vietnamese and American author who earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. After having spent 20 years in the U.S, she is now a reverse immigrant living in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Her short fiction and essays can be found at TIME Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Salon, Cosmopolitan, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Catapult, Pen America, BOMB, among others. In 2019, her hybrid writing was featured in a multimedia art and poetry exhibit at Eccles Gallery. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Short Story 2020. Her debut novel If I Had Two Lives won first place in the Writers Workshop of Asheville Literary Fiction contest. Excerpts from Constellations of Eve were finalists in the 49th New Millennium Writing Award, and the Sunspot Culmination Award. She currently serves on the graduating thesis committee at Columbia University. She is the founder of Neon Door, an immersive literary exhibit. When she isn’t reading or writing, Abbigail spends time with her pets, listens to crime podcasts, lifts weights, and enjoys unstructured free days when she can binge watch reality TV with her husband. She also loves a good snowstorm and staring into a burning fire. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jason Redmond, a US Civil War surgeon, never expected to step into his father’s shoes as the heir to an English earldom. When he first shows up to claim his inheritance, with a scrawny twelve-year-old former drummer as his ward, Jason plans to inspect the property, then return to his home in New York. But the discovery of an obviously murdered body in the local church first casts suspicion on Jason, then involves him—in performing the postmortem and helping the parish constable, Daniel Haze, solve the crime. By the end, Jason has decided to stay in England for a while. Six books and as many cases later, Haze has moved to London for reasons explained in Murder at Ardith Hall. When the corpse of Blake Upton, a renowned Egyptologist, shows up on a ship in the London Docks, it seems only natural that Daniel should involve his friend Jason in finding out who among the potential suspects had the means, motive, and opportunity to dispatch the Egyptologist to his eternal rest in the arms of Osiris. And in this variation on a locked-room mystery—the archaeologist must have been killed just before the Sea Witch docked—a surprising number of passengers and crew have something to gain from Upton’s murder. Moreover, the grisly means used to kill Upton points to someone familiar with ancient Egyptian funerary customs. Jason and Daniel have their work cut out for them if they are to find the culprit before the impatient head of Scotland Yard decides that Daniel’s first case as an inspector will also be his last. Irina Shapiro has a gift for tricky but ultimately satisfying plots and for delving into her characters’ inner lives. Jason and Daniel have come a long way since their first appearance in Murder in the Crypt a few years ago, but let’s hope they have many adventures yet to come. Irina Shapiro is the author of five series that explore romance, time travel, psychic insights into the past, and historical mysteries. Murder on the Sea Witch is her latest novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Augusta is a meek museum curator trapped in a dead-end job and relationship, when an employment offer to become the collections manager at Harlowe House changes her life. With new friends and new responsibilities, as well as a new handsome coworker, Augusta is drawn to investigate the life of Margaret Harlowe. Margaret’s portrait at Harlowe House radiates vivaciousness and warmth, but the historic records barely mention her. Soon, Augusta is obsessed by the secret life story of the mysterious young woman she feels connected to. Was Margaret just a woman unjustly ostracized by Victorian society for her wild nature and her love of herbs, or is she a more dangerous presence? For although Margaret died more than a hundred years ago, her spirit is still very present, and her voice active. A ghost story with a strong romantic element, A Lullaby for Witches (Graydon House Books, 2022) features a tender love story as well as some thrills and chills. Bio: Hester Fox is a full-time writer and mother, with a background in museum work and historical archaeology. She is the author of The Witch of Willow Hall and The Widow of Pale Harbor, as well as Lullaby for Witches. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The first poem in Sean Singers’ new collection of poetry, Today in the Taxi, published by Tupelo Press, begins with, “Today in the taxi, I brought a man from midtown to someplace in Astoria near the airport.” From that ordinary beginning, the poems explore the many features of New York City--its people, its streets, its highways, and its neighborhoods--all delivered through the impressions of an Uber driver. Like Walt Whitman, whose poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” turned a short boat ride into a meditation on life, death and eternity, Sean’s poetry starts in everyday experiences and grasps large realms of significance. Sean, now a former Uber driver, holds an MFA from Washington University in Saint Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of two other books of poetry: Discography, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and the Norma Faber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Honey and Smoke---which the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa said was “made of life’s raw lyrical energy, where jazz becomes a spiritual compass.” Sean now works helping people write poetry and academic prose at seansingerpoetry.com. Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, where he served on Sean’s dissertation committee. He is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell, paperback, 2019) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia, 2019). He can be reached at rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jean-Luc Guéry is a man down on his luck. Middling journalist, gambling addict, alcoholic. Yet when news of his brother’s murder in Saigon reach him in France, Guéry drops everything and travels to French Vietnam to investigate. Guéry is not the kind of main character you’d think would star in a detective novel like Bede Scott’s Too Far From Antibes (Penguin Random House, 2022)—something that many other characters in Bede’s novel remark on several occasions. Yet Scott drives Guéry through a murky plot of corruption and colonialism in a tense Saigon near the end of French colonialism. Bede Scott is Associate Professor of World Literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has been teaching in Singapore since 2006, when he completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Scott is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2019). Today, Bede and I talk about his novel, the setting of colonial-era Vietnam—and how Bede’s character and plot try to deconstruct some of the standard tropes of the detective novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Too Far From Antibes. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On this episode of New Books in Performing Arts, we talk with Andy Bragen about two plays of his published in a new volume by Northwestern University Press: This is My Office and Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays center on grief: Bragen's process of grieving his father in This is My Office and the slow, painful process of his mother's death in Notes on My Mother's Decline. Both plays are bravely emotionally bare yet unsentimental. They situate death and dying in a long continuum that both predates and antedates the individual person. In this way, both plays are as much about family, history, and family history as much as they are about the moment of death. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.” We’ve all heard this phrase, or some version of it, but not all of us know who uttered it. It was the singular Amadou Hampâté Bâ. By the end of his long life, Bâ, the ethnographer, author, interpreter, religious teacher, poet, philosopher and ambassador had himself become one of Africa’s most famous “elders”, and, to borrow his phrase, one of the continent’s most expansive “libraries”. Amkoullel, the Fula Boy (Duke University Press, 2021) is the first volume of Hampâté Bâ’s memoirs, covering the earliest years of his life. Amkoullel, the Fula Boy was awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire d’Afrique Noire in 1991. It has just been translated into English by Jeanne Garane with a new foreword by Ralph Austen. Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at www.elisaprosperetti.net. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Live Caught (Black Lawrence Press 2022) by R. Cathey Daniels, we meet Lenny after he’s stolen money and a skiff in an attempt to escape his abusive older brothers and ride the rivers until reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Lenny is fourteen, and his family farm in western North Carolina has become a nightmare – he’s already lost an arm and isn’t sure which of his brothers’ experiments is going to kill him. But he doesn’t get very far when his boat and all the money he’s stolen sink in a huge storm. If not for a crazy old priest who pulls him out from under a log, he’d be dead. Now the priest provides Lenny with a home and work. Lenny makes friends, especially with a stoner who seems to be drugging his own baby daughter. It soon becomes clear that the priest is running an illegal drug operation to provide for the poor people in his struggling parish. And a crooked local cop wants to collect a tax on the illegal drugs. Just like at home, Lenny’s not sure he’s going to survive. R. Cathey Daniels grew up in the mountains of Western North Carolina, attended Breward College and graduated from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill with a master’s degree in education. She is a 2016 graduate of the Stanford University Novel Writing Program. She was a semi-finalist in the North Carolina Writers’ Network Doris Betts Fiction Prize in 2021, a semi-finalist for the 2020 University of New Orleans Press Novel Contest, and won first prize in the 2018 Retreat West First Chapter Competition. When Daniels isn’t writing, she can be found in her garden, hiking, or shooting hoops with her grandchildren in her backyard in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese. Chi Ta-wei weaves dystopian tropes—heirloom animals, radiation-proof combat drones, sinister surveillance technologies—into a sensitive portrait of one young woman’s quest for self-understanding. Predicting everything from fitness tracking to social media saturation, this visionary and sublime novel stands out for its queer and trans themes. The Membranes reveals the diversity and originality of contemporary speculative fiction in Chinese, exploring gender and sexuality, technological domination, and regimes of capital, all while applying an unflinching self-reflexivity to the reader’s own role. Ari Larissa Heinrich’s translation brings Chi’s hybrid punk sensibility to all readers interested in books that test the limits of where speculative fiction can go. Chi Ta-wei is a renowned writer and scholar from Taiwan. Chi’s scholarly work focuses on LGBT studies, disability studies, and Sinophone literary history, while his award-winning creative writing ranges from science fiction to queer short stories. He is an associate professor of Taiwanese literature at the National Chengchi University. Ari Larissa Heinrich is a professor of Chinese literature and media at the Australian National University. They are the author of Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body (2018) and other books, and the translator of Qiu Miaojin’s novel Last Words from Montmartre (2014).

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Finally, the first of Norton’s long-awaited treatments of Ernest Hemingway, the American who, more than anyone, changed the look and sound of modern American prose. Academic rigor and impeccable attention to detail are the hallmarks of the Norton Critical Edition, and this volume on The Sun Also Rises is no exception. In addition to the usual suspects of contemporary reviews and early criticism, this volume draws on an exceptional pool of resources and ancillary material to tell this novel’s story: biographical excerpts from the likes of Sylvia Beach and Harold Loeb, original expurgated text, epistolary exchanges with Max Perkins and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and hefty segments on expatriation, the bullfights, and Hemingway’s own literary influences. Add to this a generous sampling of new, exceptional criticism that speaks to a modern audience about issues of gender and sexuality and about race, and a wonderful, spirited introduction, and this critical edition edited by Michael Thurston becomes the definitive edition of Hemingway’s star-making novel and a necessary comprehensive guide for both teachers and students.” --Marc Dudley, North Carolina State University. William Domnarski is a longtime lawyer who before and during has been a literary guy, with a Ph.D. in English. He's written five books on judges, lawyers, and courts, two with Oxford, one with Illinois, one with Michigan, and one with the American Bar Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Romeo Oriogun speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “The Sea Dreams of Us,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Romeo talks about his life as a poet in exile from Nigeria, and how that experience of exile appears in his poetry. He also discusses his writing process, the themes he often returns to in his work, and how growing up in Nigeria affects his use of language in poetry. Romeo Oriogun is the author of the 2020 poetry collection Sacrament of Bodies. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, he has received fellowships and support from the Ebedi International Writers Residency, Harvard University, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, the Oregon Institute for Creative Research, and the IIE Artist Protection Fund. An alum of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Ames, where he is a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State University. Read Romeo’s poetry in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/romeo-oriogun. Hear more from Romeo in this interview with Arrowsmith Press on YouTube. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this rebroadcast, John and Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (an occasional host and perennial friend of Recall this Book) speak with Madeline Miller, author of the critically acclaimed bestseller Circe. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sista, Stanap Strong!: A Vanuatu Women's Anthology (Te Herenaa Waka UP, 2021) is an anthology of new writing from Vanuatu by three generations of women—and the first of its kind. With poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, and song, its narrative arc stretches from the days of blackbirding to Independence in 1980 to Vanuatu's coming of age in 2020. Most of these writers are ni-Vanuatu living in Vanuatu. Some have set down roots in New Zealand, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Canada. Some were born overseas and have made Vanuatu their home. One is just twenty; another is an octogenarian. The writers in this anthology have chosen to harness the coloniser’s language, English, for their own purposes. They are writing against racism, colonialism, misogyny, and sexism. Writing across bloodlines and linguistic boundaries. Professing their love for ancestors, offspring, and language— Bislama, vernacular, and English. What these writers also have in common is a sharp eye for detail, a love of words, a deep connection to Vanuatu, and a willingness to share a glimpse of their world. Includes a foreword by Viran Molisa Trief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Farzana Doctor is a Toronto-based author, activist and a psychotherapist. She has written four critically acclaimed novels. Her latest, Seven, which Ms. Magazine described as “fully feminist and ambitiously bold”, was chosen for multiple 2020 Best Book lists and shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her poetry collection, You Still Look The Same (Freehand Books), will be released in May 2022 with an audiobook following soon after. Farzana is also the Maasi behind Dear Maasi, a new sex and relationships column for FGM/C survivors. In this interview, Doctor discusses her process and craft in the context of her personal journey and her work as a psychotherapist. She shares some poetry from her new collection and discusses the power of storytelling when it comes to reckoning with the past, healing, and moving forward. Her work is both deeply personal and incredibly resonant for all of us living in these challenging times. Find our more about Ms. Doctor at https://farzanadoctor.com/. Jori Krulder is an English teacher in rural Northern California where she writes frequently about engaging students in the study of what it means to be human - literature. She can be found sharing lessons and ideas with the brilliant, generous community of writers and educators on Twitter at @jorikrulder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This episode is part of a series of recordings I do with artists and scholars from Israel and Palestine. To allow people from the conflict to make their voices heard. Today I interview Sigal Naor Perelman, who is a literary scholar, editor, founder, and co-director of the Derech Ruach organization to promote the humanities in Israel. Sigal has published two research books on Natan Zach and Noah Stern. Her first volume of poetry, Machluta, was published in 2020. Sigal's poetry book, Machluta (Mixture in Arabic), deals with daily life in Haifa, a city that contains Jews and Arabs together. The dilemmas of a mother whose child has to enlist in military service, about love and sexuality, and more. Sigal's poetry does not allow us to ignore the nuances of life and allows us, readers and listeners, to meet them face to face. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Lamps of Albarracin tells the story of Sarita, who looks back on her life before and after the Inquisition arrived in her town. It’s 15th century Spain, and Sarita is the daughter and assistant of the town’s Jewish doctor. She recalls living in a warm, loving household with her sisters and brother and Torah lessons taught by Solomon the Aged. She was raised with several languages and always looking forward to the next holiday. In the kingdom of Aragon, Albarracin was a town in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews still lived mostly in harmony, although the winds of change have started blowing across the Iberian Peninsula. We watch Sarita grow up – she’s skilled with healing, which helps her survive the punishment she receives from the Spanish Inquisition. She hadn’t known that she’d been baptized at birth. Rooted in Judaism, Sarita finds ways to live as her true self even when confined to a convent or masquerading as Muslim to escape the Inquisition. Edith Scott Saavedra was born in California to an American father and a mother from the Republic of Panama. She earned her B.A. (magna cum laude) and J.D. from Harvard University and has had a distinguished career as an international lawyer, business consultant, and author, based in Hong Kong and Singapore. She is the co-author of several leading nonfiction works on the competitiveness of industries, regions and nations. She’s currently focused on educating the public in the United States and Spain, particularly students, about Sephardic heritage and history, including true stories of resistance to the Inquisition, the contributions of the Sephardim to Spain, and the importance of interfaith friendship. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Secretly his unconscious body, still flickering with life, is spirited away by to an island monastery in the Venetian lagoon where he recovers his health and joie de vivre. From there he begins a series of adventures that include Auguste Rodin, a romance with an English aristocrat, a new lover, a session with Sigmund Freud, and an heroic death. I spoke with novelist Ardythe Ashley about her meticulously researched historical novel that breathes new life into a writer who continues to charm and fascinate readers and audiences to this day. Ardythe Ashley is the author of The Return of the Century: The Death and Further Adventures of Oscar Wilde. While doing research for the novel, she found herself in the Library of the British Museum reading the letters Oscar Wilde wrote in his dank cell in Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie), later published as De Profundis. “I’m sorry, Madam,” came the firm-but-not-unkind voice of a white-gloved librarian, “but it is not permitted to weep upon the manuscripts.” In addition to being a writer, Ashley is a retired psychoanalyst. A retired psychoanalyst, Ashley is also the author of the novels The Christ of the Butterflies and In The Country of the Great King. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In A Vertical Art: On Poetry (Princeton UP, 2022), acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets. Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine. The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects—and tallies—the poet’s predilection for similes. He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry. An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Colm Tóibín, the new laureate for Irish fiction, talks to Joseph Rezek of Boston University, and guest host Tara K. Menon of Harvard. The conversation begins with Colm’s latest novel The Magician, about the life of Thomas Mann, and whether we can or should think of novelists as magicians and then moves swiftly from one big question to the next. What are the limitations of the novel as a genre? Would Colm ever be interested in a writing a novel about an openly gay novelist? Why and how does death figure in Colm’s fiction? Each of Colm’s revealing, often deeply personal answers illuminates how both novels and novelists work. As Thoman Mann wrote of the “grubby business” of writing novels, Colm reminds us of the “day to day dullness of novel writing.” Insight and inspiration only arrive, he warns, after long, hard days of work. Mentioned in this episode: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Daniel Defoe Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry James The Wings of the Dove(1902), Henry James The Ambassadors (1903), Henry James The Golden Bowl(1904), Henry James The Blackwater Lightship(1999), Colm Tóibín The Master (2004), Colm Tóibín Brooklyn(2009), Colm Tóibín The Testament of Mary(2012), Colm Tóibín Nora Webster(2015), Colm Tóibín The Magician(2021), Colm Tóibín Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Pride and Prejudice

The Golden Bowl (Penguin Classics)

From the years leading up to and into the French Revolution, we move forward in time to 1926. In Danger on the Atlantic (Kensington Publishing, 2022), Jane Wunderly, who left her home in the United States earlier in the year on a journey that took her first to Cairo, then to the English countryside, is heading back home in the company of Redvers, the enigmatic businessman she first met in Egypt. In fact, she is posing as Redvers’ wife—or should we say, he is posing as her husband, because they go by the name of Mr. and Mrs Wunderly—even though Jane has decidedly ambivalent views of matrimony, the result of bad experiences in her past. Despite her doubts, Jane enjoys being included in Redvers’ current mission: to identify a spy reported to be traveling on the Olympic, the magnificent sister ship of the Titanic. The settings are luxurious, the gig comes with magnificent clothes supplied by Redvers’ employer, and the biggest threat to Jane’s peace at first appears to be Miss Eloise Baumann, a loudmouthed New Yorker who dominates every conversation. But the ship has barely left port when Jane encounters an heiress who claims to have lost her husband—on board the Olympic, in the middle of the Atlantic. No one else wants to help, and even Redvers tells Jane to keep out of it and concentrate on the spy. But Jane is determined to solve both mysteries, and soon she has to wonder whether every trip to the deck will end with someone pitching her overboard Erica Ruth Neubauer mixes a gift for creating complex and engaging mysteries with a delightful sense of humor. To avoid spoilers, I recommend starting with Murder at the Mena House and reading forward, but all three of these novels are well worth your time. She is the author of three mystery novels set in 1926 and featuring the American widow Jane Wunderly, the most recent of which is Danger on the Atlantic. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

For better or worse, artists write. But why would a visual artist write a novel? How should such a novel be experienced? How does the artist’s novel compare or compete with literary fiction as we know it? David Maroto, the author of The Artist's Novel: A New Medium (Mousse Publishing, 2020) considers the proliferation of artists writing novels as a sign of the emergence of a new medium. Artists engaging in this new medium do so in order to address artistic issues by means of novelistic devices, favouring a sort of art predicated on process and subjectivity, introducing notions such as fiction, narrative, and imagination. Maroto’s work is the first to explore the subject of the artist’s novel in depth. David Maroto speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the artist’s novel and the demands it makes on its readers and, as he found out through his own practice, on its curators and publishers. David reads from Benjamin Seror's Mime Radio and voices the mythical satyr Marsyas but, sadly, stops short of singing. David Maroto is a visual artist, researcher, writer, and curator based in Rotterdam.

David Maroto’s first novel Illusion

The Book Lovers, a project by David Maroto and Joanna Zielinska

Benjamin Seror’s Mime Radio

Goldin+Senneby‘s Headless

Ale Cecchetti’s exhibition at Ujazdowski Castle

Alex Cecchetti’s novel Tamam Shud

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Elizabeth and John talk about fantasy's power of world-making with Edinburgh professor Anna Vaninskaya, author of William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914 ( 2010) and Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien ( 2020). Anna uncovers the melancholy sense of displacement and loss running through Tolkien, and links his notion of "subcreation" to an often concealed theological vision. Not allegory but "application" is praised as a way of reading fantasy. John asks about hopeful visions of the radical politics of fantasy (Le Guin, but also Graeber and Wengrow's recent work); Elizabeth stresses that fantasy's appeal is at once childish and childlike. E. Nesbit surfaces, as she tends to in RtB conversations. The question of film TV and other visual modes comes up: is textual fantasy on the way out? Mentioned in the Episode:

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything.

In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" Ursula Le Guin perhaps surprisingly praises the otherworldly prose style of Anna's beloved E. R. Eddison, best known for The Worm Ouroboros (1922)

J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories"

E. Nesbit The Phoenix and the Carpet

Lord Dunsany, King of Elfland's Daughter

Ursula Le Guin The Books of Earthsea

Recallable Books:

Sylvia Townsend Warner, Kingdoms of Elfin (and read this lovely Ivan Kreilkamp article on her earlier strange great Lolly Willowes)

Lloyd Alexander Chronicles of Prydain

N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Read transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Take an average-to-below-average man, his loyal best friend, a jar of pickles, and some bug sex facts, and what do you have? The answer to that is Stringers, the new novel by Chris Panatier (Angry Robot, April 2022), which is already garnering fantastic reviews. In this riotous, laugh-out-loud science fiction epic, Ben Sullivan has lived a life full of questions relating to the strange facts in his brain and now faces abduction by aliens who want the answers he doesn’t have. It’s part buddy movie, part space adventure, with lots of heart and charm. It’s also ridiculously funny. “I wasn’t thinking about a space comedy even when I first conceived of [STRINGERS],” Chris says. “What I first conceived of was ‘what if someone was born with a bunch of crazy knowledge in their head’. Of course, because of my affinity for potty humour, that went to bugs f***ing themselves in the head, which you’ll find on page 3.” From its stunning cover to the formatting quirks that make it unlike anything you’ve read before—plus, yes, those bug facts—Stringers is sure to delight fans who enjoy Hitchhiker’s Guide and Red Dwarf and who might be in need of a laugh-out-loud escape from reality. Chris Panatier lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and a fluctuating herd of animals resembling dogs (one is almost certainly a goat). He writes short stories and novels, "plays" the drums, and draws album covers for metal bands. Plays himself on twitter @chrisjpanatier. Dan Hanks is the co-host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire and Swashbucklers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire

Swashbucklers

In In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton University Press, 2022), Jeff Deutsch, the director of the Seminary Co-op Bookstores in Chicago, aims to make the case for the value of spaces devoted to books and the value of the time spent browsing their stacks. It is a defense of serious bookstores, but more importantly, it is a paean to the spaces that support them; the experience of readers as they engage with the books, the stacks, and each other; and the particular community created by the presence of such an institution. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a bookseller and his particular experience at Sem Co-op, Deutsch aims, in a series of brief essays, to consider how concepts like space, time, abundance, measure, community, and reverence find expression in a good bookstore, and to show some ways in which the importance of the bookstore is both urgent and enduring. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Get ready for a cruel dark world of abnegation and revenge, featuring a woman who struggles to achieve psychic integration after a succession of betrayals. Like a Westworld written by Edgar Allen Poe, Bone Orchard (Tor Books, 2022) comes with its own charming brothel owner, whose name actually is Charm. Charm’s free will is limited by an implant, and her memory damaged. Her dying lover/captor, the old Emperor, assigns her two final tasks which she must complete to win her freedom. She must punish his poisoner and find a worthy person—not one of his sons—to serve as the next emperor. Charm’s girls at the brothel are also her helpmates. They were grown in vats from assemblages of bones. That doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings, though. Like Charm, they are named after emotions. Pride mostly stands behind the reservation desk, looking cool and composed, while Shame is damaged early on in the game by one of the Emperor’s sons, the cruel Prince Phelan. And Pain—well, she has an especially hard time of it. Her role is to accept the pain of others, leaving them relieved of discomfort. Behind all those linked girls lurks the spirit of a mysterious and gentle woman, the architect of their lives, referred to as the Lady, who shares Charm’s body with her. The Lady must be shielded from the terrible things that happen, but occasionally she comes out of the shadowy recesses of their shared consciousness to mend her creations. This is just the opening set up of this complex and original novel, that continues to introduce flawed conniving characters to create a chessboard of moves and countermoves. A seamstress and horsewoman, Sara A. Mueller writes speculative fiction in the green and rainy Pacific Northwest, where she lives with her family, numerous recipe books, and a forest of fountain pens. In a nomadic youth, she trod the earth of every state but Alaska and lived in six of them. Fun fact: Her family once moved out of a house on the same day they’d moved into it, exactly one year later. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Shola von Reinhold is the author of LOTE, a novel about getting lost in the archives and finding what the archives have lost. LOTE won the 2021 James Tait Black prize so who better to join Shola on Novel Dialogue than Ben Bateman of Edinburgh University, lead judge of the prize committee? This conversation takes listeners back to all yesterday’s parties as Shola, Ben, and Aarthi time travel to the Harlem Renaissance and the interwar modernist era. Shola offers up Richard Bruce Nugent as their current figure of fascination (or “transfixion” to use a key image from LOTE), and wonders what it would have been like to move through Harlem and London by Nugent’s side. Recovering the stories of black writers and artists is essential to Shola’s literary project. It is also inseparable from restoring queerness to the once hyper-masculine and “muscular” paradigm of modernism. In a stirring discussion of the aesthetic forms and moods of historical recovery, Ben and Shola sink into the “purpleness” of the fin-de-siècle and explore the critical power of black sensuousness. Talk of decadence, ornamentality, and frivolity shapes the latter half of this episode, and Doris Payne, the West Virginian jewel thief, emerges as an exquisitely improbable modernist heroine! Mentioned in this episode: -Richard Bruce Nugent -Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward, Porgy -E.M. Forster -David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue -Saidiya Hartman -Benjamin Kahan, The Book of Minor Perverts -James Joyce, Ulysses -Willa Cather, “Paul’s Case” -Ornamentality via Kant, Hegel, and Adolf Loos -Susan Sontag -Doris Payne – a.k.a “Diamond Doris” -Édouard Glissant Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What does it mean to be normal? What even is normal? It’s a strange concept, dependent entirely on context and yet, in spite of this flexibility, it’s an inescapable word. Try as we might, we can’t seem to escape it, even as it seems to collapse under critical scrutiny. So again, what does it mean to be normal? And is normal even something we should try to be? This is an animating question for Phil Christman in his new essay collection How to be Normal: Essays (Belt Publishing, 2022), a collection of previously published writings of the last few years. A sort of companion-piece to his previous book Midwest Futures, these essays are simultaneously fascinated by and skeptical of all the ways normal dominates our public discourse, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic, where a return to normal has loomed over us as the most important achievement we can aim for. Christman tries to get beyond this imperative, and in a series of reflections on masculinity and gender, race and whiteness, religion and faith, culture, irony, love and family he tries get beyond the existential and social imperatives of some presumed normality and think critically about what true flourishing would look like, about the sort of people we’d all actually want to be. Phil Christman teaches writing at the University of Michigan. His first book, Midwest Futures, was a Commonweal Notable Book of 2020, a finalist for a Midwest Independent Book award, and winner of the Independent Publisher Awards' 2020 Bronze Medal for Great Lakes Nonfiction. His writing has appeared in a number of outlets, including The Hedgehog Review, Commonweal, Paste, and Plough Quarterly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Joan Schweighardt about her novel River Aria (Five Directions Press, 2020). It’s 1928 and Estela Euquério Hopper, of Manaus, Brazil, is the star vocal pupil of a world-renowned musician who’d come to revive a magnificent opera house. It had been erected during the heady years when rubber seemed likely to change Brazil’s fortunes. Those days ended, and most of the population is poor and struggling. Estela has grown up among the “river brats,” but she was fortunate to have a magnificent voice, a stellar musical education, and an American father. She’s got a job offer from the Metropolitan Opera House, but it’s only to work in the sewing room. And her cousin JoJo, another river brat and a talented artist, is going to accompany her across the ocean. But secrets threaten to destroy her plans, the heady days of Prohibition are about to come to an end, and the stock market is about to crash. Joan Schweighardt studied English Lit and Philosophy at Suny New Paltz, NY and is the award-winning author of The Accidental Art Thief, The Last Wife of Attila the Hun, Virtual Silence, and other novels. Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead and River Aria make up her river series, whose stories unfold against an early 20th century backdrop that includes the South American rubber boom, the Great War (as experienced in Hoboken, NJ) and the beginnings of the Great Depression. The stories deal with themes of grief, loss, love, immigration, assimilation and more. Joan also wrote a book for children, No Time for Zebras (Waldorf Publishing 2019), about a mother and son, with drawings by artist Adryelle Villamizar. Schweighardt worked for many years as a freelance writer, a ghostwriter, a literary agent, and the publisher of a small company with a list of award-winning books. When she’s not reading or writing her own books, she enjoys collaborating with other writers, and also loves to hike, bike, travel, and paint with oils. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This is a story of America! Lynden Hoover, a young man on the brink of a new beginning, cannot embrace it without confronting the traumas of his past. Help comes from The Duke, an old loner who calls America's landscape his home. He clings to an honor code, but in fleeing from Short Arm, his merciless enemy, his code is being tested. At the end of the 20th century few Knights of the Road still cling to their vanishing lifestyle. The Duke mentors Lynden, enlisting old traveling friends to keep himself and his apprentice just ahead of Short Arm's relentless pursuit. When two of those friends are murdered, the stakes become life or death. Bonds are formed, secrets exposed, sacrifices made, trusts betrayed - all against a breathtaking American landscape of promise and peril. Three unforgettable characters, hurtling toward a spellbinding climax where pasts and futures collide, and lives hang in the balance. With The Last Professional (Artemesia Publishing, 2022), Davis has done for American railroads what Kerouac did for American highways, and Steinbeck did for American nomads. Jerry Cimino, Founder of The Beat Museum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Shubha Sunder speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “A Very Full Day,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Shubha talks about writing stories set in India, and how she built out the insular world of Indian retirees that “A Very Full Day” centers on. She also discusses teaching creative writing to undergrads, her revision process, and her forthcoming collection of stories Boomtown Girl, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award. Shubha Sunder's debut short story collection, Boomtown Girl, won the St. Lawrence Book Award and is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She has published stories and essays in New Letters, The Common, Narrative Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review, Catapult, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. Her fiction has received honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories, won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and Narrative "30 Below," and been shortlisted for The Flannery O’Connor Award, The Hudson Prize, and The New American Fiction Prize. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and the City of Boston Artist Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at GrubStreet and at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Read Shubha’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/a-very-full-day. Read more at shubhasunder.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The city of Dublin, with its ancient cobblestones, historic pubs, and legendary river Liffey, has been a source of inspiration for writers and poets for centuries. Though it might provide a creative buzz, modern city existence can often prove exhausting for the contemporary poet constantly bombarded with new sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the increasing pull of technology, with smartphone apps and messages vying for attention, offering new ways of interacting with the history of the city, or with imagined versions of it. Adam Wyeth’s new experimental poetry collection about:blank (Salmon Poetry, 2021) takes the city of Dublin as its setting and depicts the pressures of contemporary urban life by expanding the poetic form to include a variety of genres and short forms: monologue, dialogue, and instructions for yoga poses. These narratives are interwoven to give readers a remarkable impression of contemporary human existence and the ways that human consciousness is shaped by myth, literary references, music, technology, and lived environments. Wyeth’s clever and thought-provoking book of poetry—the title itself a reference to the message that appears in internet browser’s address bar to indicate an empty web page—meditates on what it means to be a writer in an ever-changing world and touches on philosophical questions surrounding identity, selfhood, and the absurdity of existence. B ridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies. Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bridgetrenglis2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Disorientation: A Novel by Elaine Hsieh Chou (Penguin Press, 2022), we meet Ingrid Yang: an eighth-year PhD student in East Asian studies struggling to write a dissertation on (fictional) canonical Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. Her situation is made all the more distressing by the fact that her student loan deferral is soon to expire, and it’s dawning on her that she was never interested in Xiao-Wen Chou in the first place—rather, her advisor convinced her that this would be a good topic for a marketable dissertation. Then one day, a strange note in the archives leads her to a shocking discovery. What is it? What happens? You’ll have to read Disorientation to find out. Tune in to this episode of the New Books Network podcast to hear Elaine Hsieh Chou discuss the inspiration for Disorientation, how liberating it felt to have the last word on toxic white men, the difficulties of finding institutional space for Asian American studies, the continued importance of the legacy of the Third World Liberation Front, the joys and challenges of writing complex and flawed Asian American characters, Ingrid’s journey towards healing post-grad school, and more. Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. She holds an MFA from NYU where she was a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow, and she was once in—and dropped out of—a PhD program. Jennifer Gayoung Lee is a writer and data analyst based in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Leslie T. Grover about her book The Benefits of Eating White Folks (Jaded Ibis Press, 2022). The Sickness, a disease with unknown origins, is killing white children in the antebellum South, but Perpetua, a Black enslaved woman, is facing something much more devastating: Her daughter Meenie is missing. What she finds in her search for her child will change her life forever. By fusing the past and present with the power of prose and poetry, Leslie T. Grover poignantly explores the ripple effect of history and the nature of love and family and the ties that bind. Leslie T. Grover is a Black History writer and community scholar-activist. She is the founder of a small nonprofit, Assisi House, Inc., which uses the power of story to build the capacity of vulnerable communities. Her work in Narrative Medicine, social justice, and Black History has inspired this book. A native of Charleston, Mississippi, she is an unapologetic Black Southern woman, and this extends itself into her writing. Leslie’s work, which focuses on Black women characters, seeks to reveal the past in a way that honors art, the Black writing tradition, and her own deeply rural voice. She currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Life Sentences (Godine, 2022) tells three interconnected stories about a family in his home country of Ireland. In lyrical, moving prose, with characters that reach across the years, Billy O’Callaghan describes births, deaths, war, and the life of his family. The book begins in the 1920’s with Jeremiah, who survived as a soldier in the Great War. He’s drunk and jailed on the night before his sister’s funeral to prevent him from killing his sister’s husband. “Life had its struggles,” he says as he muses about his family and experiences, “but we bore them in the way that our kind always do.” The second part goes back to the 1880’s, and Jer’s mother, Nancy, recounts being the only member of her family to survive the Great Potato Famine. Starving, she left her tiny island home to find work on the mainland and was wooed by Michael Egan, the man who fathered her two children and haunted her for years. The third section is in the voice of Nellie, Jer’s youngest daughter, who is nearing the end of her life. This is a beautifully written novel about family, home, poverty, loss, and the struggle to live in a difficult world. Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, is the author of four short story collections (In Exile, In Too Deep, The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind, and The Boatman) and the novels The Dead House and My Coney Island Baby. His work has been translated into a dozen languages and earned him numerous honours, including four Bursary Awards for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and, in 2013, a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award for the Short Story of the Year, as well as shortlistings for the COSTA Award and the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. His short stories have appeared in such literary journals and magazines around the world as: Agni, the Chattahoochee Review, the Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, the Saturday Evening Post and Winter Papers. A new novel, The Paper Man, will be published in the UK and Ireland by Jonathan Cape in 2023. When Billy isn’t reading or writing, he’s a big fan of Liverpool Football Club (called soccer in the U.S.). G. P. Gottleib interviews authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and tries to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When I Grow Up, the latest graphic nonfiction narrative from New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein, is based on six of hundreds of newly discovered, never-before-published autobiographies of Eastern European Jewish teenagers. These autobiographies, submitted in a writing contest, were hidden away at the outbreak of World War II, and were only discovered seven decades later. In When I Grow Up, the author brings these stories, their authors, and their entire world, to life. David Gottlieb is the Director of Jewish Studies at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

France in 1755 is a country of extremes. The streets of Paris are filled with the poor and downtrodden, whereas just a few miles away lies the Palace of Versailles, with its renowned Hall of Mirrors where courtiers under the eye of Louis XV while away the hours amid endless extravagance. Once known as Louis the Well-Loved, the king has steadily lost ground with his people, and even his long-term relationship with Madame de Pompadour has entered a new phase. To retain her power and appeal to the king’s changing appetites, Madame enlists the help of Dominic-Guillaume Lebel, Louis’s valet de chambre. He sets up a school in Deer Park (le Parc des Cerfs), near the palace, where carefully selected thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls from poor families can master basic literacy, painting, music, dance, embroidery, manners, and court protocol. Those who succeed in pleasing the king leave with a dowry and an income for life. Even those who fail receive some kind of financial settlement. Véronique Roux, a printer’s daughter fallen on hard times, enters the school and does well—until a chance remark leads to her hasty dismissal. Years later, a little girl named Marie-Louise—who we know from the book jacket is Véronique’s daughter, sired by the king and wrenched from her mother at birth—is summoned to Versailles and turned over to two of Madame de Pompadour’s servants for her education. Marie-Louise wants nothing more than to find the parents who abandoned her, without knowing who they are, and through her story we see the connections of Louis XV’s failures as a ruler and how they lead to the French Revolution in 1789. In The School of Mirrors (William Morrow, 2022), Eva Stachniak takes the element of the real-life school at Deer Park and builds it, through the fictional characters of Véronique and Marie-Louise, into a powerful indictment of both a monarchy in decline and the radicals who sought to overthrow it at all costs, even when their initial idealism caused them to turn against one another. Eva Stachniak is the author of two novels about Catherine the Great, The Winter Palace and Empress of the Night, and four other works. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide (Columbia UP, 2021), co-authored by Susan Chan Egan and Pai Hsien-yung (Columbia University Press, 2021), is a straightforward guide to the Chinese literary classic, The Story of the Stone (also known as Dream of the Red Chamber), that was written at a time when readers had plenty of leisure to sort through the hundreds of characters and half a dozen subplots that weave in and out of the book’s 120 chapters. The Story of the Stone is widely held to be the greatest work of Chinese literature, beloved by readers ever since it was first published in 1791. The story revolves around the young scion of a mighty clan who, instead of studying for the civil service examinations, frolics with his maidservants and girl cousins. The narrative is cast within a mythic framework in which the protagonist’s rebellion against Confucian strictures is guided by a Buddhist monk and a Taoist priest. Embedded in the novel is a biting critique of imperial China’s political and social system. Each chapter of A Companion to The Story of the Stone: A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide summarizes and comments on each chapter of the novel. The companion provides English-speaking readers—whether they are simply dipping into this novel or intent on a deep analysis of this masterpiece—with the cultural context to enjoy the story and understand its world. The book is keyed to David Hawkes and John Minford’s English translation of The Story of the Stone and includes an index that gives the original Chinese names and terms. Susan Chan Egan is an independent scholar. She is the author of A Latterday Confucian: Reminiscences of William Hung (1893–1980) (1987), coauthor of A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit: The Half-Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams (2009), and cotranslator of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (Columbia, 2008), among other books. Pai Hsien-yung (Bai Xianyong) is an acclaimed fiction writer and a professor emeritus of East Asian languages and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include Taipei People (1971) and Crystal Boys (1983). He has taught The Story of the Stone for decades and is the author of a popular three-volume guide in Chinese on which this book is based. Linshan Jiang is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests are modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). He brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. His other work includes two books of short stories (Third Class Superhero 2006 and Sorry Please Thank You in 2012) and some episodes of Westworld, He speaks with John and with Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine, noted SF scholar. The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the "small feelings" that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie's time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is "acute impostor syndrome" and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called "double consciousness." In conclusion, we followed the old ND custom of asking Charlie about treats that sustain him while writing. Later, we reached out with this season's question about what new talent he'd love to acquire miraculously. He had a lightning-fast response: "the ability to stop myself from saying a thing I already know I will regret. I would use this on a daily, if not hourly, basis." Mentioned:

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

W. E. B. Du Bois on "double consciousness" (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The superhero of comic books and blockbuster movies may be a quintessentially American invention, forever saving the world in skin-tight spandex. But the cultural DNA of the superhero can arguably be traced to a much older, more progressive, British tradition: the larger-than-life folk heroes of historical protests – General Ludd, Captain Swing, Lady Skimmington, and others; semi-fictional identities that ordinary protestors adopted, often dressing up in the process. The Cuckoo Cage (CommaPress, 2022), edited by Ra Page, is a unique experiment, twelve authors have been tasked with resurrecting that tradition: to spawn a new generation of present-day British superheroes, willing to bring the fight back to British shores and to more progressive causes. From the dimension-jumping statue-toppler, to the shape-shifting single mum raiding supermarkets to stock local foodbanks, these figures offer unlikely new insights into shared, centuries-old political causes, and usher in a new league of proud, British (social justice) warriors. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nell Young, a dedicated cartographer, once had it all—a dream job in the New York Public Library, a stylish boyfriend, Felix, who understood her obsession with maps, and a good salary as a researcher. Then she and her father, Dr. Young, the top scholar at NYPL had a fight about the importance of find she discovered in the basement, and her dreams came crashing down. She lost Felix when her father fired him, along with her. Seven years later, Nell is frumpy and depressed, working well below her aptitude, when news arrives of her father’s unexpected death at the Library. While in his office, she comes across his secret hiding place for treasured items and is amazed to find one of the maps included in the box that provoked the fight. It’s not one of the rare expensive maps, but rather a cheap common map from the thirties. It’s not until she enters her find into the database that she realizes she may have the only surviving map of this edition. The others have all mysteriously disappeared. Soon she begins to wonder if her father might have been murdered over this cheap map? Much as Nell would like to solve this all by herself, she’s forced to reach out for help. Could her parent’s former friends and her estranged boyfriend, Felix, help her solve the mystery? Or will her questions draw the killer nearer and put her new comrades in danger? The Cartographers (William Morrow, 2021) will acquaint you with the real-world concept of a phantom settlement and make you see the New York Public Library in a new light. Peng Sheperd was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where she rode horses and trained in classical ballet. She’s lived in Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, London, Los Angeles, Washington DC and New York. Up next is Mexico City. Her first novel, The Book of M, won the 2019 Neukom Institute for Literary Arts Award for Debit Speculative Fiction, as well as many other accolades. Fun fact: Peng has never been stung by a bee. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ruta Sepetys is a an acclaimed “crossover” author (read by both young people and adults) of historical novels. In her latest novel I Must Betray You (Philomel Books, 2022) published by Philomel Books in 2022, she dramatizes the last days of the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania in 1989. A 17-year-old boy, Cristian Florescu, feels compelled to become one of the legions of civilian informants in the service of the regime to help his family. Young Cristian becomes involved in the violent revolution against the regime in December 1989. Sepetys’ story reveals the real tensions among Romanians in this closed society and the angst that drove so many ordinary people to risk their lives in revolting against the totalitarian regime. Sepetys interviewed many who lived through the last days the Ceausescu regime in order to recreate, through the use of historically informed imagination, the inherent suspicion and fear of Romanians of not only their government but also their fellow countrymen. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

There is a great temptation, when writing about the past, to sanitize its circumstances and attitudes to make the characters more palatable to present-day readers. Tania Bayard, who has written four mystery novels set in fourteenth-century France, does not make that mistake. Her Paris is filthy and smelly, with muddy streets and refuse lying in heaps, horrible diseases, stray dogs, and dead rats in the gutters. Her characters, too, wallow in prejudices and superstitions of all sorts. And those streets are filled with beggars, prostitutes, thieves, cheats, and would-be sorcerers and witches, ready to prey on upstanding citizens. Yet fourteenth-century France, in these novels as in real life, also contains farsighted thinkers, gifted artists of all sorts, and would-be scientists. One of the shining lights is Christine de Pizan, a scribe at the court of Charles VI “the Mad” who will soon establish a name for herself as a poet and early feminist. Contrary to the stereotypes of medieval women as passive and obedient, Christine works hard to support her family and resolutely challenges the prejudices of the men around her, especially her frequent bête noire and sometime supporter, Henri Le Picart. In Murder in the Cloister (Severn House Publishers, 2021), the sudden death of a young nun causes the prioress to summon Christine, who has already solved three crimes affecting the royal family, to find out what happened. On the surface, Christine has been hired to copy an important manuscript, but her investigations turn up not only secrets and lies but ongoing sources of tension among the nuns. And even as she races to untangle the mystery before more deaths occur, she must counteract Henri’s efforts to protect—or is it undermine?—her and what she fears is his undesirable influence on her young son. Bayard has taken some flak for her decision to adopt a historical person as her fictional detective, but as she notes during this interview, any character she could have invented would have been less complex and less credible than Christine, who defied both her own society’s expectations and our own limited view of medieval women. So relax, don’t worry too much about the details of the crimes being fictional, and enjoy parachuting into a fully imagined past that you can hope never to experience in real life. Tania Bayard is the author of four novels featuring Christine de Pizan, as well as the nonfiction works A Medieval Home Companion and Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers: Medieval Gardens and the Gardens of The Cloisters. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tom Sleigh speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poems “Last Cigarette” and “Apology to My Daughter,” which appear in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Tom talks about his time as a journalist in Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Kenya, Iraq, and Libya, and how that experience comes out in his poetry. He also discusses the process of putting together his new poetry collection from Graywolf, The King’s Touch, and how he sees the current Ukrainian refugee crisis playing out differently than crises in other parts of the world with less established infrastructure. Tom Sleigh’s many books include The King’s Touch; House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed; and Army Cats. His book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers, recounts his time as a journalist covering refugee issues in the Middle East and Africa. He has won a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila Wallace Award, both the John Updike and Individual Writer Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and two NEA grants. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College. Read Tom’s poetry in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/tom-sleigh. Read more at tomsleigh.com. Watch Tom read more poems from The King’s Touch on his Vimeo channel. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel Heartland is forthcoming in spring 2023 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Literature is full of families torn apart by tragedy—death, war, crime. But what if the members of a family can’t agree on the cause of the tragedy that divides them? In Mike Chen’s new novel, Light Years from Home: A Novel (Mira Books, 2022), sisters Kass and Evie agree that their brother Jacob vanished 15 years ago. But did he runaway to party to his heart’s content, as Kass believes, or was he abducted by aliens, as Evie thinks? Their starkly different interpretations of the facts exacerbates the pain and tragedy of their brother’s disappearance, pushing the family to the point of breaking. “One of the things that I really wanted to show was how a single moment can really change the trajectory of people's lives,” Chen says. Jacob’s disappearance “fundamentally changes the direction of this family. Kass has this attitude of ‘if no one else is going to fix it, I am going to fix it.’ And Eve has the same attitude, except she thinks about it as ‘I'm going to fix it by going with my dad on like these UFO hunts, and we're going to find my brother’ and their mom wants to just move forward because that's the only way that she knows how to do it. … They've all gone in a completely different angle because this disaster has happened to them and none of them know the truth.” Mike Chen, a three-time guest on the podcast, is the author of Here and Now and Then, A Beginning at the End, We Could be Heroes, and Star Wars: Brotherhood. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

In this episode of Queer Voices of the South I talk to Dr. Sherry Scott about her new book Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism, released in February 2022 by Black Rose Writing. Three cousins fiercely defended their roles within the sanctity of their playhouses. But a six-year stint in a fundamentalist religious organization thwarted Scott's developing understanding of sexual orientation. Homosexuality was an insidious, infective spirit that conferred fear upon her adolescent naiveté, eventually eroding the relationship with her cousins. Playhouses is a journey from corrosive indoctrination to celebrating the differences in others. "Reconciling who we were took years, but survival led to relational ties without fear and a heart for activism in the face of rising institutionalized discrimination." Sherry Scott, M.D., is a pediatrician who has practiced palliative/hospice care for children and general medicine. She self-published her first literary work, The Year My Mother Died, 2011. She founded Paris Poet's Society and published a juried anthology of poetry and photography: What Brings You Here, 2016. She serves on the board of the Gendercide Awareness Project, founded in Dallas. She lives with her family in Paris, Texas. Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which has been optioned for TV/film development. A communications leader in health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education, his work has appeared in national and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, home cook, and Cajun New Yorker, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Instagram: morrisardoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sara Goudarzi about her novel The Almond in the Apricot (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2022). Emma lives in New Jersey, works as a civil engineer, has a reliable boyfriend, and had a wonderful best friend from college who she always secretly loved even. Not long after her best friend is killed crossing the street in Manhattan, Emma begins having nightmares. In these not-at-all-normal dreams, she is a young girl name Lilly whose life is continuously upended by bombs that force her and her family into a bunker. Unlike normal dreams, Emma’s are continuous and chronological, and she truly inhabits the little girl’s life, including playing with her friends, skipping home from school, or working on her math homework. Lily also finds a wonderful best friend, and when his life is at risk, Emma wants to go back to her dreams to rescue him, but how? Sara Goudarzi is a Brooklyn writer and holds an M.A. in journalism from New York University and an M.S. in engineering from Rutgers University. Her non-fiction, poetry and translations have appeared in Scientific American, The New York Times, National Geographic News, The Christian Science Monitor, The Globe and Mail, Scholastic’s Science World magazine, The Adirondack Review and Drunken Boat, among others. Sara is the author of Amazing Animals, Leila's Day at the Pool (2022) and several other titles from Scholastic Inc. and has taught writing at NYU and mediabistro. She is a 2017 Writers in Paradise Les Standiford fellow and a Tin House alumna. When she’s not writing, she loves swimming, going to the beach, gardening, traveling, and of course reading! G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Legend has it that the sixteenth-century Telugu poet Nandi Timmana composed Theft of a Tree, or Pārijātāpaharaṇamu, which he based on a popular millennium-old tale, to help the wife of Krishnadevaraya, king of the south Indian Vijayanagara Empire, win back her husband's affections. Theft of a Tree recounts how Krishna stole the pārijāta, a wish-granting tree, from the garden of Indra, king of the gods. Krishna does so to please his favorite wife, Satyabhama, who is upset when he gifts his chief queen a single divine flower. After battling Indra, Krishna plants the tree for Satyabhama--but she must perform a rite temporarily relinquishing it and her husband to enjoy endless happiness. The poem's narrative unity, which was unprecedented in the literary tradition, prefigures the modern Telugu novel. Theft of a Tree is presented here in the Telugu script alongside the first English translation. Ujaan Ghosh is a graduate student at the Department of Art History at University of Wisconsin, Madison Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ruth Ozeki, whose most recent novel is The Book of Form and Emptiness, speaks with critic Rebecca Evans and guest host Emily Hyde. This is a conversation about talking books, the randomness and serendipity of library shelves, and what novelists can learn in the editing room of a movie like Mutant Hunt. Ozeki is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and her novels unfold as warm-hearted parables that have been stuffed full of the messiness of contemporary life. The Book of Form and Emptiness telescopes from global supply chains to the aisles of a Michaels craft store and from a pediatric psychiatry ward to the enchanted stacks of the public library. The exigencies of environmental storytelling arch over this conversation. Evans asks Ozeki questions of craft (how to move a story through time, how to bring it to an end) that become questions of practice (how to listen to the objects stories tell, how to declutter your sock drawer). And we learn Ozeki’s theory of closure: her novels always pull together at the end so that readers are free to continue pondering the questions they raise. Mentioned in this episode:

Mutant Hunt, directed by Tim Kinkaid (1987)

My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki (1998)

All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki (2003)

The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki (2021)

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo (2014)

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Mahabharata is one of the central works of Indian literature—its characters, lessons, and tropes are widely known and referenced in Indian popular culture, literary discussions and political debate. And like all classic works, it’s ripe for reinterpretations, deconstructions and adaptations. One such reinterpretation is Song of Draupadi (Aleph Book Company, 2021), written by Ira Mukhoty. Ira’s book puts the Mahabhrata’s female characters front and center, focusing the story around their struggles and their strengths in fighting for themselves—and the men they have to care for. Ira Mukhoty is the author of several books about India and Indian women throughout history, including Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History (Aleph Book Company: 2017), Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire (Aleph Book Company: 2018), and Akbar: The Great Mughal (Aleph Book Company: 2020). Ira can be followed on Twitter at @mukhoty, and on Instagram at @iramukhoty. We’re also joined by Mariyam Haider, researcher-writer and spoken word artist in Singapore. Today, the three of us will talk about the Mahabharata, and how Song of Draupadi reinterprets its story and central characters. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Song of Draupadi. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sandra Cavallo Miller about her novel Where No One Should Live (U Nevada Press, 2021). Dr. Maya Summer works at Arizona Public Health, overseeing and researching a myriad of public health issues. A passionate advocate for a motorcycle helmet law, she also monitors disease-bearing mosquitoes, rabid bobcats, and the opioid epidemic--along with many other concerns. To maintain her clinical skills, she spends time at the nearby family medicine residency, seeing patients and teaching new physicians. Maya also navigates a complicated personal life: a somewhat troubled romantic relationship with a cardiologist; a retired physician-friend searching for new meaning; an undocumented neighbor raising a young son; and a cherished ailing old horse. A new danger looms when she sparks the anger of local biker gangs who want to stop her helmet campaign. As the intimidating warnings reach an unsettling highpoint, a past trauma that had been fueling her work now starts to haunt her--threatening to derail her carefully choreographed life. Dr. Alex Reddish, a faculty member at the residency, enjoys Maya's company every week. He longs to know her better but also knows she is involved with a prominent cardiologist. A former shy chess champion, Alex has worked to remake himself into a more socially engaged person, though he cannot completely shed his reclusive past. His professional life is complicated by two resident physician advisees: a depressed and poorly performing man, and a seductive woman. And now someone seems determined to harm him. Maya and Alex turn accomplices when they try to unravel a spate of unusual illnesses afflicting residency staff, and discover disturbing trends. As Maya and Alex become closer, they must also tackle their personal pasts and individual demons, and find the courage to move forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nine out of ten dentists agree, Mazey Eddings's rom-com A Brush with Love (St. Martin's Griffin, 2022) makes your smile brighter! not scientifically proven Harper is anxiously awaiting placement into a top oral surgery residency program when she crashes (literally) into Dan. Harper would rather endure a Novocaine-free root canal than face any distractions, even one this adorable. A first-year dental student with a family legacy to contend with, Dan doesn’t have the same passion for pulling teeth that Harper does. Though he finds himself falling for her, he is willing to play by Harper’s rules. So with the greatest of intentions and the poorest of follow-throughs, the two set out to be “just friends.” But as they get to know each other better, Harper fears that trading fillings for feelings may make her lose control and can't risk her carefully ordered life coming undone, no matter how drool-worthy Dan is. Blood, gore, and extra-long roots? No problem. The idea of falling in love? Torture. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sequoia Nagamatsu about his novel How High We Go in the Dark (William Morrow, 2022). In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects--a pig--develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet. From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Julia Cooke speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Past and Future on Rapa Nui,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Julia talks about her trip to Rapa Nui, commonly known as Easter Island, a place famous for the mysterious moai statues that dot the remote landscape. She also discusses the island’s complicated and unknowable history, her earlier work as a journalist, and her latest book, which chronicles stories from Pan Am stewardesses during the Jet Age. Julia Cooke is the author of Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am and The Other Side of Paradise: Life in the New Cuba. Her essays and reporting have been published in A Public Space, Smithsonian, Tin House, Condé Nast Traveler, and Virginia Quarterly Review, where she is a contributing editor. Read Julia’s essay in The Common here. Read more at juliacooke.com. Follow her on Twitter at @juliaccooke. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Interest in the events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 has only increased since the centenary of the Romanovs’ assassination in 1918. Bryn Turnbull tackles this familiar story from the perspective of Emperor Nicholas’s eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna (1895–1918). The novel opens with a prediction, apparently made on the day of Olga’s birth, that the infant grand duchess would “not live to see thirty.” From there it moves to 1907, when the young heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, is on the brink of death due to uncontrolled bleeding, the result of his hereditary hemophilia. Enter Grigori Rasputin, who enacts a miracle cure, saving the boy’s life and earning himself the undying gratitude of the desperate empress. With this central conflict established—including the secrecy maintained around the nature of Alexei’s illness for as long as he remained heir to the throne—we shift forward in time to Nicholas II’s abdication in March 1917. The two stories of the revolution and the years that preceded it intertwine, with accounts of Olga at parties or nursing during World War I interspersed between chapters detailing the increasing confinement of the family after the revolution, from the Alexander Palace in Petrograd to a house in Siberia, then their transfer to the mansion in Ekaterinburg where the assassination took place. Olga makes a compelling narrator, old enough to see what’s going on and have opinions about it but young enough to enjoy life, whether that means flirting at her coming-out party, chatting with a handsome wounded army officer, or riding a sled down Snow Mountain, a structure built by her and her siblings at the interim house in Tobol’sk. She is intensely family-focused, devoted to Russia, and charmingly naive due to her sheltered upbringing. Indeed, if one thing comes through in this richly described and thoughtful novel, it is the love of Nicholas II, his wife, and his children for one another—even if their insistence on staying together dooms them all. Many factors, of course, lay behind the Russian Revolution, and The Last Grand Duchess (Mira, 2022) hints at poverty, disillusionment, the massive casualties of the Great War, and Bolshevik determination as well as Nicholas’s limitations as a ruler, Alexandra’s shortcomings, Rasputin’s ambition, and the “ministerial leapfrog” to which those failings gave rise. But the strength of fiction lies in its ability to draw us into the minds and hearts of a small group of people, and in this case, that group is Olga and her immediate family. It’s a journey well worth taking. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bangkok, as Thailand’s largest and most economically-important cities, attracts migrants from all over the country. Drawn to its economic opportunities, migrants eke a living working in informal jobs, with few protections–yet they build a community among their fellow migrants and workers. The King of Bangkok (University of Toronto Press: 2021), written by Claudio Sopranzetti, illustrated by Sara Fabbri and translated from its original Italian by Chiara Natalucci, tells the story of one such migrant: Nok, who lives through economic upheaval, protest movements and military crackdowns, in a story based on years of research. Claudio Sopranzetti is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Central European University. He is the author of Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok (University of California Press: 2017), winner of the 2019 Margaret Mead Award. Sara Fabbri is an illustrator and editorial designer, currently working as Art Director for Linus, an Italian comics magazine. Claudio and Sara join us to talk about The King of Bangkok, where they cover Nok’s story, and what it tells us about Thailand, Bangkok, and the country’s urban-rural divide. They also talk about the process of making the book itself: a graphic novel, based on a decade of anthropological research. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The King of Bangkok. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Fine Boys: A Novel (Ohio University Press, 2021), Ewaen is a Nigerian teenager, bored at home in Warri and eager to flee from his parents’ unhappy marriage and incessant quarreling. When Ewaen is admitted to the University of Benin, he makes new friends who, like him, are excited about their newfound independence. They hang out in parking lots, trading gibes in pidgin and English and discovering the pleasures that freedom affords them. But when university strikes begin and ruthlessly violent confraternities unleash mayhem on their campus, Ewaen and his new friends must learn to adapt—or risk becoming the confras' next unwilling recruits. In his trademark witty, colloquial style, critically acclaimed author Eghosa Imasuen presents everyday Nigerian life against the backdrop of the pro-democracy riots of the 1980s and 1990s, the lost hopes of June 12 (Nigeria’s Democracy Day), and the terror of the Abacha years. Fine Boys is a chronicle of time, not just in Nigeria, but also for its budding post-Biafran generation. Eghosa Imasuen is the cofounder of Narrative Landscape Press, a publishing company based in Lagos. He studied medicine at the University of Benin and lives in Lagos with his wife and twin sons. Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Homicide and Halo-Halo (Berkley, 2022) is the second cozy mystery in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen mystery series. Written in first person, baker Lila Macapagal is about to open the Brew-Ha Café in Shady Palms, a fictional town about 2 hours outside of Chicago. Lila, a proud Filipino American who bakes awesome fusions of Filipino and American pastry, is a 25-year-old who has been asked to guest judge a local beauty pageant that she won as a teenager. The first sign of trouble is a threat about the competition, and then one of Lila’s fellow judges is found dead. Cozy mysteries are usually lightweight and amusing – while Homicide and Halo-Halo is written in a light-hearted style, characters grapple with serious issues such as PTSD, fatphobia, fertility and pregnancy issues, predatory behavior, unresolved grief, parental death, and dismissive attitudes toward mental health. Mia P. Manansala is a writer and certified book coach who earned her undergraduate degree in English at Northeastern Illinois University. A 2017 alum and 2018-20 mentor for Pitch Wars, a volunteer-run writing program, Manansala uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck - Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrastibaking, playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho, Max Power, and Bayley Banks (bonus points if you get all the references). G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tochi Onyebuchi’s new novel Goliath (Tordotcom, 2022) features a phenomenon familiar to those of us who live in cities—gentrification. Like the gentrifiers of today who push out old-timers with high rents and coffee boutiques, Onyebuchi’s urban colonizers are taking over property in communities that have suffered from underinvestment and systemic racism. But unlike gentrifiers of today, who often leave behind comfortable lives in the suburbs, the gentrifiers in Goliath are returning from comfortable lives on space stations where those with means had fled years earlier to escape pollution and environmental degradation on Earth. Onyebuchi sees in the story of David and Jonathan—returnees from who take over a home in a Black and Brown community in New Haven—parallels to frontier narratives. “I've read a lot of westerns and western-inflected literature, and the ways in which people have written about the American West were very fundamental in how I approached the characters of David and Jonathan. You have people going out west historically for all sorts of reasons. ‘Oh, that's where my fortune is.’ Or they're like, ‘Oh, like, there are no rules out there. I can totally remake myself.’” In David and Jonathan’s case, their relationship is broken. “They think, ‘Oh, if we just change the scenery, that'll make things better, we'll be able to start over.… We can make this work on Earth. It's virgin territory, this place where we can build something together.’ That in many ways is the animating impulse, of course, completely or almost completely disregarding the fact that Earth is already home to a lot of people.” Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the Beasts Made of Night series; the War Girls series; and the non-fiction book (S)kinfolk. His novel Riot Baby—which he discussed on the podcast in 2020—was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image Awards and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignyte Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award. He has degrees from Yale, New York University, Columbia Law School, and the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Guest host Chris Holmes sits down with Booker Prize winning novelist Damon Galgut and Andrew van der Vlies, distinguished scholar of South African literature and global modernisms at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Andrew and Damon tunnel down into the structures of Damon’s newest novel, The Promise to locate the ways in which a generational family story reflects broadly on South Africa’s present moment. The two discuss how lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic invoke for some the limitations on movement during the Apartheid era in South Africa. The Promise is a departure from Damon’s previous two novels, which were peripatetic in their global movement and range. Damon describes the ways in which this novel operates cinematically, as four flashes of a family’s long history, with the disembodied narrator being the one on the move. Damon provocatively divides novels into two traditions: those that provide consolation, and those that can provide true insight on the world but must do so with a cold distance. While he does not call The Promise an allegory, Damon admits to the fun that he has with inside jokes that play with allegorical connections, as long as the reader is in on the joke. Damon directly takes on his choice to leave a pregnant absence in the narrative’s insight into his black characters “sitting at the very heart of the book.” Mentioned in this Episode:

The Promise, Damon Galgut (2021)

The Good Doctor, Damon Galgut (2004)

The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer (1974)

No Time Like the Present, Nadine Gordimer (2012)

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This conversation, first aired in July 2021, features Brandeis poet Elizabeth Bradfield, and the poet Sean Hill, author of Blood Ties and Brown Liquor (2008) and Dangerous Goods (2014). Sean reads his “Musica Universalis in Fairbanks,” (it appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review) and then, like someone seated in an archive turning over the pages of aged and delicate documents, unfolds his ideas about birds, borders, houses and “who was here before me.” Mentioned in This Episode: C.S. Giscombe, Into and Out of Dislocation C.S. Giscombe, Giscome Road Lorine Neidecker, Lake Superior Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Anne Carson, Plainwater William Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt Listen and Read: Read transcript here: Sean Hill on Bodies in Space and Time Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Manuel Padilla Jr. spoke to me today in his very accessible yet historically conscious novel Coconut: Brown on the Outside, White on the Inside (Xlibris Publications, 2020) in which he depicts Latino culture while also considering politics, history, class and generational differences in the life of a Latino family in the Los Angeles of the 1960’s and 70’s. Through the unflustered logic of a five year old child we see the impact of racism and differentiation and we are made aware of the evolution of multiculturalism in the United States a country that was supposed to be the melting pot of races but where people are still thought of by their race. Manuel Padilla Jr. has over 36 years of professional writing experience in the media and publishing worlds, working as a newspaper reporter and editor; marketing, public relations and advertising professional; and public speaker. He has written pieces which have appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other publications. He was also a regular columnist for the Los Angeles Daily News. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Teri M. Brown's novel Sunflowers Beneath the Snow (Atmosphere Press 2022) opens in 1973 with a Ukrainian man being spirited out of the USSR. He’s part of the resistance and his cover was blown. Ivanna, his wife is told that he died in another woman’s bed, and she never wants to hear his name again. Loyal to the Soviet Union, Ivanna manages to raise her daughter Yevtsye, who grows up, falls in love, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter, Ionna. Then Gorbachev comes to power and the Soviet Union collapses, leaving Ivanna in shock but offering hope to Yevtsye, Danya, and their daughter. The years pass, and Ionna wants to learn languages and see the world. She takes a job at an American summer camp and slowly overcomes the prejudices of the rest of the staff. Then the Soviet army invades Crimea, and she can’t get home, so she heads to New York City in hopes of blending into the large Ukrainian population. This is a story of resilience and courage. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Starting a new historical mystery series is always fun, but summarizing one at book 7 creates a certain conundrum: how to convey the essence of a character and her development without giving away too much information? Since her first adventure in 1887 (A Curious Beginning, published in 2015), Veronica Speedwell, a lepidopterist by inclination and training, has had an exciting two years. Early in that book, she leaves a family funeral only to encounter a housebreaker and would-be abductor. She evades the villain with help from an unknown rescuer who promises to reveal a decades-old secret but dies before he can fulfill his promise. Veronica is nothing if not intrepid, and she flees London in the company of the unkempt and misanthropic Stoker. Together they attempt to discover who perpetrated the murder and why without falling under suspicion themselves. By 1889, Veronica and Stoker have tackled more than a few complicated cases. In An Impossible Impostor (Berkley Books, 2022), the head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch asks them for help. Jonathan Hathaway supposedly died during the eruption of Krakatoa six years before, but he has returned from the grave—or has he? His putative grandmother identifies him, but other family members disagree. And the family owns a priceless parure that may be the newcomer’s real target. So off Veronica and Stoker go to Hathaway Hall, a gentry estate on the Devon Moors. There another piece of Veronica’s personal history surfaces when least expected, threatening her partnership with Stoker as well as her peace of mind. Deanna Raybourn has a gift for writing fast-moving, richly imagined, intriguing, and at times flat-out hilarious mysteries filled with well-rounded and opinionated characters at all levels. I can’t wait to find out where she will send Victoria and Stoker next. Deanna Raybourn is the bestselling author of two Victorian mystery series featuring Lady Julia Grey and Veronica Speedwell, as well as several stand-alone works. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest novel, Song of the Sinner, appeared in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mona Kareem speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Mapping Exile: A Writer’s Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait,” which appears in a portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Mona talks about her family’s experience living in Kuwait as Bidoon, or stateless people, and why examining and writing about that experience is important to her. She also discusses her work as a poet and translator, her thoughts on revision and translation, and why she sometimes has mixed feelings about writing in English. Mona Kareem is the author of three poetry collections. She is a recipient of a 2021 NEA literary grant and a fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University. Her work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence, Ambit, Poetry London, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, PEN America, Modern Poetry in Translation, Two Lines, and Specimen. She has held fellowships with Princeton University, Poetry International, the Arab American National Museum, the Norwich Center for Writing, and Forum Transregionale Studien. Her translations include Ashraf Fayadh’s Instructions Within and Ra’ad Abdulqadir’s Except for This Unseen Thread. Read Mona’s essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/mapping-exile-a-writers-story-of-growing-up-stateless-in-post-gulf-war-kuwait. Read her ArabLit essay about self-translation here. Read more at monakareem.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter at @monakareem. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections (PeePal Tree Press, 2021), Dr. Corinne Fowler explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. “Historical and literary ideas about the countryside have shifted significantly in the last three decades. For a long time now, historians, social geographers and archaeologists have recognised that English rural landscapes are readable, showing up such things as Bronze Age forts and Roman roads. The countryside was not, until recently, considered to reveal much about the British empire. Nor was the empire seen as having much to do with enclosure, rural poverty or rural industry. All that has changed.” Combining essays, poems and stories, the book details the colonial links of country houses, moorlands, woodlands, village pubs and graveyards. Dr. Fowler, who herself comes from a family of slave-owners, argues that Britain's cultural and economic legacy is not simply expressed by chinoiserie, statues, monuments, galleries, warehouses and stately homes. This is a shared history: Britons' ancestors either profited from empire or were impoverished by it. The legacy of empire is expressed by potent language, literary culture and lasting ideas, not least about the countryside. “The book sets out to explore the connections between historical studies and imaginative literary attempts to rethink English rurality. It demonstrates how Black British and British Asian writers (who are inevitably also readers) have addressed and challenged a sense of rural exclusion within the context of shifting sensibilities about the countryside in writing from the sixteenth-century to the present.” This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp in central Germany, where they’ll be forced to help build the Third Reich’s V-2 rocket program. Eli glimpses Werher von Braun and other scientists, who helped developed the V-2 rocket and were later recruited in Operation Paperclip to work in the United States on our nascent rocket program. Hicks describes Hessel’s struggle to survive the deprivations and torture by sociopathic ‘kapos’ in control of daily humiliations, cruelty, and murder at Dora. Approximately 20,000, mostly Jews, were murdered there, and very few survived. Eli survives, immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and gets recruited by the Kennedy Space Center. One day, he sees the infamous Wernher von Braun, now a respected United States citizen – his expertise, along with those of other Nazis, enabled the building of our space program. This is a story about resilience in the face of evil and the human capacity to recuperate, rebuild, and re-start. Patrick Hicks is the author of over ten books, including The Collector of Names, Adoptable, and This London—he also wrote the critically and popularly acclaimed novel, The Commandant of Lubizec, which was published by Steerforth/Random House. He earned a doctorate in Irish Literature from the University of Sussex and is currently writer in residence at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Holocaust Studies. His work has appeared in such journals and magazines as Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salon, Chronicle of Higher Education, Commonweal, Huffington Post, Guernica, The Utne Reader, and many others. When he’s not writing Hicks is busy raising his son, who was adopted from South Korea. He is passionate about international travel and lived in Europe for seven years. He has plans to visit Spain, England, Ireland, and Germany, followed by trips to Israel and England. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our historic moment. By presenting these words and phrases in sequence, Senior offers a timeline of the way events unfolded and how the language and preoccupations kept changing in response. In this accessible collection, Senior captures the zeitgeist of 2020. In this interview Senior discusses her craft and inspiration for writing. As she writes in her preface, “These poems capture the paradox that even as we are forced into consciousness of being a part of the world, we are at the same time forced to be apart.” and these pandemic poems became a way of engaging the community outside her door and sparking a conversation about what it means to live in this world together. Jori Krulder is an English teacher in rural Northern California where she is a frequent contributor to Edutopia.com and other publications writing about engaging students in the study of what it means to be human - literature. She can be found sharing lessons and ideas with the brilliant, generous community of writers and educators on Twitter at @jorikrulder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

We all live surrounded by objects: some practical, some personal, some handed down from family generations past. But though we interact with material things every day, we don’t often stop to consider the complex histories and stories of the objects in our lives—what they say about our culture, our families, and ourselves. Over a lifetime we accumulate these things, and when we die, they serve as evidence of who we once were and how we once lived. When writer Julia Ridley Smith’s parents passed away, they left behind a home full of treasures. As lifelong antique dealers, they collected scores of unique objects Smith struggles to sort through as she processes her grief. From her mother’s miniatures to her father’s favorite record albums, the objects of their lives cataloged their passions and humanity. How could anyone just give those things away? In her debut essay collection, The Sum of Trifles (University of Georgia Press, 2021), Smith considers the complex relationships we share with objects through artifacts from her childhood home, expertly braiding original research and personal narrative to get to the heart of how our loved ones can live on after death, whether through the things they cherished or our memories of them. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (Yale UP, 2021) brings together thirty-five essays, originally published in the Times, on a wide range of topics, from the dimensions of Plato’s academy and the mysteries of Eleusis to Philip K. Dick, Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of Liverpool Football Club fans. Simon Critchley has been a strong voice in popular philosophy for more than a decade. In an engaging and jargon‑free style, Critchley writes with honesty about the state of the world as he offers philosophically-informed and insightful considerations of happiness, violence, and faith. Stripped of inaccessible academic armatures, these short pieces bring philosophy out of the ivory tower and demonstrate an exciting new way to think in public. Simon Critchley is the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research and the moderator of the New York Times’ Stone column. He is a board member of the Onassis Foundation, and his most recent book is Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Season three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne Anlin Cheng, renowned scholar of American literature and visual culture at Princeton. The conversation goes small and goes big: from the shortest short story to the totalizing effects of capitalism. Chang-rae is no stranger to such shifting scales: his novels sweep through large stretches of time and space, but their attention to detail and meticulous prose makes for an intimate reading experience. Chang-rae’s latest novel, My Year Abroad, fuels a discussion about how we can form meaningful bonds in current conditions (hint: it’s often around a table) and about the specters of other, better worlds that haunt Chang-rae’s fictions. He discusses his relationship to his own work and the benefits of taking an “orbital view” on his writing. Chang-rae also offers a tantalizing glimpse into his current project, a semi-autobiographical novel about Korean-American immigrants in 1970s New York. In response to a brand new signature question for the podcast this season, Chang-rae reveals the talent he wishes he could suddenly have... one that Anne already possesses! Mentioned in this Episode

Crazy Rich Asians, Dir. Jon M. Chu (2018)

Parasite, Dir. Bong Joon-ho (2019)

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is

Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper, 2021), which traces the path of the Amur from its origins in Mongolia to its end-point in the Pacific Ocean. We also discuss what means to be a travel writer in today’s world—which has undergone a recent and rapid expansion, and even more recent and rapid collapse, of travel. Colin Thubron is an acclaimed travel writer and novelist, and the winner of many prizes and awards. His first books were about the Middle Eas—Damascus, Lebanon and Cyprus. But later he was drawn to the lands which he says his generation was brought up to fear: the Soviet Union and Communist China. In 1982 he traveled by car into the Soviet Union, a journey described in Among the Russians (Ulverscroft: 1989). From these early experiences developed his classic travel books: Behind The Wall: A Journey Through China (Random House: 1987), The Lost Heart of Asia (Random House: 1994), In Siberia (Penguin: 2000), Shadow of the Silk Road (Chatto & Windus: 2006) and To a Mountain in Tibet (Chatto & Windus: 2011). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Amur River. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

John and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the old country and the new at once. Upcoming episodes: As you know, we always have a new episode for your delectation on the first Thursday of the month, and on the second Thursday an essay by a young scholar connected to the episode. Following on the success of our November reissue of a 2019 conversation with Martin Puchner, we are dedicating the third week of the month to an "archival treasure." So on February 17th, we think you'll be pleased with an older poetical conversation, also starring Elizabeth. In March, a change of pace: we tackle the legacy of settler colonialism in "land grant" universities with a scholar who has been documenting the ways that stolen Native land funded the growth of America's higher education complex. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Did you ever hear the one about the elf, druid, and warlock that walk into—no, not a bar—but a trailer? Trailer Park Trickster (Blackstone, 2021), David Slayton’s follow up to White Trash Warlock, offers urban fantasy alternating with backwoods spookiness. If you’ve thought of warlocks as tall elegant fellows with a British accent and a swirling velvet cloak, think again. Adam Binder is a newly made warlock from Guthrie, Oklahoma, who grew up in a trailer park with a violent father and a chain-smoking mother. After his father’s disappearance and a stint in a mental hospital for seeing visions, Adam took refuge with his kindly Aunt Sue, Guthrie’s local fortune teller. While Adam, in the first book, deals with an evil spirit in Denver, a dark force is gathering in Guthrie. Trailer Park Trickster opens as he dispatches his first victim—Adam’s beloved Aunt Sue. Adam rushes back to Guthrie for her funeral, and finds his dysfunctional Goth cousin and estranged aunt cooking up meth in Sue’s erstwhile cozy trailer. Things only get worse after that. Adam’s love interest, Vic, a policeman, wants to support Adam through this time of crisis, but instead gets sidetracked in a long road trip with Elf Queen Argent, leaving Adam to try to pacify his crazy cousin, win the trust of the local sheriff, and find out the identity of the dark Druid who’s killing off Adam’s relatives. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lyndsey Ellis’s debut novel, Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books 2021) tells the story of Justine Holmes, who is mourning her husband’s death and grappling with both societal and family tensions. It’s 2015, and the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri are still simmering after the fatal police shooting sparked a national debate about use-of-force law, militarization of police, and the relationship between the police and African Americans. Justine’s adult children, an unemployed former activist who is angry at her mother, a realtor still mourning the loss of her only child, and a defeated politician who struggles with his sexual identity, are all mourning their own losses. Tension builds as Justine faces her activist past, her marriage to an abusive husband, and her unquenched longing for family peace, but the only thing that makes her feel alive is stealing small items from other people’s funerals. Lyndsey Ellis is a fiction writer, essayist, and novelist. Her work has appeared in Kweli Journal, Catapult, Fiction Writers Review, Electric Literature, Joyland, Entropy, Shondaland, and several anthologies. Ellis was a recipient of the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her fiction. She’s currently a prose editor for great weather for MEDIA and The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose & Thought. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where she enjoys thrift stores, bike riding and horror films when she’s not reading or writing. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Erin Jessee of the University of Glasgow, with her Rwandan co-author Jerome Irankunda, and illustrator Christian Mugarura, and translator Sylvere Mwizerwa have published a graphic novel titled Nyiragitwa (Mudacumura Publishing House, 2021). It tells the story of Nyiragitwa, a Rwandan woman who is thought to have lived in the 17th century. The first in a series of graphic novels about Rwandans living in the pre-colonial era, Nyiragitwa provides insight into how Rwandan women might have lived and contributed to their communities in the past. The story is based on the oral histories of Jan Vansina, of the University of Wisconsin, in the 1950s and 1960s. Nyiragitwa’s life history was shared with Vansina by a Rwandan elder named Ndamyumugabe. Erin and I had a wide-ranging conversation about publishing for Rwandans, the absence of women in Rwanda’s pre-colonial history and the value of collaborative work. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Bron Williams about her book I Have Seen the Moon: Reflections on Nauru (2017). Mary Anne Radmacher wrote, "I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." Have you ever looked at the moon from a different angle? I don't mean looking at it upside down as you might have done as a child, through your legs or hanging from the monkey bars. I mean, have you ever looked at the moon and it looked upside down? I know the moon is round and that there really is no up or down side to a circle, but I'm talking about a quarter moon or a crescent moon. Have you ever seen a crescent moon where the crescent just doesn't seem to be in the right place? That's how it seemed to me when I lived and worked on Nauru. Nauru, the Pleasant Island, is a tiny island nation just 23 km around, lying in the Pacific Ocean 30km south of the equator and some 2800km north-west of Australia. It is a typical tropical island - palm trees, warm blue seas, smiling locals and cheap food. It also houses one of Australia's off-shore detention centres, and it was here that I worked, off and on, for 15 months. In the months after I returned to Australia permanently I realised that inside me I had built wall. This wall was not to keep things out, nor to keep things in. it was merely a wall constructed from all the events, people, memories, impressions and emotions that made up my time working in off-shore processing in Nauru. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Andy Choi about his novel Slow Hot (Schism Press, 2021). "The principal narratives of Slow Hot (Schism Press, 2021) intersect, contrast, and complement one another like the panels in an intricate silk bojagi. Shards of text depicting our digital alienation and oversaturated connectivity in the age of apocalypse cut into a young Korean's journey home, the ghosts he encounters there, the shamanistic reinvention of his queer voice in the oppressive sweat of a subtropical forest. Like the invasive species he mentions, from Asia to North America, Choi vividly captures not only a sense of transpacific longing, but the need to belong on a more elemental level, so that whichever direction he takes us all we can do is marvel at what he creates along the way and thank him most profusely for the trip, for the refuge it gave us." (Gary J Shipley, author of Warewolff!) "What if love could save you but also kill you? That is the riddle at the heart of this iconoclastic, playful, prismatic debut novel. In Slow Hot our world is remade and revealed in what is almost like a firefly opera-brilliant flashes in the dark spelling out Choi's vision of what America both is and could become-a placeless empire committed to war at any cost, where survival requires of you something you may never be able to provide. And yet this is offered in a profound and even gentle way. We learn, in the process, the consolations of a vision with no false hopes." (Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh). Adhy Kim is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Steven Tagle speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “Notes on Looking Back,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Steven talks about writing this essay, originally in Greek, as a way to explore his love of the language and the experience of learning, speaking, and writing in it. Steven first came to Greece several years ago as a Fulbright Fellow. He discusses his current writing project about borders and migration, and the time he spent visiting and getting to know a family in a refugee camp in Greece. Steven also talks about life in Greece—how friendly and welcoming Greek people can be to outsiders, and how the country weathered the pandemic. When he interned at The Common, Steven spearheaded the magazine’s first podcast series. Steven Tagle is the recipient of fellowships from the Institute of Current World Affairs, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Lambda Literary, and Fulbright Greece, as well as a Soros Fellowship for New Americans. A graduate of the UMass Amherst MFA, he has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Hobart, them, and Nea Estia. Originally from California, he now lives in Greece. Read his essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/notes-on-looking-back. Read more from Steven at steventagle.com, or follow him on Twitter @steventagle. Also discussed in this podcast:

An essay with photos in the Los Angeles Review of Books, about a refugee camp in Greece

Steven’s current writing project, funded by a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs: a series of dispatches about Greece as a cultural crossroads

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Why not just torture this main character and make his children completely disappear?” That’s the terrifying premise behind Deep Dive (Angry Robot, 2022), the debut novel by author Ron Walters, which sets a videogame developer on a thrilling virtual reality adventure which is equal parts Inception and Matrix, and perhaps a little Parenthood too. Creating a story that is a relentlessly thrilling and page-turning science fiction story is one challenge. But Deep Dive also has a strong emotional core, that of a parent whose worst fear has come true. And so aside from nefarious government organizations doing shady things, we’re also treated to some modern parenting issues. Such as regrets over trying to figure out that all-important work-life balance—and what happens when you can’t and one side of it almost completely vanishes? This emotional pull within a fascinating VR-centric plot will undoubtedly resonate with all readers, but it will especially speak to those with children who face similar struggles. “A lot of people I know who read science fiction and fantasy are parents. It goes back to the whole idea of wanting to see yourself reflected in fiction. And so seeing parents ‘on page’ is hugely important—and nice when it happens.” Ron Walters is a former journalist, college registrar, and stay-at-home dad who writes science fiction and fantasy for all ages. A native of Savannah, GA, he currently lives in Germany with his wife, two daughters, and two rescue dogs. Dan Hanks is the co-host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire and Swashbucklers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Swashbucklers

Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire

Two children stumble upon a mass grave in the forest outside of Minsk in Belarus where the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, buried tens of thousands of innocent victims of torture. The Singing Forest, by Judith McCormack (Biblioasis 2021) weaves the story of a low-rung enforcer of that torture in pre-WWII Belarus and a modern-day Canadian lawyer on the team prosecuting long-forgotten crimes. Stefan Drozd’s life from earliest childhood lacked anything resembling kindness, nurturing, or morality. He has no understanding of human interaction, never had a friend, and did whatever he had to do to survive, even when that required torturing, murder, or lying to get into Canada after the war. Years later, Drozd is in his nineties and doesn't understand why anyone is making a fuss about something that happened so long ago. Leah Jarvis, a somewhat timid and confused young lawyer from an eccentric family, is helping prosecute him for war crimes. Leah knows that Drozd is guilty, but she needs hard evidence. While working on this case, she grapples with her own history – the death of her mother, the disappearance of her father, and her erratic upbringing by three uncles. Leah questions her Jewish heritage and wonders how a person becomes evil, how power is wielded by those who have it, and how justice is served. This is a beautifully written, lyrical novel about truth, heritage, and memory. Judith McCormack was born outside Chicago and grew up in Toronto, with brief stints in Montreal and Vancouver. Her first short story was nominated for the Journey Prize, and the next three were selected for the Coming Attractions Anthology. Her collection of stories, The Rule of Last Clear Chance, was nominated for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and was named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and Mail. Her work has been published in the Harvard Review, Descant and The Fiddlehead, and one of her stories has been turned into a short film by her twin sister, Naomi McCormack, an award-winning filmmaker. Her most recent short story in the Harvard Review was recorded as a spoken word version by The Drum and has been anthologized in 14: Best Canadian Short Stories. Backspring, her first novel, was shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award in 2016. McCormack has several law degrees, which have mostly served to convince her that law is a branch of fiction, and she tries to point out as often as possible that Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Paul Cézanne, Cole Porter and Geraldo Rivera were lawyers. She is a recipient of the Guthrie Award for outstanding public service and contributions to access to justice, and the Law Society Medal for outstanding service in the highest ideals of the profession. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

As the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia and host the first annual gay pride in the Sinophone Pacific, Taiwan is a historic center of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. With this blazing path of activism, queer Taiwanese literature has also risen in prominence and there is a growing popular interest in stories about the transgression of gender and sexual norms. Since the lifting of martial law in 1987, queer authors have redefined Taiwan’s cultural scene, and throughout the 1990s many of their works have won the most prestigious literary awards and accolades. This anthology provides a deeper understanding of queer literary history in Taiwan. It includes a selection of short stories, previously untranslated, written by Taiwanese authors dating from 1975 to 2020. Readers are introduced to a wide range of themes: bisexuality, aging, mobility, diaspora, AIDS, indigeneity, recreational drug use, transgender identity, surrogacy, and many others. The diversity of literary tropes and styles canvased in this book reflects the profusion of gender and sexual configurations that has marked Taiwan’s complex history for the past half century. Queer Taiwanese Literature: A Reader (Cambria Press, 2021) is a timely and important resource for readers interested in Taiwan studies, queer literature, and global cultural studies. Howard Chiang is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China and Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

First place winner of the 2021 Elgin Award, The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee (Jaberwocky, 2020) is an epic fantasy about a young king who must defend his kingdom against a number of outside forces, both human and terrifyingly otherworldly. Lee draws from Chinese culture to create a legendary figure in King Xau, one of honor, nobility, and subtle magic. With light, clean, and lyrical language, these poems shape an epic story of heroism and humanity. “Who saw them raft over the river, three hours before daybreak? Who saw their half-dark lanterns glimmer on helmut and shield? The heron in the reeds; the crane startled to air.” — from “Crossing”, The Sign of the Dragon Mary Soon Lee was born and raised in London, but now lives in Pittsburgh. She writes both fiction and poetry, and has won the Rhysling Award and the Elgin Award. Her two latest books are from opposite ends of the poetry spectrum: Elemental Haiku, containing haiku for each element of the periodic table, and The Sign of the Dragon, an epic fantasy with Chinese elements. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thinking in 20th century Literature. If you enjoy this conversation, range backwards through the RtB archives for comparable talks with Jennifer Egan, Helen Garner, Orhan Pamuk, Zadie Smith, Samuel Delany and many more. It’s a rangy conversation. John begins by raving about Caryl’s italics–he in turn praises Faulkner’s. Corina and Caryl explore his debt (cf. his The European Tribe) to American writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Meeting Baldwin was scary–back in those days before there were “writers besporting themselves on every university campus.” Caryl praises the joy of being a football fan (Leeds United), reflects on his abiding loyalty to his class and geographic origins and his fondness for the moments of Sunday joy that allow people to endure. John raises Orhan Pamuk’s claim (In Novel Dialogue last season) that the novel is innately middle-class; Caryl says that it’s true that as a form it has always taken time and money to make–and to read. But “vicars and middle class people fall in love, too; they get betrayed and let down…a gamut of emotion that’s as wide as anybody else.” He remains drawn to writers haunted by the past: Eliot, W.G. Sebald, the huge influence of Faulkner trying to stitch the past to the present. Mentioned in the Episode

James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charley, The Fire Next Time

Richard Wright, Native Son

Johnny Pitts, Afropean

Caryl Phillips, Dancing in the Dark

J. M. Coetzee, “What We like to Forget” (On Caryl Phillips)

Graham Greene (e.g Brighton Rock and The Quiet American) wrote in “The Lost Childhood” (1951) that at age 14 ” I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf…From that moment I began to write.”

Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom

Read a transcript here Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Now that science has granted eternal life and youth to all, the world is a place of endless opportunity to live out one's dreams and fulfill one's desires. With death unnecessary, it becomes optional and suicide is celebrated when chosen. However the main character, 10,000 year old Warren, has fought off the urge to die but begins to contemplate making this choice for himself. Matthew C. Kruger's book What The Living Know: A Novel of Suicide and Philosophy (Nfb Publishing, 2020) tackles questions such as: How many times can you send someone on their way and not start to feel as if it might be your time to go? How much life will you live before you come to say "that's enough for me"? Or, through it all, will your love for life always endure? Our conversation discusses the importance of, not just having a philosophy, but having a lived and embodied philosophy: one that's procedural and takes into account the messiness and hardships of each and every day. While the book is a hard read mentally -- and perhaps spiritually -- it comes to the beautiful and paradoxical conclusion that there might not be a point to living but there's no point in dying either, that life is worth living, and that you should let yourself be moved and transformed through struggle. Not easy, certainly, but worthwhile. Sarah Kearns (@annotated_sci) reads about scholarship, the sciences, and philosophy, and is likely over-caffeinated. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster--Richard, an expat and wealthy water-bottling executive with a secret daughter; the daughter, Anne, an architect who drafts affordable housing structures for a global NGO; a small-time drug trafficker, Leopold, who pines for a beautiful call girl; Sonia and her business partner, Dieudonné, who are followed by a man they believe is the vodou spirit of death; Didier, an emigrant musician who drives a taxi in Boston; Sara, a mother haunted by the ghosts of her children in an IDP camp; her husband, Olivier, an accountant forced to abandon the wife he loves; their son, Jonas, who haunts them both; and Ma Lou, the old woman selling produce in the market who remembers them all. Artfully weaving together these lives, witness is given to the desolation wreaked by nature and by man. Brilliantly crafted, fiercely imagined, and deeply haunting, What Storm, What Thunder: A Novel (Tin House Books, 2021) is a singular, stunning record, a reckoning of the heartbreaking trauma of disaster, and--at the same time--an unforgettable testimony to the tenacity of the human spirit. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Julia Fine about her new book The Upstairs House: A Novel (Harper Collins, 2021). We talked about a lot of things, including how Goodnight Moon is surreal and how one decides to become a novelist. Here's a bit about the book... Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she's also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation--a thesis on mid-century children's literature. Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children's book writer Margaret Wise Brown--author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon--whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle--and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger. Using Megan's postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman's fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and "barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances" (Washington Post). Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Noor Naga speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about co-editing The Common’s first-of-its-kind portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, which appeared in Issue 22. Noor penned an introduction to the portfolio, titled “Who Writes the Arabian Gulf?”, which explores her experience growing up in the Gulf with no real contemporary literature written for, by, or about that diverse population. Noor discusses her idea to create the portfolio, what she enjoyed about assembling it from submissions, and what themes unite the pieces that became part of it. She also talks about her forthcoming novel from Graywolf Press, and why an earlier novel didn’t find a home in publishing. Noor Naga is an Alexandrian writer who was born in Philadelphia, raised in Dubai, studied in Toronto, and now lives in Cairo. Her verse-novel Washes, Prays, which won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and an Arab American Book Award, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2020. Her debut novel If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English won the Graywolf Press Africa Prize and is forthcoming in April 2022 from Graywolf Press. Read her essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/who-writes-the-arabian-gulf. Read more from Noor at noornaga.com, or follow her on Twitter @noor_naga. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of The Common and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sue Lynn Tan about her new book Daughter of the Moon Goddess (Harper Voyager, 2022). The immortal Xinyin lives a quiet life on the moon with her mother the Moon Goddess, and a devoted servant. When an innocent Xinyin ignores her mother’s warning, her actions raise the suspicion of the Empress of the Celestial Kingdom, who swoops in for an unannounced visit. Xinyin has never questioned her isolation, but now her mother reveals that her existence is a secret which would lead to punishment for them both, if it were known. Xinyin is forced to flee her home before the Empress returns, but her travels are interrupted by a storm. She ends up in the last place where she would want to be—the court of the Celestial Kingdom itself. No one suspects her true identity. Xinyin must keep her secret safe, even as she becomes closer and closer to the Empress’ own son, Prince Liwei, who is as compassionate as his mother is cruel. When their growing love for each other threaten the path each should take, Xinyin decides the best course of action is become an archer in the Emperor’s army. But not all the danger will come from the monsters she faces on the battlefield. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Karen Odden’s latest mystery (Down a Dark River, Crooked Lane Books 2021) it’s 1878 in London, and Scotland Yard inspector Michael Corravan, a former thief and bare-knuckles boxer, is battling demons, including his urge to drown his troubles in drink. In the wake of a police corruption scandal that threatens to shut down Scotland Yard, Corravan is assigned the case of a young, wealthy woman whose corpse has been set adrift in a small boat on the Thames River. At first, the murder seems to be linked to a stolen heirloom necklace, but then a second dead woman appears and then a third. As the press riles up London and blames Scotland Yard, Corravan’s search for clues takes him from insane asylums to jewelry stores and from brothels to wealthy Mayfair homes. Then his lady friend is threatened, and Inspector Corravan must confront the darkness in his own past to understand the killer and prevent yet another murder from taking place. KAREN ODDEN received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University, writing her dissertation on Victorian railway disasters and the origins of PTSD. She has taught at UW-Milwaukee, written essays for numerous books and journals, and edited for the journal Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP). She freely admits she might be more at home in Victorian London than today, especially when she tries to do anything complicated on her iPhone. All of her mysteries are set in 1870s London. Her first novel, A LADY IN THE SMOKE, about a young woman in a 1874 railway crash, was a USA Today bestseller. In A DANGEROUS DUET, Nell Hallam, an ambitious young pianist stumbles on a notorious crime ring while playing in a Soho music hall. In A TRACE OF DECEIT, Annabel Rowe, a young painter at the Slade School of Art, must delve below the glitter of the art and auction world to uncover the truth about her brother's murder. DOWN A DARK RIVER is Karen's fourth novel and the first in the Inspector Corravan series; the sequel, UNDER A VEILED MOON, will be released in November 2022. An avid desert hiker, Karen lives in Arizona with her family and her rescue beagle muse, Rosy. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Julie Hedlund. Julie is an award-winning children’s book author, founder of the 12 x 12 Picture Book Writing Challenge, co-founder of Picture Book Summit, co-creator with Emma Walton Hamilton of the Complete Picture Book Submissions System, and a frequent speaker at industry events such as SCBWI conferences. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A wonderful conversation with renowned editor Harold Underdown who founded and runs The Purple Crayon, a respected website with information about the children's publishing world talks about his favorite children's books growing up, his original plan of becoming a school teacher which morphed into an unexpected role as assistant editor. He discusses the importance of reader response (including those responses unanticipated by the author). Harold explains why during his career he preferred helping hundreds of authors publish children's books rather than write his own and how his career as a teacher helped him understand the needs of children to see themselves in the books. Note: Since the interview took place, Harold has taken on a new position as executive editor at Kane Press. Mel Rosenberg is a professor of microbiology (Tel Aviv University, emeritus) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. He is also the founder of Ourboox, a web platform that allows anyone to create and share awesome flipbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Most people believe that when they grow up, they need to “put away childish things”—a wise strategy for holding a job, paying the rent and raising a family. But what if you need to fight a malevolent pirate who threatens to destroy the universe? In that case, a toy War Wizard blaster might come in handy. In British author Dan Hanks’s second novel, Swashbucklers (Angry Robot, 2021), the four lead characters arm themselves with War Wizards and other toys retrofitted to inflict maximum damage as they try to stop an evil that threatens their town and the world. “The idea originally was to do a Ghostbusters thing, but then it became about ‘How would the Ghostbusters do their jobs as parents?’” Hanks says. “How would the Ghostbusters have dealt with fighting ghosts while also trying to find babysitters and go to nativity plays and things like that? What if the Goonies had all grown up and they had their own kids?” The story addresses the power and limits of nostalgia while remaining firmly rooted in the contemporary world, juxtaposing the surrealness of events like Brexit and the pandemic with the absurdity of a giant inflatable Santa Claus stomping on shoppers in the heart of Manchester. The heroes hail from a town based on Hanks’ home. “I used my local bookstore, the local café that is a big favorite of mine. I got everyone's permission before I threw them into the book,” Hanks says. “It's such a beautiful part of the world, and I kind of wanted to just trash it a bit with some supernatural crap. And I did.” Hanks lives in England’s Peak District. He is the author of Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire. He also writes screenplays and comics. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

This week on Recall this Book, another delightful crossover episode from our sister podcast Novel Dialogue, which puts scholars and writers together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. (If you want to hear more, RtB 53 featured Nobel Orhan Pamuk, RtB 54 brought in Helen Garner, and in RtB 72 we haveCaryl Phillips). Who better to chat with John and Jennifer Egan--prolific and prize-winning American novelist--than Ivan Kreilkamp? The distinguished Indiana Victorianist showed his Egan expertise last year in his witty book, A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread. Jennifer Egan © Pieter M. van Hattem Their conversation ranges widely over Egan’s oeuvre–not to mention 18th and 19th century literature. Trollope, Richardson and Fielding are praised and compared to modern phenomena like TikTok and gamers streaming (including gamers streaming chess, a very special instance of getting inside someone else’s thought process). The PowerPoint chapter in Goon Squad gets special treatment, and tantalizing details from Egan’s forthcoming novel, The Candy House (April, 2022) make an appearance. Egan discusses her authorial impulse towards camouflage, her play with genre’s relationship to specialized lingos and argots–and the way a genre’s norms and structure can function like a “lifeline” and also a “portal.” Mentioned in the Episode

Jennifer Egan: Visit from the Goon Squad; Look at Me; Manhattan Beach; The Keep

Samuel Richardson: Clarissa; Pamela

Henry Fielding, Shamela

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Patrick O’Brian (e.g. Master and Commander)

Alfred Hitchcock, Lifeboat

Read the transcript here. Elizabeth Ferry is Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Email: ferry@brandeis.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Even for someone trained from birth to manage a farm, stepping into an inheritance at the age of twenty is not easy. Yet this is the situation facing Promise Mears Crawford when Sunday’s Orphan opens in 1930. Trouble comes at her from many directions. Her adoptive uncle, Taylor Crawford, constructed his farm according to the principles of racial equality, in defiance of the Jim Crow laws in effect all around him. Taylor had the standing to resist opposition from his neighbors, but Promise lacks both his stature and the resources she needs to fulfill the obligations he took on. Her financial constraints land her in conflict with the farm’s foreman, Fletch Hart, a long-time friend whose dreams of becoming a physician she cannot support due to lack of funds. But the potential loss of Fletch’s friendship pales in comparison to the threat posed by the arrival of Daffron Mears, a self-appointed Jim Crow enforcer whose propensity for vigilante violence is well known throughout the county. Daffron wants a job—in fact, he wants Promise’s farm, which he regards as stolen from him by Taylor—and he is not above manipulating Jim Crow laws to get his way. He implies that he will report Promise to the authorities if she turns him down while giving work to Fletch, a Black man. To protect her friend, Promise agrees to Daffron’s demand, if only for a week. But Daffron’s return to the farm that he left twenty years before sets off a series of crises that cast doubt on everything Promise thought she knew about herself and her origins. Catherine Gentile admits in our interview that this was a difficult novel to write. For the same reasons, it is a difficult novel to read. But its exploration of a topic too often buried beneath platitudes about the need for change and its particular relevance to the questions of racial injustice that have been front and center the last two years make it an important book. Catherine Gentile is the author of The Quiet Roar of the Hummingbird, a fictionalized memoir, and Small Lies: A Collection of Short Stories, as well as Sunday’s Orphan. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her next book, Song of the Sinner, will appear in 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 2016, the city of Mumbai was blanketed in toxic smog. The source? Fires at the nearby dumping ground of Deonar: the country’s oldest. The Deonar fire became an embarrassment for Mumbai, coming right before an international expo meant to announce the city to international investors and business. Law enforcement immediately blamed scrap dealers who lived alongside the landfill. The pickers are men and women–poor, sometimes very young–who comb the mountain for waste that can be resold: metal, plastic, cloth and, if they’re lucky, gold and jewelry. Saumya Roy’s Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings (Profile Books, 2021) looks into the lives of a few of these pickers, as they try to survive among the mountains of trash, as government officials and judges squabble above them trying to figure out what to do. More of Saumya’s work on landfills can be found here. In this interview, we talk about the trash mountains of Deonar, the families that live there, and how they navigate life on the fringes of one of India’s largest cities. Saumya Roy is a journalist and activist based in Mumbai. In 2010, she co-founded the Vandana Foundation to support the livelihoods of Mumbai's poorest micro-entrepreneurs; through this she met the community who depend on Deonar. Her writing has appeared in Forbes India Magazine, wsj.com and Bloomberg News among others, and she has contributed a chapter to Dharavi: The Cities Within (HarperCollins India: 2013), an anthology of essays on Asia's largest slum. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Mountain Tales. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ghastly Tales from the Yotsuya Kaidan (Chisokudo, 2020) is a newly revised and corrected translation of what is perhaps the most famous and oft told tales of horror in Japan. The legend of Iwa and her curse blurs the lines between fact and fiction as it spins its terrifying tale of ghostly vengeance. For nearly three hundred years in the repertoire of itinerant storytellers, in dramatic performances on stage, and in modern adaptations for anime and film, Iwa’s story has lost none of its intoxicating power over the imagination. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

One of the first members of Albert Samaha’s family introduced in his memoir Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books, 2021) is his uncle Spanky: a baggage handler in San Francisco’s airport. Spanky emigrated to the United States from his home country, the Philippines, where he lived a very different life as a rockstar: one of the founding members of VST & Co., one of the country’s most famous bands. That’s merely one of the family members Albert Samaha profiles in Concepcion which traces the lives of generations of Filipinos, and Filipino-Americans, trying to find a better life for themselves and navigating the ups-and-downs of American society and politics. Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and inequality editor at BuzzFeed News whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly, and the Riverfront Times, among other outlets. A Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, he is also the author of Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City (PublicAffairs: 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ESPN Literary Sports Writing Award and winner of the New York Society Library’s 2019 Hornblower Award. We’re also joined by Helen Li. Helen is a freelance journalist originally based in Asia, and has since relocated to the United States. She joined us previously for our interview with Amish Mulmi on All Roads Lead North. The three of us talk about immigration, U.S.-Filipino relations, class and how that all relates to the immigrant experience: both in general, and regarding the many members of Albert’s family. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Concepcion. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Stoking Hope (D.X. Varos, 2021), C.K. McDonough’s debut novel, opens in an early 1900’s southwest Pennsylvania coal town. Nineteen-year-old Martha gets pregnant, her father banishes her, and she’s sent to a home for unwed mothers in neighboring West Virginia. She gives birth, and when her daughter Frances is taken from her six years later, Martha agrees to marry her widowed boss with hopes of getting her daughter back. The loveless marriage allows Frances to stay in school and pursue her dream of becoming a chemist, until long-held secrets cut that dream short. Stoking Hope is a family saga that travels through five decades of challenges and heartache with moments of unexpected generosity and joy. The novel culminates with the creation of Kevlar, a life-saving fabric. A Uniontown, Pennsylvania native, C. K. McDonough has a journalism degree from West Virginia University’s Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, and twenty years’ experience in the communications industry. She says writing video scripts and advertising copy is fine but writing a novel is bliss! A self-proclaimed history nerd, Caren has turned her love of research and the written word into Stoking Hope, her first novel. When not writing, Caren is reading, devouring books of every genre. She also loves to ski, hike, and garden but her favorite pastime is hanging with her pets. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Night Came With Many Stars (Godine 2021) ebbs and flows with people who only take or destroy, balanced by those who give or heal. And everything centers on a family. A Kentucky father treats Carol, his thirteen-year-old motherless daughter like a servant up to the moment he loses her in a poker game. It’s 1933, and Carol’s aching heart begins a novel of stories filled with heartache or joy that weaves back and forth across decades. Carol gets rescued on the side of the road and finds a home with two women who help pregnant teenagers, a woman survives a botched self-induced abortion, a Black family saves a starving white boy, and Carol’s grandson wins money playing poker. In this beautifully-written novel, characters are defined by what they do, not by what they are. Simon Van Booy is the award-winning and best-selling author of fifteen books that include: The Secret Lives of People in Love (short-listed for the Vilcek Prize), Love Begins in Winter (awarded the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Everything Beautiful Began After, The Illusion of Separateness, Tales of Accidental Genius, Father's Day, The Sadness of Beautiful Things (short-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize), two novels for children, Gertie Milk & The Keeper of Lost Things and Gertie Milk & The Great Keeper Rescue, along with three anthologies of philosophy, Why We Fight, Why Our Decisions Don't Matter and Why We Need Love. He has has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, National Public Radio, the BBC, and the Chinese edition of ELLE. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. In 2013, he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

As Jinny Webber explains in this interview, a “bedtrick” is a literary device through which a character is deceived into spending the night with someone unexpected, trapping that character into an unwanted commitment. William Shakespeare used the device in All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. So it is a fitting title for this novel about the gender-bending that was so much a part of Shakespeare’s comedies—most notably, Twelfth Night. There were practical reasons for having female characters appear as men throughout much of a play, but Webber takes this historical reality and twists it into the essence of her plot. Her main character, Alexander Cooke, is a gifted actor with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the company where Shakespeare serves as playwright. Sander, as Alexander is known to family and friends, specializes in female roles, which in Elizabethan times could be played only by males—usually pre-pubescent boys. Only a select group of confidants knows that Sander was born Kate Collins, a village girl who fled her home to avoid an unwanted marriage and found her place among the traveling actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. When Sander’s brother—Johnny, another member of the acting company—gets his lover pregnant and refuses to marry her, Sander steps in to protect the mother-to-be, Frances, and her unborn child. Although it is illegal for two women to marry in sixteenth-century London, Sander persuades a priest to perform the ceremony. Frances’s position as Elizabeth I’s Silkwoman is secured, but the story of Sander and Frances is just beginning. Like all married couples, they must find a way to live together, even as England itself suffers from unrest and uncertainty caused by the aging queen’s reluctance to name her successor. Filled with quotations from Shakespeare and an insider’s view of his plays, this is a charming story of love triumphing in the midst of intolerance. A longtime college teacher, Jinny Webber has always been fascinated by the theater and society of the Elizabethan era, and in particular its complicated gender roles on stage and off. She has written short stories, screenplays, and novels, of which Bedtrick is the latest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mary O’Donoghue speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Safety Advice for Staying Indoors,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Mary talks about crafting a story that explores two points of view within the same Irish family, both stuck inside during a strong storm, both coping with loss. She also discusses her work translating Irish-language poets, her interest in stories that require the reader to connect their own dots, and what it’s like to edit fiction for AGNI while writing her own short stories, too. Mary O’Donoghue is a writer from the west of Ireland living in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Kenyon Review, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and elsewhere. She is fiction editor at AGNI. Read her story in The Common at thecommononline.org/safety-advice-for-staying-indoors. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Patricia A. Jackson’s debut novel Forging a Nightmare immerses the reader in a world of menace-—fallen angels and demigods whose history of alliances and resentments stretch to the beginning of time. Jackson puts a fresh spin on biblical characters like Gabriel and Lucifer by turning them into FBI agents, a parish priest, a homeless preacher and other seemingly ordinary folks who pursue ancient vendettas in modern day New York City. On the surface, the story is about a series of grisly murders. But underneath, it is about much more: a son grappling with his father's abandonment, the persecution of “the other” and the revelation that maybe Hell isn't the unremittingly evil place we thought it was. The hero is Michael Childs, a Black FBI agent who competes in jousts (at the opening of the book, he shows up at the scene of a grisly murder clad in medieval armor) and who (unbeknownst to him) descends from divinity. His sidekick is Anaba Raines, a Black former Marine and the eponymous Nightmare, whose transformation into a fierce and hellish horse makes her a formidable foe to angels seeking to do Michael harm. Like Childs, Jackson is an experienced equestrian. “I think every character is an extension of the author, and I am Michael Childs,” Jackson says. “I would go to horse shows and I would be in my boots and my breaches and my show jacket, and I would go to the mall or I would go to the bank, or I would go to the jewelry store dressed in my duds, sometimes with odor of horse upon me. And people would just kind of look around. And it wasn’t just because you were dressed in horse gear. You are a Black girl dressed in horse gear, and they had never seen that before.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

When Cassandra Lane finds herself pregnant at thirty-five, the knowledge sends her on a poignant exploration of memory to prepare for her entry into motherhood. She moves between the twentieth-century rural South and present-day Los Angeles, reimagining the intimate life of her great-grandparents Mary Magdelene Magee and Burt Bridges, and Burt's lynching at the hands of vengeful white men in his southern town. We Are Bridges: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021) turns to creative nonfiction to reclaim a family history from violent erasure so that a mother can gift her child with an ancestral blueprint for their future. Haunting and poetic, this debut traces the strange fruit borne from the roots of personal loss in one Black family--and considers how to take back one's American story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Girl Singer (Fireside Industries, 2021), her latest collection of poems, Marianne Worthington weaves together nature writing, feminism, and country music to form a powerful strand of interlocking poems. In the book's first section, Worthington inhabits famous woman singers like Hazel Dickens and Sara Carter, but also unsung artists who struggled to find a voice or an audience in the patriarchal world of country music. Later sections pivot to more personal themes, but the resonances of the first section remain in lines that recall the lyrics of folksongs, evocations of the singing of birds, and poems that make use of traditional song structure. The collection as a whole is an immensely satisfying volume that should appeal to poetry fans in general, as well as fans of country, folk, and old-time music. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway (TriQuarterly 2021) tells the story of an African American family trying to survive the early decades of the twentieth century. The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed. They settle in Harlem, but the Spanish flu is raging around the globe, and Percy’s father doesn’t survive. His mother, DeLilah, is pregnant with Selma. Years later, Percy witnesses a murder in New York, and DeLilah sends him back to Sedalia. She does her best to make a home for her daughter, but Selma’s childhood is cut short when a brutal rape leaves her pregnant. After her baby is kidnapped, the city’s first ‘colored policeman’, Weldon Haynie Thomas, vows that this kidnapping will not end like the Lindbergh kidnapping. Gone Missing in Harlem touches upon many things, including African American soldiers coming home from WWI, the Great Migration north, and the world of 1930’s Harlem. Gone Missing in Harlem is historical, African American literary fiction and a mystery, but it’s ultimately a novel about the lengths a mother will go to protect her family. Karla FC Holloway, Ph.D., M.L.S., is James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Professor of Law at Duke University. She is former Dean of Humanities and Social Science Faculty at Duke. Her research and teaching focused on African American cultural studies, bioethics, literature, and law. Her national and institutional board memberships have included the Greenwall Foundation’s Advisory Board in Bioethics, the Trent Center for Bioethics and Humanities, the North Carolina Humanities Council, the College Board, and the Hastings Center. She is a co-founder of Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and founding co-director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. Professor Holloway is the recipient of national awards and foundation fellowships including the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Residency Fellowship and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard University’s Du Bois Institute. Professor Holloway is the author of over fifty essays and ten books including Codes of Conduct: Race, Ethics and the Color of Our Character (1995), Passed On: African American Mourning Stories (2002), BookMarks: Reading in Black and White (2006), and Legal Fictions: Constituting Race, Composing Literature (2014). In her emerita years she has shifted to fiction and has published A Death in Harlem (2019) and Gone Missing in Harlem (2021) both with Triquarterly. She’s at work on the final book in the “in Harlem” series, A Haunting in Harlem, and tweets on bioethics, law, society, and popular cultures from @ProfHolloway. When she’s not tweeting, or writing, she’s deep into reading fiction or painting miniature acrylic landscapes and abstract compositions. Anything, she says, with colors that swirl into cerulean. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Priyanka Sacheti speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Oman is Mars: An Alien All Along,” which appears in a portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Priyanka talks about her feeling of not belonging anywhere—born in Australia to an Indian family, but growing up in Oman as a third culture kid. She also discusses her work as a poet and an artist, and her experience being stranded between countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Priyanka Sacheti is a writer and poet based in Bangalore, India. She grew up in Oman and was educated at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford in the UK. She has been published in many publications with a special focus on art, gender, diaspora, and identity. Her literary work has appeared in many literary journals, such as Barren, Parentheses, Jaggery Lit, and The Lunch Ticket, as well as various past and forthcoming anthologies. She’s currently working on a poetry and short story collection. Read her essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/oman-is-mars-an-alien-all-along. Follow Priyanka on Twitter at @priyankasacheti. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

ND stages a trialogue this week with MacArthur "Genius" Cristina Rivera Garza and Notre Dame critics Kate Marshall and Dominique Vargas. Professor Rivera Garza recalls roadtripping through Mexico in a bochito (a Volkswagen). For her, such drives became the mother of literary invention: there was no car radio and when family conversations died down, the window (and not an iPhone) became the screen that occupied her. In a more serious vein, CRG, Kate, and Dominique also discuss the role of linguistic mobility and translation in bringing Rivera Garza’s novels and essays to English-speaking audiences. CRG reflects on how books change when they cross languages and reminds us that the United States is the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. This episode productively estranges us from a number of received narratives about national monolingualism and experimental writing. Professor Rivera Garza rejects the notion of aesthetic individualism and the idealized image of the solitary writer. She declares that language always has plural roots and her work is underpinned by the belief that we only become individuals when community fails. Mentioned in the Episode

Juan Rulfo

Rosario Castellanos

Ramón López Velarde

Virginia Woolf

Marguerite Duras

Suzanne Jill Levine & Aviva Kana, Translators of The Taiga Syndrome

Sarah Booker, Translator of Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country

Transcript available here. Aarthi Vadde is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. Email: aarthi.vadde@duke.edu. John Plotz is Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University and co-founder of the Brandeis Educational Justice Initiative. Email: plotz@brandeis.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Reyna Marder Gentin about her novel Both Are True (Moonshine Cove, 2021). Judge Jackie Martin's job is to impose order on the most chaotic families in New York City. So how is she blindsided when the man she loves walks out on her? Jackie Martin is a woman whose intelligence and ambition have earned her a coveted position as a judge on the Manhattan Family Court-and left her lonely at age 39. When she meets Lou Greenberg, Jackie thinks she's finally found someone who will accept her exactly as she is. But when Lou's own issues, including an unresolved yearning for his ex-wife, make him bolt without explanation, Jackie must finally put herself under the same microscope as the people she judges. When their worlds collide in Jackie's courtroom, she learns that sometimes love's greatest gift is opening you up to love others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rin Chupeco's Wicked As You Wish (Sourcebooks Fire, 2020) begins with our Filipina narrator, Tala, and her best friend, Alexei, who both attend high school in the small Arizona town of Invierno. Alexei has a few secrets. For one, he’s gay, but not out, and for another, he’s the exiled Prince of Avalon, hiding from the evil Snow Queen and her minions, which include the ICE, the US Immigrations Department. One can’t hide from the Snow Queen forever, though. Soon there are scary ice maidens roaming the halls of the local high school, hunting Alexei. Tala’s family, the Makilings, along with her Tias and Titos fight to protect Alexei but have a hard time against enemies that also include ogres and the undead. Luckily, reinforcements arrive when the Bandersnatchers, a group of teen magicians dedicated to Avalon, show up armed with various cool weapons and quips. And the adventure is just beginning. This mash-up offers a mix of everyone’s favourite fairytales. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Dina Greenberg about her new novel Nermina's Chance (Atmosphere Press, 2021). Nermina is a medical student in Sarajevo. She’s been raised in an educated family of Westernized, secular Muslims, but it’s 1992 and the Serbian Chetniks have started to destroy the city. Her mother and brother are murdered and Nermina is brutally raped. She manages to bribe her way out of Bosnia, flees with an orphaned five-year-old whom she leaves with relatives, and ultimately ends up in Portland, Oregon. She starts to rebuild her life and resolves to bring her own child into the world, but she’s twenty-four and can’t afford a medically induced pregnancy. So, she entices a ‘sperm donor’ who has no idea of her intentions. Through pregnancy and the first sixteen years of her daughter’s life, Nermina completes her degrees and begins counseling traumatized combat veterans. One of them turns out to be the brother of Nermina’s unknowing sperm donor. Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and The Millions, Dina Greenberg’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared widely in such journals as Bellevue Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, Split Rock Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Barely South, and Wilderness House Literary Review. Dina earned an MFA in fiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as managing editor for the literary journal Chautauqua. She teaches creative writing at the Cameron Art Museum and provides one-on-one writing coaching for victims of trauma. Her work leading creative writing workshops for combat veterans resulted in Nermina’s Chance. When she’s not writing, teaching, or reading, Dina loves to work transforming a previously litter-strewn median into what she and a group of neighbors hope will be a city oasis. She also loves iPhone photography, building things (think DIY compost tumbler, raised garden beds, etc.), and power walking on Wilmington, NC’s Riverwalk. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Great Britain’s Regency Era (1811–1820) has long been wildly popular as a subject of historical fiction yet overly focused on the romance genre. The towering figures of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer have tended to dominate the field to the point where even novels that are not primarily romances exist within Austen’s world. But as we can see from Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford & Sloane mystery series, far more was going on during the Regency than parties and marriage politics. Penrose’s London is a gritty place filled with canny urchins, men and women of science, engineers and international businessmen, gamblers and disgraced lords and satirists who make their living off the foibles and follies of the well-to-do. One such satirist is Charlotte Sloane—a young artist who writes under the pen name A.J. Quill. Her network of contacts—including the two urchins who live with her, known as Raven and Hawk—proves invaluable in untangling a series of murders, the first of which Bow Street is all too eager to blame on the Earl of Wrexford. She and Wrexford become reluctant partners, then friends, and by the time we reach book 5, Murder at the Royal Botanic Gardens, they are planning their wedding. Wrexford is an acclaimed amateur chemist, an interest that brings him into contact with most of London’s scientific elite and accounts for his and Charlotte’s attendance at a symposium being held the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. The death of a prominent botanist, visiting from the United States (then at war with Britain), is first written off as the result of a weak heart. But certain clues point to murder, and Wrexford and Sloane’s friends and family urge them to investigate. They soon realize this crime may have international implications, and the hunt for the killer is on. As with the Lady Sherlock mysteries, it’s best to read this series from beginning to end, as each book develops Charlotte’s and Wrexford’s relationship, revealing new insights into their past. The characters are fascinating, the plots fast-paced and complex, and the settings richly described. If you’ve been avoiding novels set in the Regency because you associate the era with pale and predictable romances, this series will open your eyes. Andrea Penrose is the bestselling author of Regency-era historical fiction, including the acclaimed Wrexford & Sloane mystery series. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her next book, Song of the Sinner, will appear in January 2022. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The next world war is 13 years away—that is, if you live in the world envisioned by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (Penguin, 2021). When writing about the intersection of combat and diplomacy, the co-authors draw from experience. Ackerman has worked in the White House and served five tours of duty as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. Stavridis, a retired United States Navy admiral, served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and, after leaving the Navy, as the dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. 2034 plays out a what-if scenario, starting with an incident between the Chinese and U.S. that escalates into a major conflict. “You could certainly say right now, vis-a-vis the United States’ relationship with China, that if we’re not in a Cold War, we are at least in sort of the foothills of a Cold War,” Ackerman says. Told through the eyes of multiple main characters from five nations, the escalating conflict begins to seem inevitable as deceit, posturing, and a game of chicken made it harder and harder for the countries’ leaders to back down. Ackerman feels that a conflict between the U.S. and China in real life is possible but not inevitable. “It's a cautionary tale. There's still time to take the exit ramp,” he says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Daniel Alexander Jones' Love Like Light: Plays and Performance Texts (53rd State Press, 2021) collects seven plays and performance texts from the past twenty-five years. Together, they provide a panoramic view of a remarkable playwright, songwriter, improviser, and performer. In our conversation we discuss Jones' early exposure to theatre as a high school student in Springfield, MA, his discovery of Ntozake Shange's work, his emergence in the Radical Alternative Theater scenes in Austin and the Twin Cities, and his more recent work at New York venues including Soho Rep and Joe's Pub. Love Like Light should be of interest to anyone interested in queer performance, Afromysticism, and abstract structures of performance writing. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Sara B. Fraser about her new novel Just River (Black Rose Writing, 2021). The Otis River flows through the once bustling city of Wattsville, a few hours north of NYC, reminding the remaining residents of better days. Cross-dressing Sam is okay with his new, minimum-wage job, as long as he gets to sing Karaoke twice a month. His neighbor and best friend, Carol, is a cashier who spreads love through her baking. Garnet, Carol’s daughter, is in prison after nearly killing her violent boyfriend, who visits her in prison. A couple of inmates learn that he’s rich and threaten Garnet with violence unless he sneaks in drugs for them. Carol and Sam try to help Garnet, but then an innocent boy is kidnapped and a dog is poisoned. The river is the only thing that can save them all. Sara B. Fraser is the author of the novels Long Division and Just River. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Carve, Jabberwock Review, the Forge, Wilderness House Literary Review, Salamander, Traveler’s Tales, and more. Fraser completed her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College and two master’s degrees, the first in Composition from the University of Massachusetts and the second in Education from Boston College. She is a high-school Spanish teacher, married to an Irishman, and mother of two boys. Her passions are surfing—she has trouble finding people willing to accompany her as she’ll drop everything even in the dead of winter if there’s swell (don’t tell her boss)—and fermenting things in her kitchen. She cultivates funny smelling stuff like kimchi, sauerkraut, vinegar, kombucha, and sourdough bread starter. Some people think scoby (a product of fermentation) is weird looking, but she loves it. She spends summers in Galicia and plans on retiring there. A random fact that may or may not indicate something about who she is: as a teenager she used to darn her socks. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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 Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Carin Clevidence speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Ghosts of the Southern Ocean,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Carin talks about how her experiences traveling to Antarctica on expeditions have changed over the years, and how that change comes through in her writing. She also discusses her 2011 novel The House on Salt Hay Road, and the novel she’s recently completed about an expedition to Antarctica. Carin Clevidence grew up in a family of naturalists and travelers. She is the author of a novel, The House on Salt Hay Road (FSG), as well as essays and short stories appearing in Guernica, the Washington Post, Off-Assignment, O Magazine, OZY, Panorama, and elsewhere, and forthcoming in the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. She has worked as a deckhand in Baja, Mexico and an assistant expedition leader in Antarctica, and received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, and Sustainable Arts, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Art Omi, Marble House Project, and Hawthornden Castle, among others. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is currently at work on a novel about art, perfectionism, and revenge. Read her essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/ghosts-of-the-southern-ocean. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On her own since the age of eighteen, Cass Macklin dated brilliant, troubled Ben McGreavy, convinced he was the smartest person she'd ever known. They partied their way through their twenties, slowly descending into a bleak world of binge-drinking and broken promises, inebriated for most of a decade. Now Ben is dead, and Cass is broke, homeless, scared...and pregnant. Determined to have a healthy pregnancy and raise Ben's baby, Cass has to find a way to stop drinking and build a stable life for herself and her child. But with no money, skills, or sober friends or family, the task seems insurmountable. At wit's end, Cass turns to the only person with the means to help her: Ben's brother Scott, third basemen for the Boston Red Sox, a man with a temper and problems of his own. The two make a deal that neither one of them is sure they can live up to. As Cass struggles to take control of her life and to ask for help when she needs it, Scott begins to realize there's a life for him beyond the baseball diamond. By turns heartbreaking and humorous, with its message that change is possible, that forgiveness can be freely given, and that life, though imperfect, is worth embracing, Juliette Fay's Catch Us When We Fall: A Novel (William Morrow, 2021) is a story of human connectedness and hope. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Lisa Marchiano. Marchiano is a mother of two children. She’s also a Jungian analyst and a host of the podcast called This Jungian Life. She brings these experiences together in her new book Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself (Sounds True, 2021). It’s a fascinating and deeply insightful book that draws on the universal wisdom of fairy tales and myths to illuminate how motherhood offers mothers a rich opportunity for psychological exploration and growth. And the wonderful thing about Marchiano’s approach is that she fully recognizes that this opportunity comes amid all sorts of struggles, from spilled juice to adolescent outbursts to the complicated and sometimes ugly feelings that mothers experience. Her book recognizes and names these difficulties and shows how they might, in the end, lead to unexpected riches. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It’s December 1667 and London is still recovering both from the Plague and the Great Fire. Lucy Campion visits retired judge Master Hargrave and discovers that he’s been attacked and robbed in his home. She once worked as a maid for the judge, but she learned how to read and now works as a sort of printer’s apprentice. It turns out that a stash of the judge’s papers has been stolen. Then, while Lucy is working, trying to interest buyers in the books she has helped print, a rival storyteller poaches the crowd she has convened, and it becomes clear that his tales are directly connected to the judge’s stolen papers. When she hears someone being murdered, and that too is connected to the judge’s papers, Lucy is determined to figure out who is trying to destroy his name. In The Cry of the Hangman (Severn House, 2021), the historian Susanna Calkins also manages to convey 17th century British views about order and justice, crime and punishment, legal and illegal marriages, the possibility of moving out of the social order to which one is born, and enthusiasm for the accessibility of printed materials. Susanna Calkins writes the award-winning Lucy Campion historical mysteries set in 17th century London and the Speakeasy Murders set in 1920s Chicago. Her books have been nominated for the Anthony, Agatha, Mary Higgins Clark, the Lefty awards, and her third mystery received the Macavity. Holding a doctorate in history, she is currently an educator at Northwestern University. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two sons. When she’s not writing or working--or maybe when she is--she enjoys interesting wines, beers and cocktails. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jordan Salama’s Every Day the River Changes: Four Weeks Down the Magdalena (Catapult Press, 2021) is a travelogue for a new generation about a journey along Colombia’s Magdalena River, exploring life by the banks of a majestic river now at risk, and how a country recovers from conflict. An American writer of Argentine, Syrian, and Iraqi Jewish descent, Jordan Salama tells the story of the Río Magdalena, nearly one thousand miles long, the heart of Colombia. This is Gabriel García Márquez’s territory—rumor has it Macondo was partly inspired by the port town of Mompox—as much as that of the Middle Eastern immigrants who run fabric stores by its banks. Following the river from its source high in the Andes to its mouth on the Caribbean coast, journeying by boat, bus, and improvised motobalinera, Salama writes against stereotype and toward the rich lives of those he meets. Among them are a canoe builder, biologists who study invasive hippopotamuses, a Queens transplant managing a failing hotel, a jeweler practicing the art of silver filigree, and a traveling librarian whose donkeys, Alfa and Beto, haul books to rural children. Joy, mourning, and humor come together in this astonishing debut, about a country too often seen as only a site of war, and a tale of lively adventure following a legendary river. Kathryn B. Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the history of science at Princeton University. She is currently researching the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the twentieth-century United States. You can reach her on twitter, @katebcarp. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Annabel Abbs’s Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women (Tin House Books, 2021) is a beautifully written meditation on connecting with the outdoors through the simple act of walking. In captivating and elegant prose, Abbs follows in the footsteps of women who boldly reclaimed wild landscapes for themselves, including Georgia O’Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the French River Garonne, Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhône, and Simone de Beauvoir―who walked as much as twenty-five miles a day in a dress and espadrilles―through the mountains and forests of France. Part historical inquiry and part memoir, the stories of these writers and artists are laced together by moments in Abb’s own life, beginning with her poet father who raised her in the Welsh countryside as an “experiment,” according to the principles of Rousseau. Abbs explores a forgotten legacy of moving on foot and discovers how it has helped women throughout history to find their voices, to reimagine their lives, and to break free from convention. As Abbs traces the paths of exceptional women, she realizes that she, too, is walking away from her past and into a radically different future. Windswept crosses continents and centuries in a provocative and poignant account of the power of walking in nature. Thalia Laughlin is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne, researching Louise Hanson-Dyer’s (1884-1962) patronage and artistic support of women in the first half of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Shmulie Shimmer is the inventor of LERBS, the most popular designer drug ever to be created. Turns out that it leaves people brain dead, and Shmulie should be in prison, but his business partner took the rap. Now Shmulie’s father hasn’t heard from him in over a year and half. He approaches Shmulie’s high school friend, Professor Nick Friedman, aka Nick Bones, private detective. Nick’s beautiful daughter was a victim of Lerbs, and Nick never wants to see the guy again, but Shmulie’s father has cancer and only a few months to live, so NIck takes the case. It’s a future in which the world no longer works the way it did, and sharp-witted, colorful characters roam above and below ground in what is an unrecognizable New York City. Now, Nick needs the help of his AI computer to make his way in the Velvet Underground, previously known as part of the subway system. Phil M. Cohen's Nick Bones Underground (Koehler Books, 2019) is a mystery, a wild ride through the future, a science-fiction nightmare, and an exploration of religion and humanity. Phil M. Cohen is a rabbi who has been engaged in Jewish storytelling for a very long time. In addition to a B.A from Dickinson College and rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Phil holds a Ph.D. in Jewish thought from Brandeis University and an MFA from Spalding University in Louisville. From his rabbinic education, he learned how to create and interpret stories. From his doctoral experience, he learned how to grapple with philosophical questions. In earning an MFA, he learned how to write fiction. From his work as a rabbi, he gained deep insight into the Jewish and broader world. And from realms unknown and a bit scary, Rabbi Doctor Cohen discovered his creative imagination. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Water, Wood, and Wild Things: Learning Craft and Cultivation in a Japanese Mountain Town (Viking, 2021) is memoir, ethnography, cookbook, and sketchbook rolled into one." This is the Princeton Independence's description of the polyvocal and artistic text, written by Hannah Kirshner. I cannot agree more with the following review they made on the creative quality of the book: "It evokes the best of the nature writing of Rachel Carson and Wendell Berry, as well as the food writing of M.F.K. Fisher and craft writing of Edmund de Waal." It is certainly a great book to read if you are traveling to Japan or to buy as a gift if you know someone who might be interested in Japanese culture but does not where to start. An immersive journey through the culture and cuisine of one Japanese town, its forest, and its watershed–where ducks are hunted by net, saké is brewed from the purest mountain water, and charcoal is fired in stone kilns–by an American writer and food stylist who spent years working alongside artisans One night, Brooklyn-based artist and food writer Hannah Kirshner received a life-changing invitation to apprentice with a “saké evangelist” in a misty Japanese mountain village called Yamanaka. In a rapidly modernizing Japan, the region–a stronghold of the country’s old-fashioned ways–was quickly becoming a destination for chefs and artisans looking to learn about the traditions that have long shaped Japanese culture. Kirshner put on a vest and tie and took her place behind the saké bar. Before long, she met a community of craftspeople, farmers, and foragers–master woodturners, hunters, a paper artist, and a man making charcoal in his nearly abandoned village on the outskirts of town. Kirshner found each craftsperson not only exhibited an extraordinary dedication to their work but their distinct expertise contributed to the fabric of the local culture. Inspired by these masters, she devoted herself to learning how they work and live. Taking readers deep into evergreen forests, terraced rice fields, and smoke-filled workshops, Kirshner captures the centuries-old traditions still alive in Yamanaka. Water, Wood, and Wild Things invites readers to see what goes into making a fine bowl, a cup of tea, or a harvest of rice and introduces the masters who dedicate their lives to this work. Part travelogue, part meditation on the meaning of work, and full of her own beautiful drawings and recipes, Kirshner’s refreshing book is an ode to a place and its people, as well as a profound examination of what it means to sustain traditions and find purpose in cultivation and craft. During the interview, we talked about Hannah's process of creative writing and its symbiotic relation with accompanying illustrations. Our discussions quickly led to a series of episodes, which described her cross-cultural and cross-linguistic interactions with others (including humans, animals, plants, art crafts, and natural surroundings) in the wonderful mountain town, Yamanaka, in Ishikawa Prefecture. This book is not only a great invitation to the magical experience of living in rural Japan and becoming a part of satoyama, but also an indispensable contribution to our ongoing discussions on the larger problems of "sustainability," "decline of rural economy and tradition," "ecology," and the negative aspect of "urbanisation" or of "ageing rural society" in Japan among others. Takeshi Morisato is philosopher and sometimes academic. He is the editor of the European Journal of Japanese Philosophy. He specializes in comparative and Japanese philosophy but he is also interested in making Japan and philosophy accessible to a wider audience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Destroyer of Light (Tor Books, 2021) is Jennifer Marie Brissett’s long-awaited follow up to her critically acclaimed debut Elysium, winner of a Philip K. Dick Special Citation and a finalist for the Locus and the Tiptree awards. Her new novel takes readers far into the future where humans are settling a new planet. They are the survivors of the world described in Elysium—an Earth where four-dimensional aliens known as the Krestge have destroyed human civilization. The frame of Destroyer of Light is a mystery—a search for a missing boy. But a deeper story follows the relationship of a mother and her young daughter, who is kidnapped and abused by a warlord building an army of child soldiers. The book is also about the relationship between humans and their former antagonists, the Krestge. Some of the aliens’ descendants now live peacefully among humans. While some people are willing to forgive the crimes of the past, going so far as to start families with the Krestge, others see their aliens’ crimes as unforgivable. “There's a lot of difficulty in answering questions as to what kind of people the Krestge are because to get to know one is not to get to know all. The first alien you meet in the beginning, the stepfather of the missing [human] boy, is really worried about his son and wants to do everything he can to try and find him,” Brissett says. “And yet I think the distrust that humanity has for the Krestge is not unfounded, and it's not without its history and not without its reason. The feeling of not being told the entire truth, of not owning up to past sins, to just sort of pretending that it all just went away because you've decided to not be that anymore, doesn't really happen.” Jennifer Marie Brissett is British-Jamaican American, born in London and raised in Cambridge, Mass. owned an independent bookstore called Indigo Café & Books. She obtained her master's in creative writing from the Stonecoast MFA Program and a bachelor's in Interdisciplinary Engineering from Boston University. Rob Wolf is a writer and host of New Books in Science Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lydia Warren has a particular kind of amnesia. She vaguely recalls arriving in Santorini with a one-armed man whom she calls David Copperfield, who takes care of her. Lydia spends her days watching the sea and the changing light, trying to remember who she is. She takes walks, befriends a kindly old antiques dealer who might have been a Nazi and a French woman who helps people remember their past lives. Bits and pieces of what might or might not have been past lives appear in brief visions. A lamp she buys from the antiques dealer reminds her of an New York apartment she once lived in, but it’s the 1960’s, well before she was born. Then she’s visited by someone from The Hague investigating war crimes, and she learns that she has an uncle who lives like a hermit behind a monastery, also somewhere in Greece. This is a story about memory, the mysterious workings of the brain, and the human capacity for forgiveness. Jessica Sticklor earned a BA from the New School and an MFA in Creative Writing from the City University of New York. Before The Weary God of Ancient Travelers, she wrote The Beekeeper’s Daughter (Bedazzled Ink Press), Betwixt and Between (IG Publishing), Nod, and the young adult Pan Chronicles Series (D.X. Varos). Her short stories have appeared in The Warwick Review, The Hawaii Pacific Review and Wasifiri, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Writer Magazine, Ms. Magazine, and Tor.com. She has worked as an editor at THe Global City Press and the The Global City Review and has taught creative writing at both high school and university level. She has published young adult fantasy under the name J.M. Stephen, lives in southern Vermont, and writes for the very local newspaper, the Deerfield Valley News. Jessica grew up in the Chicagoland area. She has lived in New York City and Southwestern Vermont. She loves skiing, hiking, Virginia Woolf and anything Icelandic. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Since Arthur Conan Doyle first created Sherlock Holmes, the great detective has gone through many permutations and been the subject of much study. As Sherry Thomas admits in this latest New Books Network interview, finding a new element to explore is not easy. But she has managed to discover one—perhaps an angle that is particularly fitting in this age of gender fluidity, although the Lady Sherlock series draws much of its punch from and plays off the stereotypes of the past, in this case Victorian England. In Thomas’s reimagining of the great detective, Sherlock Holmes is not only a fictional character but a front for the real detective, the disgraced younger daughter of a poverty-stricken baronet. Charlotte Holmes has an incisive intellect, an unflappable temperament, little respect for convention, and a love of books—traits that undermine her intended purpose in life as defined by her parents: to marry a wealthy, titled man. Charlotte cuts a deal with her father: if she’s still unmarried at twenty-five, he will fund her education so that she can earn her living as the headmistress of a girls’ school. But when Dad reneges on the deal, Charlotte takes matters into her own hands, with disastrous (from her parents’ perspective) but delightful (from her own) results. This is the setup in the first book of the Lady Sherlock series, aptly titled A Study in Scarlet Women. By the time this sixth book rolls around, Charlotte has made a name for her alter ego and had several run-ins with the infamous Professor Moriarty and his underlings. In Miss Moriarty, I Presume? (Berkley Books, 2021) the tables are turned, and the professor seeks out Charlotte for assistance in finding his missing daughter. Unless, of course, the mission is simply a trap aimed at getting the meddlesome Charlotte out of the professor’s life permanently. It’s best to read this engrossing series from beginning to end, as each book builds on those that came before. But watching Sherry Thomas turning the Holmes canon on its head is tremendous fun, and if you tear through the novels as I did, it won’t take long to reach Miss Moriarty, I Presume? Sherry Thomas is the author of historical romances, YA fantasy, and the Lady Sherlock series, which begins with A Study in Scarlet Women. Find out more about her at https://sherrythomas.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Seventh Queen (HarperCollins, 2021) is the second book in the Warrior Witch Duology, so the following review and questions for author Greta Kelly assume you’ve read the first one. If not, go get yourself a copy before listening to the podcast, so you don’t encounter any spoilers. The Frozen Crown ends with a cliffhanger. Princess Askia had travelled to Vishir in the hopes of convincing Emperor Armaan of Vishir to help her liberate her own kingdom of Seravesh. Seravesh, like many other countries, fell to the Roven Empire, ruled by Radovan. Radovan magnanimously offered to marry Askia himself and restore peace to her country. The biggest problem with his offer was that none of his wives survived more than six months. And then, of course, he dealt with dissent by ordering his fire witch to burn down entire towns along with the inhabitants. By the end of The Frozen Crown, Askia has a promising protector for her besieged country in the person of her husband-to-be, the polygamous but noble and charismatic Emperor Armaan of Vishir. The wedding and consummation of their union is disrupted when Radovan, a powerful witch, kills Armaan and his chief wife and kidnaps Askia. In The Seventh Queen we learn the secret to Radovan’s power. He steals the magic from his wives through the means of a magic stone, and he only needs Askia, a rare death witch, to complete his mastery over all forms of magic. Askia learns she has about a month before the stone fastened around her neck drains her completely of her power. In the meantime, the stone prevents her from using her magic , and lets Radovan to control her. Bereft of her magic and without her guards or sympathetic allies at court, Askia has to rely on her wits to exploit Radovan’s weaknesses, and make a plan to best him—no matter what it costs her personally. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Julian Zabalbeascoa speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Igerilara,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation from San Sebastián, Julian talks about writing stories set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and the Basque Conflict. He also discusses his love of travel and his experiences running study abroad programs for college students, and what it’s like to teach The Common in his classes at UMass Lowell. Julian Zabalbeascoa’s stories have been published or will appear in American Short Fiction, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, The Gettysburg Review, Glimmer Train, Ploughshares, Ploughshares Solos, Shenandoah, and other publications. He is a visiting professor in the Honors College at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Boston. Read his story in The Common at thecommononline.org/igerilaria. Read more about Julian and his work at julianzabalbeascoa.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Clare Pooley about her novel The Authenticity Project (Penguin, 2020). In this chatty, very British story, a few personal lines written in a “pale-green exercise book like the one Monica had carried around with her at school,” inadvertently trigger enormous personal change in a group of strangers. Monica owns the café where Julian, an aging, lonely artist, has left a few words about himself in the exercise book. Julian hopes that whoever finds it might want to share their own truth and pass it along, and surprisingly, some do. Monica writes in it and leaves it for the next person, Hazard, a coke-snorting, financially high-flying jackass. Hazard takes it to Thailand and gives it to Riley, a cute young Australian gardener. And so on, but everyone ends up back Monica’s café, grappling with the challenges of finding love, or raising a baby, or getting sober. The Authenticity Project will bring you up to date on popular culture back in 2018, when slapdash gatherings, art classes in cafes, raising a glass with friends, and jumping on a plane to Thailand were all part of everyday life. Though not literary, this is a cute, charming story, and don’t be surprised if it turns into an even cuter movie. Clare Pooley was a backup singer with ABBA when she was eleven, and later studied economics at Cambridge University, where she constantly raided the bookshelves of the English students. For years, she was passionate about drinking wine, which led to a chronic alcohol addiction. She quit drinking and started an anonymous blog called Mummy was a Secret Drinker. The blog went viral and became a memoir, The Sober Diaries, which sold over 150,000 copies worldwide. She also gave a TEDX talk on the shame associated with alcohol addiction that has been viewed over 200,000 times. Before becoming a full-time writer, Pooley spent twenty years in the heady world of advertising. She lives in Fulham, London with her husband, three children, and two border terriers.

I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“My poetry captures a moment,” remarked Dr. Castillo when asked about the process of writing her most recent collection of poems My Book of the Dead: New Poems (University of New Mexico Press, 2021). While many of us would be immobile at the news about the effects of climate disaster, school shootings, and anti-black racism which often resulted in extralegal violence, Ana Castillo reached for pen and paper. She processed these events through writing carefully, intentionally, and vividly about the world which gave rise to these catastrophes. She forces us to feel that moment with her – confusion, anger, grief. My Book of the Dead is the result of Ana’s mourning turned artistic bodily expression. Each poem offers a snapshot in response to personal and national tragedies. Ana mourns loss at all levels – from the passing of artist friends she danced with to the national news of slain schoolchildren. “You hear of his death by the virus and // it all comes back – // meeting in Chicago, // celebrating his first novel, // dancing to a sweat together in New Orleans,” Ana writes in “Hache ¡Presente!” (8). Eight pages later she launches into an exhaustive yet incomplete list of mass shootings in the United States between 2016 and 2019. “+ Plus más – // domestic violence // deaths // at the hands // of someone that loved you, // loved your baby, // mother, // the neighbor upstairs who came running,” Dr. Castillo writes in “Mass Shooting (2016 to 2019 and Counting” (16-23). Sixty-three incidents of mass shootings span eight pages, each indicating the number of deaths in bold. These two poems sit alongside poems about anti-Black racism, police violence, and the threat to Democracy posed by the Trump administration. Dr. Castillo’s My Book of the Dead also carries with it a sense of urgency about the future of the United States. By connecting the relationship between domestic terrorism (i.e., mass shootings and anti-Black racism) and the imperial violence inflicted across the world by the U.S. through bombs and other warfare, Ana takes to task the history and the present U.S. In “Xicanisma Prophecies Post 2012: Putin’s Puppet,” Ana writes, “Putin’s Puppet sees color and it revolts him. // Blacks belong in Africa, he opines, and Muslims must stay in the Mid-East. // Mexicans are the scourge. // Like with his father, // his father before him, and so on. Darker races serve their purpose – // servitude or genocide. // As for women – // you kill a rhino for sport or for its horns. // (A woman is worthwhile only if she enhances your status.)” (80). In several poems such as “Gotas caían en el techo” (31), “A Storm Upon Us” (3), and How to Tell You Are Living under Rising Fascism (A Basic Primer in Progress)” (41), she indicts the Trump Administration for advancing white supremacy, their attacks on history, and their denial of science. Ana is insistent about calling out every aspect of exactly how the rights of people of color, the elderly, and women are continuously being restricted. She is particularly focused on the plight of mothers. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nariman Youssef speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her work translating three short stories from Arabic for The Common’s portfolio of fiction from Morocco, in the spring issue. In this conversation, Nariman talks about the conscious and unconscious decisions a translator makes through many drafts, including the choice to preserve some features of the language, sound, and cadence that may not sound very familiar to English readers. She also discusses her thoughts on how the translation world has changed over the years, and her exciting work as Arabic Translation Manager at the British Library. Nariman Youssef is a Cairo-born, London-based semi-freelance literary translator. She holds a master’s degree in translation studies from the University of Edinburgh, manages a small translation team at the British Library, and curates translation workshops with Shadow Heroes. Her literary translations include Inaam Kachachi’s The American Granddaughter, Donia Kamal's Cigarette Number Seven, and contributions in Words Without Borders, Banipal, and the poetry anthologies Beirut39 and The Hundred Years' War. Read her translations in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/nariman-youssef. Follow Nariman on Twitter at @nariology. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

By 1924, Sarah Cunningham has spent years in France establishing her own artistic style, more contemporary than the landscapes that have made her older sister, Ada Belle Davenport, famous. She has just attained her goal—a one-woman show in an exclusive Paris gallery—when Ada Belle dies unexpectedly. Sarah temporarily abandons her own career, traveling to Carmel-by-the-Sea to find out what happened. Sarah reaches California to discover that the local marshal has already closed the inquest into Ada Belle’s death, ruling it a suicide. The will that appoints Sarah as both beneficiary and executor has gone missing, as has a crucial series of portraits promised to a gallery in New York. Meanwhile, Sarah herself and many of Ada Belle’s friends question the suicide ruling, and as the details of Ada Belle’s final days resurface, the more striking the discrepancies become between the official verdict and the clues discovered by Sarah and her sister’s faithful Jack Russell terrier, Albert. In The Artist Colony (She Writes Press, 2021), Joanna FitzPatrick constructs a fast-paced mystery in which a combination of historical and fictional characters battle over uncomfortable truths against a background of brilliant sky- and seascapes, viewed with an artist’s eye. Joanna FitzPatrick is the author of Katherine Mansfield and The Drummer’s Widow. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Passage North (Granta, 2021) is a novel set in contemporary post-war Sri Lanka. A young, privileged Tamil man takes a train journey from the capital Colombo to former war-torn Kilinochchi to attend the funeral of his grandmother's caretaker. But the journey of the title is equally the philosophical journeys he undertakes to the deepest recesses of his mind, to the past and future. An intense thread of longing runs through the novel: the nature of his people's longing that must have led to events that led to the devastating war, his longing for the non-existent Tamil homeland of his imagination, the caretaker's impossible longing for the impossible return of her sons dead in the war, his longing for his estranged romantic partner. Anuk Arudpragasam is from Colombo, Sri Lanka, and received a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University in 2019. A Passage North is his second novel and has been shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Meredith Hall about her new novel Beneficence (Godine, 2020). A beautiful family is torn apart by a shocking loss, and three of its members blame themselves. It’s the middle of the twentieth century, their farm in Maine needs tending, and the seasons move swiftly with specific chores and tasks. The cows need calving, the chickens need feeding, the laundry needs washing, the rugs need airing, the food needs preparing. But each member of the family is numb from their huge loss, and they go their separate ways, telling small bits of the story as their lives unfold. Their dreams and hopes change, and some decisions have harsh consequences, but slowly, through the changing seasons, they struggle to make their way back to the family they once loved. Meredith Hall taught in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire for many years. In her late fifties, she wrote an essay that won the Pushcart Prize, and on the basis of that encouragement, she was awarded the Gift of Freedom Award, which provided two years of dedicated writing. Her memoir Without a Map was named a best book of the year by Kirkus and BookSense and was both a NYT bestseller and an Elle magazine Reader’s Pick of the Year. She was a recipient of the 2004 Gift of Freedom Award from A Room of Her Own Foundation and her work has appeared in Five Points, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and many other publications. Hall writes while listening to Gregorian chant, and when she is not writing or reading, she is outdoors, finding beautiful wild places. She spends her time in Northern California and Maine, so beauty is available all around her, vital sustenance. She loves and needs the arts and spends each winter in the Bay Area gorging on performances of contemporary dance, modern and classical music, and drama. She wanders museums and galleries a lot. Her family and friends are at the center, always. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to anthropologist J. W. Traphagan's novel The Blood of Gutoku: A Jack Riddley Mystery in Japan (Balestier Press, 2021) Jack Riddley is an anthropologist all too ready to retire – he is done with university politics and is eager to start his new life in a sleepy village in northern Japan. What wasn’t involved in his retirement plan is for a murder to occur just as he arrives in town. With Jack’s passion for ethnography, he cannot help but get involved with the investigation, eager to discover not only who committed these crimes, but why. Even a village of retirees has its secrets – abandoned traditions, family rifts, and childhood traumas – all of which are perfect motives for murder. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ryka Aoki’s new novel, Light from Uncommon Stars (Tor Books, 2021), is packed with as much variety as a box of lovingly prepared assorted donuts from your favorite, funky-but-long-standing neighborhood donut shop. One of the book’s primary settings is, in fact, a donut shop, but unlike other Los Angeles donut shops it is run by a family of refugees from a faraway galaxy. The story revolves around three women—the matriarch of the outer space family, Lan Tran; Shizuka Satomi, a world famous violin teacher, who is also contractually obliged to deliver souls to hell; and her newest student, Katrina Nguyen, a trans runaway fleeing an abusive home who has no formal violin training but is a brilliant musician with natural talent. With a book focused on musicians, Aoki relied on narration to convey the power of Katrina’s performances. “When one is a poet and writing novels, sometimes … I feel at a horrible disadvantage. I still write at the speed of a poet. … But during certain moments, I'm really glad I'm a poet because I know darn well that I can convey music through words. … I can use imagery. I can use analogy, but mostly I can vary my sentence structures. I can play with clauses. I can concatenate my grammar. I can write sentences so that one sentence jams into the next. I layer sentence fragments occasionally to build a collage of meaning. And these are all things that are poet tricks.” The themes of Light from Uncommon Stars are as varied as its cast. The books is about talent and genius, creativity and love, and the sacrifices—or deals with the devil—that some people may make to achieve success. Ryka Aoki is a poet, composer, and teacher. Her mixed collection Seasonal Velocities and poetry collection Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul were both finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. And is also the author of the novel Hey Mele Ah Hilo. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Migrations (LA Review of Books, 2021) is a collection of short stories by the Puerto Rican born writer and now retired university professor J. L. Torres. Each story condenses a bit of the experience of a cross section of Puerto Rico: the rich who treat it like a playground, the stereotypical macho men, the shanty town dwellers. The ramifications of the stories are deep and the varied tales range from climate change and the destruction of natural ecosystems by tourism, to the Puerto Ricans of the diaspora who struggle in dysfunctional families and who long to be part of the mainstream but have weathered the subtle racism of American society that has taken a toll on their inner lives. Torres’s stories bring alive Puerto Rico to us, its natural beauty but also try to show the colonial economy that the country is. Minni Sawhney is a professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Delhi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Back in the days when brick-and-mortar bookstores were common in suburban America, I was browsing the shelves at my local Borders when a title caught my eye: Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen. I picked it up, opened it, and fell in love. It’s 1932, and Lady Georgiana Rannoch, a twenty-something who is “thirty-fourth in line to the British throne,” has fled her ancient but drafty ducal castle in Scotland for the family mansion in London. Alas, the Rannoch family—although rich in property—hasn’t a farthing to its illustrious name due to the unfortunate gambling habits of the first duke, Lady Georgie’s father. And as a member of the royal family, Georgie can’t just go out and get a job, because the only destiny approved by her lofty relatives is to marry the fish-faced Prince Siegfried, who doesn’t even like women. Nonetheless, with a little help from her friend Belinda and a handsome but enigmatic gentleman named Darcy O’Mara, Georgie manages not only to survive but to solve a murder. Since the day I finished that book, I have wanted to interview Rhys Bowen, the creator of Lady Georgiana and a number of other memorable detectives both amateur and professional. That time has come with Georgie’s fifteenth adventure (and second murder-filled Christmas), God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen (Berkley, 2021). After fourteen books, Georgie’s life and financial circumstances have substantially improved. Georgie and Darcy have married, and they plan to entertain their friends for Christmas at their new estate. As fate would have it, except for Georgie’s beloved grandfather, the only guests able to attend are her brother, the Duke of Rannoch, and his wife, known as Fig—the last person Georgie wants to spend time with. She’s just about resigned herself to Christmas with Fig when a letter arrives from Darcy’s eccentric Aunt Ermintrude, insisting that they all come at once to her home near Sandringham, close to the Royal Family. The Queen of England has requested Georgie’s presence, although she does not divulge why. Unable to say no to Her Royal Highness, Georgie, Darcy, and the Rannochs head off to Aunt Ermintrude’s house. At Sandringham, Georgie learns that Queen Mary believes someone intends harm toward her son, the Prince of Wales, now deeply involved with Wallis Simpson. She wants Georgie to find out what’s going on. Georgie’s merry little Christmas is set to become a royal nightmare if she can’t get to the bottom of this mystery. Bowen’s mysteries are complex and their solutions satisfying, but the real delight of these novels is the way they poke fun at the British class system, exemplified by Georgie’s own mixed heritage as the daughter of a duke and of an actress whose father, a retired Cockney policeman, acts as a constant reminder that being a member of the royal family isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. They’re also, to put it simply, hilarious. If this is your first encounter with them, I promise you have a treat in store. Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including two historical mystery series featuring Molly Murphy and Lady Georgiana Rannoch and four stand-alone novels. Her work has won over twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Find out more about her at https://rhysbowen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Jennifer Estep about her new book Capture the Crown (HarperCollins, 2021). Princess Gemma Ripley is famous for her glittering outfits, in which she flounces through countless parties and balls. There’s another side to her, though. Her duties as a royal also include putting on a disguise and spying, in order to discover any trouble in her father’s Kingdom of Andvari. There’s almost sure to be trouble at any time, given their neighbors, the ruthless rulers of the Kingdom of Morta, who hate the Andvarians. Gemma finds out firsthand just how ruthless the Mortans are, when heir-apparent Leonidas kidnaps her after an injury and brings her back to the Mortan palace. Luckily Leonidas has no idea who she is-or does he? Complicating matters is that he’s a hunk with a heart—and seems to be attracted to Gemma. In meantime, Gemma is ideally placed to find out why Leonidas’ fiendish half-brother, Milo, is secretly assembling vast stocks of tearstone—that is, if she can survive without losing her heart—or her life. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Sarah Minor, a brilliant and exciting author and artist. Minor has written a new book that looks into—in fact, I might even say sinks us or maybe slathers us in—slime. And if that sounds more disgusting than appealing, that's one of the many wonders of slime that Minor reveals: yes, slime grosses us out and yet its grossness somehow comes curiously close to desire. Slime features in immensely popular genres our culture loves and loathes, like horror movies and pornography. Slime has its own online communities. Slime even comes from outer space and lands on the earth as "gelatinous meteors." Slime, once you start looking for it, shows up in spaces where we experience birth and death, where bodies connect and boundaries dissolve. Minor's book is called Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), which is a title that slimes together unexpected things, and I start our conversation by asking her about it. Here’s my chat with the warm and wonderfully un-slimy Sarah Minor. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ricardo Wilson speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem, “nigrescence,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Ricardo talks about his new collection Apparent Horizon and Other Stories, winner of the PANK Book Contest in fiction. The collection includes several short poetic fragments scattered amongst stories and novellas, with both historic and contemporary storylines. He discusses his process for writing from historical research, and what it’s like writing creative and critical work at the same time. Ricardo also talks about Outpost, a fully-funded residency in Vermont for creative writers of color from the US and Latin America. Ricardo Wilson is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness. His fiction and critical writing can be found in 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, and Stirring. He is director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America. Read his poem in The Common at thecommononline.org/nigrescence. Read more about Ricardo and his work at ricardoawilson.com. Follow him on Twitter @ricardoawilson. Purchase An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories from PANK Books. Find out more about Outpost, and apply by November 1, at outposttheresidency.org. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Beth Alvarado about her new novel Jillian in the Borderlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) We first meet Jillian Guzmán when she is nine. She’s mute, has a big imagination, and communicates through her drawings. She and her mother, Angie O’Malley live in the borderlands of Arizona and Mexico. Jillian can see ghosts – in the first story a dead child-bride saves her from the clutches of a predatory neighbor. These dark stories introduce faith healers, talking animals, and spirits of the dead. As she grows up, Jillian’s drawings begin to both reflect and create the realities she sees around her, culminating at the Casa de los Olviados, a refuge for the sick and elderly run by a traditional faith healer, Juana of God. Beth Alvarado is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her essay collection Anxious Attachments won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spievogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and Not a Matter of Love and other stories, which won the Many Voices Project Award. Her stories and essays have been published in many fine journals including The Sun, Guernica: An International Magazine of Politics and Art, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Three of her essays have been chosen as Notable by Best American Essays. She is a recipient of a 2020 Oregon Career Artist’s Fellowship, and lives in Bend, Oregon, where she is core faculty at OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. These unprecedented events also wrought a remarkable cultural revolution in Ukraine itself. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the presidency of the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review, focusing on newly emergent trends in film, literature, painting, design, and fashion. The journal became an East European cultural institution, publishing outstanding writers in the region and beyond. From his vantage point as a journalist and editor, Davidzon came to observe events and know many of the leading figures in Ukrainian politics and culture, and to write about them for a Western audience. Davidzon later found himself in the center of world events as he became a United States government witness in the Ukraine scandal that shook the presidency of Donald Trump. From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Academica Press, 2020) tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, Limbo (Fitzcarraldo, 2019) is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors - including the author's older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world - to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and its opposites. From the Headington Shark to radical behavioural experiments, from life aboard a container ship to Sun Ra's cosmology, Limbo argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal. Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (Harvard Graduate School of Design) interviews authors on how the portrayal and use of emptiness and allied concepts (such as voids, nothingness, or limbo) in philosophical, political, religious, and social studies are influenced by the imagination and construction of physical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Celeste Mohammed speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Home,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Celeste talks about her novel-in-stories, Pleasantview, and why it was important to her to write a book that shows all the complexities and difficulties of island life, with characters who break out of the stereotypical West Indian personality Americans often expect. She also discusses Trinidad’s multicultural society, her choice to write dialogue in patois, and her essay “Split Me in Two,” about being mixed-race during the election of Vice President Kamala Harris. Celeste Mohammed’s debut novel-in-stories, Pleasantview, published this year. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, LitMag, Epiphany, and The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Celeste graduated from Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in creative writing. Read her story in The Common at thecommononline.org/home-celeste-mohammed. Read more about Celeste and her work at thecursivem.com. Purchase Pleasantview here. Below is a list of books and writers from the Caribbean and the West Indies that Celeste recommended in the podcast:

Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma

The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo

Golden Child by Claire Adam

Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey

Home Home by Lisa Allen-Agostini

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. Čas Proměn (Time of Changes) is his first book of historical nonfiction. Find more about Mark at his website. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cadwell Turnbull appeared on New Books in Science Fiction two years ago to discuss his debut novel, The Lesson, about an alien invasion and colonization of Earth, centered around Turnbull's native U.S. Virgin Islands. He returns to talk about his second book, No Gods, No Monsters (Blackstone, 2021), which, rather than aliens from another planet, features monsters who live among us as our friends, neighbors and even relatives. While ostensibly about the fantastical, the novel is grounded in reality with complex characters whose experiences touch on difficult but important issues like police violence, othering, and even fake news. While the two books have different characters and storylines, Turnbull calls them “sister books.” Aliens and monsters “are both versions of human fears manifested through these speculative elements,” Turnbull says. “One is dealing with a threat from without, and one is dealing with a threat from within. And they both have similar thematic concerns.” Among the topics Turnbull discusses in the interview are the human propensity to deny uncomfortable truths; the challenge of those with different beliefs accepting the same version of reality (even when reality is captured on video); how monsters can provide a window on intersectional marginalization; and how writing can be like solving a puzzle. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

On Wandering Beaches (Pardes, 2020) is a novel of journeys, a novel of migration that conceals contradictions that summarize a whole world. Along the shores of Tel Aviv- Haifa-Acre-Nahariyya, all the contradictions are summarized: the Jewish nationalism versus the Arab nationalism, the individual principles versus the traditions of society, the heart versus the mind, femininity versus manliness, the ‘I’ versus the ‘Other’, geography of homeland versus geography of happiness, the end versus the beginning, and emigration versus settlement in homeland. All these contradictions seek on the shores of the novel to achieve reconciliation, affinity, identification and harmony in a deeper entity of humanity, love and happiness. Dr. Rawya Jarjoura Burbara. Born in Nazareth (1969), Dr. Burbara serves as Chief Inspector Director of Arabic (for native speakers of Arabic) at the Ministry of Education, and a lecturer at the Language Department, Oranim College. She is also a writer, and her 10th book was published in 2021 (collection of short stories titled "I do not want to get use to you"). Her Arabic novel, titled "On the shores of wandering" was translated to Hebrew and published by Pardes (2020). Dr. Burbara is editorial member at Maktoob series and The Translators Forum at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is also a member of the Mahmoud Darwish Association. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Stephen Jenkinson. Jenkinson has a new book. It's entitled A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (Orphan Wisdom, 2021) and it's a rarity among books and, to my mind, authors. Jenkinson not only attempts to reckon with our current crisis in the midst of it, which would be challenge enough, but he also attempts to reckon with his previous work, asking the ballsy question: do the books that I've written in my life—does, in some part, my life's work—stand up to the pressures of this moment? Did I write anything that withstands the test of this time? This is, to my mind, a colossal demand that Jenkinson asks of himself. He's written books about money and soul, death and wisdom, matrimony and patrimony, and the role of elders in a culture bereft of them. In A Generation's Worth, Jenkinson isn't so much summing up these previous books as leaning in more deeply to the questions that animate them. And through these questions, these wonderings, as Jenkinson calls them, he asks us to lean more deeply into life—not life as we wish it or want it to be—but life as it is, life full of grief and mystery, full of rough gods and dark roads, life that, as he writes, "will prevail over lives, yours included." Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The poet Shachar-Mario Mordechai was born 1975 in Haifa and he currently lives in Tel Aviv. He has published four volumes of poetry, all of which attracted critical attention. Mordechai is the 2017 recipient of the Prime-Minister’s award for creativity in poetry and the 2010 recipient of Tel Aviv Municipality's nationwide Poetry Competition. He was Poet in Residence at Johns Hopkins University for 2018/9. His book of poems "Make Room For The Rain" won first place in poetry by the Rachel and Leib Goldberg Foundation for 2021. The book was written in the USA when Mario lived for two years in Baltimore and one year in NYC. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Laurie Frankel about her new novel One, Two, Three (Henry Holt, 2021). The little town of Bourne made national news seventeen years before when its water turned green and people started to get sick. The Mitchell triplets were born that year, after the factory closed, the town began to wither along with its citizens, and their father died. The three girls, each a different version of normal, have watched their mother’s endless fight for justice from the company that destroyed their town. Mirabel, number Three, is the smartest triplet, even though she can’t speak and uses a wheelchair. Monday, number Two, inherited all the library’s books when the library building closed. She eats and wears only yellow and knows exactly where in the house each book is hidden. And Mab, number One, is trying to get into college and out of Bourne. Then one day, a moving truck pulls up and the Mitchell sisters are forced to grapple with a past that was never resolved. Laurie Frankel writes novels (and reads novels, teaches other people to write novels, raises a small person who reads and would like someday to write novels) in Seattle, Washington where she lives on a nearly vertical hill from which she can watch three different bridges while she's staring out her windows between words. She's originally from Maryland and has a degree in reading Shakespeare, which has relatively little to do with writing novels. She has taught writing, literature, and gender studies at both community colleges and universities. Now she is at work — always — on her next novel but also blogs about craft at Medium where she endeavors to help other people finish their novels. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship? In Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India (Seagull Books, 2021), Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a genre-bending exploration of a litigation battle, and a celebration of defiant love that burns bright in the shadow of the law. Saronik Bosu (@SaronikB on Twitter) is a doctoral candidate in English at New York University. He is writing his dissertation on South Asian economic writing. He is coordinator of the Medical Humanities Working Group at NYU, and of the Postcolonial Anthropocene Research Network. He also co-hosts the podcast High Theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Franz Nicolay's Someone Should Pay for Your Pain (Gibson House Press, 2021) is a moving, funny, and sometimes brutal novel about the life of a touring musician. Rudy Pauver is a punk-turned-singer-songwriter now roughly ten years past his peak. He draws a small but steady crowd in bars and venues far from the beaten track, all while enduring the thundering success of his one-time protege Ryan Orland. Nicolay brings his decades of experience as a musician to this novel, which teems with perfect tiny details of the rigors of touring. This is a coming of middle age story for anyone who's ever wondered what goes on in the van during the long stretches between the glamorous heights of a musician's life. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Despite the deluge of novels about World War II that has characterized the last few years, the period leading up to the war on the Pacific Front has received far less attention. One welcome exception is the Death in Shanghai series penned by Garrett Hutson, the latest book of which is No Accidental Death (Warfleigh Publishing, 2021). The series revolves around Douglas Bainbridge, a naval intelligence officer assigned to a two-year immersion program in Chinese language and culture. Doug has defied the expectations of his affluent but rigid parents by joining the US Navy instead of taking over the family business, and although he has already developed fluency in Mandarin, he is not emotionally prepared for the rich and varied life that awaits him in Shanghai’s International Settlement when he arrives in May 1935. It doesn’t help that he has barely unpacked his suitcases before a childhood friend, met by chance in a bar, winds up dead in the streets—with the local police all too willing to assign responsibility for the murder to Doug. Doug sets out to clear his name in that first novel, The Jade Dragon, in the process establishing a chain of tangled alliances and favors that help him through the sequel, Assassin’s Hood. By the time No Accidental Death opens in July 1937, Doug has completed his immersion program and moved on to his dream job as intelligence officer on a naval vessel in the Yangtze fleet. His new position takes him away from Shanghai more than he likes, but it remains his home port. He’s eager to disembark and reunite with his beloved Lucy Kinzler and his cohort of friends. But soon a crewman from Doug’s ship is killed under mysterious circumstances and the Fleet Admiral charges Doug with solving the crime. Once again, Doug must place duty above pleasure—this time in the midst of an ongoing battle between the Japanese Navy and the Chinese National Army for the control of both Shanghai and Beijing. These are fast-moving, well-written murder mysteries with a refreshing take on the complexities of Chinese culture in the period leading up to the Japanese invasion of 1937. The characters have enough disagreements and flaws to keep them interesting, and the theme of various characters’ homosexuality and Doug’s growing acceptance of them is well handled. They even add something to that massive literature on World War II! Garrett Hutson writes upmarket historical mysteries and spy fiction, driven by flawed characters who are moving and unforgettable. He lives in Indianapolis with his husband, four adorable dogs, two odd-ball cats, and too many fish to count. No Accidental Death (Death in Shanghai 3) is his most recent novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings almost a century ago revolutionized the study of ancient Egypt and its pharaohs. The splendors that surrounded the burial of this relatively minor ruler, interred in a hastily arranged tomb, sparked a furor of speculation, scholarship, and outright chicanery and draw crowds even today. For a long time, though, no one knew that the first modern person to enter the tomb was not Howard Carter, the famed archaeologist who located it, but Lady Evelyn (Eve) Herbert, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Lord Carnarvon, who funded Carter’s expedition. In The Collector’s Daughter (William Morrow, 2021), Gill Paul approaches the story of Carter’s discovery from the perspective of its long-term effects on those involved in the find. We meet Eve first in 1972, fifty years after these life-changing events, when she has just awoken in a hospital after suffering the latest in a series of strokes that sap her physical and mental strength. She barely recognizes the man sitting next to her, although she soon concludes (correctly) that he is her husband, Brograve. As Eve fights her way back to health, Brograve attempts to jog her memory with photographs and tales, each of which sets off a trip into the past where we see what actually occurred and contrast it with Eve’s foggy recollections. Meanwhile, Brograve is doing his best to shield his wife from the demands of an Egyptian archaeologist determined to track down missing artifacts from the tomb—on behalf of her government, her university, or herself? We’re not quite sure of the archaeologist’s motives, only that she has secrets of her own. The tale of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the accidents that followed its discovery, and how Eve came to be the first person to enter its suffocating atmosphere three thousand years after the ancient Egyptian priests sealed the sarcophagus is beautifully told. But what really sets The Collector’s Daughter apart is its haunting exploration of memory loss and its impact on Eve and Brograve’s long and loving marriage. This is definitely a book that you don’t want to miss. Gill Paul writes historical fiction, mostly set in the twentieth century, and enjoys reevaluating real historical characters and trying to get inside their heads. Her novels have reached the top of the USA Today and Globe and Mail (Canada) bestseller lists and been translated into twenty languages. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. The fruit of the tree has mysterious medicinal properties, and Andre’s mission is both scientific and personal, because his mother has suffered a serious stroke. He receives sufficient funding to create the correct conditions to care for the trees, but he’s under pressure, both from his sponsors, and from a mysterious organization that fears the apple is an omen of evil. Second in Karen Hugg’s literary thriller series focused on the world of plants, Harvesting the Sky (Woodhall Press, 2021) is a parable about what we take from nature. Karen Hugg is also the author of The Forgetting Flower and Song of the Tree Hollow. Born into a Polish family and raised in Chicago, she later moved to Seattle and worked as an editor in tech, which gave her the opportunity to live in Paris for a short time. Afterward, she became a certified ornamental horticulturalist and master pruner. Karen earned an MFA from Goddard College and her work has appeared in The Big Thrill, Crime Reads, Thrive Global, and other publications. She lives with her husband and three kids in Seattle, where she’s finishing up her first nonfiction book, Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness Through Plants. When she’s not writing or gardening, Karen is learning guitar by playing her favorite songs from the Scottish band, Travis. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Forgetting Flower (Botanique Noire)

Leaf Your Troubles Behind: How to Destress and Grow Happiness through Plants

Song of the Tree Hollow: Book One in the Verdant Souls Series

It’s no coincidence that one of the main characters in S. Qiouyi Lu’s In the Watchful City carries with ser a qíjìtáng, or cabinet of curiosities. Lu’s novella is, itself, a cabinet of unusual mementos, with many smaller objects carefully folded into the larger structure. On one level the plot is simple. The qíjìtáng is full of stories, and its owner, Vessel, who hovers between life and death, needs to add one more story to ser collection in order to have a second chance at life. (Vessel’s pronouns are se, ser and sers). So se asks Anima, one of eight people who provide surveillance for the city-state of Ora, for aer story. (Anima’s pronouns are ay, aer and aers). But Anima’s life isn’t so simple. Ay serves as a node in the city’s Hub, which aer monitors by entering the consciousness of animals (including a gecko, raven, and wild dog during the course of the story). In this way, Ay can travel anywhere and yet aer body is fastened by a stem to a tank of amniotic-like fluid. Lu likens Anima’s experience of being both fixed and all-knowing to our relationship with the internet. “We're sitting in front of a computer, and, physically, our body is stationed in front of this machine. But through this network, we're able to explore so much,” Lu says. “We’re able to go to faraway lands, see through the eyes of someone else.” The topics ay covers in aer New Books interview include aer inspirations for the novella (such as China’s facial recognition technology), aer interest in linguistics, including neopronouns, and aer fascination with experimental narratives. Lu is also a poet, editor, and translator and runs microverses, which publishes speculative flash fiction, poetry, and other short forms of storytelling. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Today I talked to Trisha R. Thomas about her new novel What Passes as Love (Lake Union Publishing, 2021). In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white. She introduces herself as an orphan without a family. It starts out as a lark, but her adventures could destroy those she left behind. Especially after her father puts a high bounty on her head, because she is, after all, a runaway slave. TRISHA R. THOMAS won the Literary Lion Award from the King County Library Foundation. Her first book, Nappily Ever After, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature as well as being featured in O Magazine’s Books That Make a Difference. Her work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Her debut novel is now adapted to a feature film on Netflix. She’s had 11 novels published and continues to write from her home in California. When she’s not writing, she’s tending to her mini farm where she grows tomatoes, avocados, and lemons, all the perfect ingredients for guacamole and avocado toast. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line? In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work. (Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.) (US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize. Her poetry collection War of the Beasts and the Animals was published by Bloodaxe Books, also in 2021. She is the recipient of several Russian and international literary awards. Irina Shevelenko is professor of Russian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Translations are by: Alexandra Berlina, Sasha Dugdale, Sibelan Forrester, Amelia Glaser, Zachary Murphy King, Dmitry Manin, Ainsley Morse, Eugene Ostashevsky, Andrew Reynolds, and Maria Vassileva. For a video of the May 2021 launch event for The Voice Over, featuring Maria Stepanova and several of the translators, see Book Launch of Maria Stepanova’s The Voice Over: Poems and Essays – A Reading and Conversation – CREECA – UW–Madison (wisc.edu) Maria Stepanova is one of the most powerful and distinctive voices of Russia’s first post-Soviet literary generation. An award-winning poet and prose writer, she has also founded a major platform for independent journalism. Her verse blends formal mastery with a keen ear for the evolution of spoken language. As Russia’s political climate has turned increasingly repressive, Stepanova has responded with engaged writing that grapples with the persistence of violence in her country’s past and present. Some of her most remarkable recent work as a poet and essayist considers the conflict in Ukraine and the debasement of language that has always accompanied war. The Voice Over brings together two decades of Stepanova’s work, showcasing her range, virtuosity, and creative evolution. Stepanova’s poetic voice constantly sets out in search of new bodies to inhabit, taking established forms and styles and rendering them into something unexpected and strange. Recognizable patterns of ballads, elegies, and war songs are transposed into a new key, infused with foreign strains, and juxtaposed with unlikely neighbors. As an essayist, Stepanova engages deeply with writers who bore witness to devastation and dramatic social change, as seen in searching pieces on W. G. Sebald, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Susan Sontag. Including contributions from ten translators, The Voice Over shows English-speaking readers why Stepanova is one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jose Hernandez Diaz speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Ode to a California Neck Tattoo,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Jose talks about finding his way to prose poetry, initially drawn in by its casual language and style. He also discusses the process of editing and revising poetry, his interest in the surreal, and what it’s like writing from a first generation point of view. Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of the 2020 book The Fire Eater. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Currently, he is an associate editor at Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. He is from Southern California. Read “Ode to a California Neck Tattoo” at thecommononline.org/ode-to-a-california-neck-tattoo. Follow Jose on Twitter at @JoseHernandezDz. Sign up for Jose’s Intro to Prose Poetry online course at litromagazine.com. Submit to Frontier Poetry, where Jose is an editor, at frontierpoetry.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Amy Wright. Wright is an essayist and artist, one who works across a dizzying and dazzling range of subjects and media. However, in her new book, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (Sarabande, 2021), it's not only Wright's voice that shines, but also the voices of almost fifty other contributors. She's written—or maybe I should say assembled or orchestrated—the thoughts and reflections of a dizzying and dazzling range of thinkers, artists, scientists, and true human beings, sharing their experiences and reflections on what it means to be, to live, to make, to grieve, to laugh and, as Wright's entire book attests, to share meaningful conversations that leave us all the richer for the encounter. I'm deeply grateful to share our conversation with you. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This is the third episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). This episode features two of the winners in Creative Writing Prose: Xuan Juliana Wang, whose collection Home Remedies explores the new generation of Chinese diasporic wanderers, and Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, whose collection The Foley Artist provides a new treatment of queer Filipinx diasporic lives. Xuan Juliana Wang was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her collection Home Remedies won the 2021 AAAS award in Creative Writing: Prose. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is finishing his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a board member of Kundiman. His collection The Foley Artist won honorable mention in Creative Writing: Prose. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Joyce Yarrow about her new novel Sandstorm (D.X. Varos, 2021). The message essentially parentless Sandi Donovan learns after being dumped first at an inattentive aunt’s and then at a bootcamp for delinquent teenagers, is to never put her destiny in anyone else’s hands. After her mother dies, her father uses her for cons but can’t be bothered to raise her. She’s fifteen but passes for twenty, and the man who takes her in after she escapes the bootcamp teaches her how to create and sell counterfeit goods. She already knows how to reinvent herself and is surprised at how easy it is to lie. She’s a quick study but struggles with wanting to live a legitimate life rather than continuing to be the grifter and con artist she was raised to be. No matter how good her intentions, everything she does triggers a sandstorm in this heartwarming, fast-paced coming of age tale. Joyce Yarrow was raised in the Southeast Bronx, but escaped to Manhattan, where she wrote poetry while riding the bus through the Lower East Side. The Bus Poems were published, and her writing career was launched. She graduated from Antioch University in L.A. with a combined degree in Music and Communications – two lifelong interests. In addition to five published novels, Joyce's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous national publications, and she is a member of both the Authors Guild and Sisters in Crime. When she’s not writing, Joyce loves gardening, and when the pandemic is over, she plans to return to singing with the world music vocal-with-percussion ensemble, Abráce. They sing in 20 languages, and she’s great at memorizing lyrics but terrible in foreign language conversation. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue (Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character Like all of Kirwan’s work, it has a strong sense of history. In Rockaway Blue, Kirwan looks back on September 11 with admiration for the genuine heroism of first responders and skepticism about the “blue wall of silence” in the New York City Police Department. Equally important, he approaches the dead of September 11, and their surviving friends, relatives and colleagues, as three-dimensional human beings with their own mix of strengths, weaknesses, virtues and flaws. Kirwan is the author of five other books, including the novel Rocking the Bronx, the memoir Green Suede Shoes: An Irish-American Odyssey, A History of Irish Music, and 16 plays and musicals. He is also the host of Celtic Crush, a radio show on Sirius XM. He is probably best know as the leader of Black 47, an Irish rock band whose songs mixed Irish music, rock and roll, rhythm and blues and rap to celebrate immigrant experiences old and new and the socialist strain in Irish republicanism embodied by James Connolly. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University, is the author of Crossing Broadway: Washington Heights and the Promise of New York (Cornell) and co-author of All the Nations Under Heaven: Immigrants, Migrants and the Making of New York (Columbia.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The US military camptowns were established shortly after the Second World War in 1945, appropriating the Japanese comfort stations. The Korean government actively supported the creation of camptowns for its own economic and national security interests. Utilizing the Japanese colonial policy, the US military and the South Korean government sought to control camptown women’s bodies through vaginal examinations, isolation wards, and jails, monitoring women for potential venereal diseases. Denigrated as a “traitor” for “mixing flesh with foreigners,” camptown women and their labors were disavowed in Korean society.[1] However, the Korean government also depended on camptown women for its economic development: camptown women’s earnings accounted for 10% of Korea’s foreign currency.[2] Speaking against this silence, Grace Cho’s new memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2021), brings to light not only the pain and trauma of militarized violence as experienced by her mother who worked as a camptown woman in the 1960s and 1970s, but also the beauty and poignant resilience of her life. In Tastes Like War: A Memoir (Feminist Press, 2021), Cho explores the connection between food, war, trauma, family, and love. After marrying a merchant marine, Cho’s mother moved to a white town of Chehalis in Washington in the 1970s. Abundance, social mobility, and progress – America promised Cho’s mother what seemed beyond her grasp in Korea. However, the daily traumas of racialized violence and institutionalized abuses at her workplace furthered her fragmentation as a Third World subject whose body and subjectivity were created by complex ties between the histories of empire, militarized and sexual violence, and racialization. To understand the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia, Cho delves into this history, focusing not only on the traumas but also on hope, strength, beauty, and resilience as embodied by her mother. The everyday acts of cooking Korean meals and foraging for mushrooms and blackberries signaled her mother’s will to survive no matter the condition set by the global empire. Through the act of writing, Cho reconstructs the fragments of her mother’s life – illustrating her mother’s persistent and creative drive for life despite the historical violence that continued to condition her present and the future. [1] First quote is from Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora, 94 and second quote is from Cho, Tastes Like War, 93. [2] Park, Emmanuel Moonchil, dir. Podŭrapge (Comfort). 2020; Seoul, Korea: Independent, 2020. Vimeo. Da In Ann Choi is a PhD student at UCLA in the Gender Studies department. Her research interests include care labor and migration, reproductive justice, social movement, citizenship theory, and critical empire studies. She can be reached at dainachoi@g.ucla.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Gervais Hagerty about her novel In Polite Company (William Morrow, 2021). Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. When Simons isn’t producing the news on a local TV station, she surfs the waves of Folly beach, crabs the salty rivers of Edisto Island, and joins an old friend at King Street bars. If she manages to accept the path laid out for her by generations, she’s also supposed marry her boyfriend, Trip. But she isn’t sure of anything. She confides her confusion only to her elegant grandmother, who urges her to be brave. Simons just has to figure out what that means. Author Gervais Hagerty grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Vanderbilt University. After a post-college stint in Southern California, she returned to the East Coast, where she worked as a news reporter and producer for both radio and television broadcasts. After earning her M.B.A. from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, Hagerty was hired to teach Leadership Communications, and as director of the Patricia McArver Public Speaking Lab, she coached students, faculty, and staff to become effective speakers. She also advised the college's public speaking club. She is a board member of The Charleston Council for International Visitors and serves on Charleston's Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. Gervais lives in Charleston with her husband and daughters, and when not writing, parenting, or trying to slow traffic so she can bike safely, she dabbles in creating single panel cartoons. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Emma Sloley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Cassandras,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Sloley talks about writing a story based on the fear of men women are taught to have from a young age. She also discusses her decision to include a sort of Greek chorus in the story, apocalyptic isolation in her novel Disaster’s Children, and how travel writing has changed in the age of Instagram. Emma Slowley’s work has appeared in Catapult, Literary Hub, Yemassee, Joyland, Structo, and The Masters Review Anthology, among many other publications. She is a MacDowell Fellow and Bread Loaf scholar. Her debut novel, Disaster’s Children, was published in 2019. Born in Australia, Emma now divides her time between the United States and the city of Mérida, Mexico. Read “The Cassandras” at thecommononline.org/the-cassandras. Read the LitHub essay mentioned in the podcast here. Read more about Emma and her work at emmasloley.net. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It’s a common tale: a gunman out for revenge in the American West, whose six-shooter leaves a trail of bodies behind him. But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Little, Brown and Company, 2021), the debut novel from Tom Lin, takes a novel twist on the genre by having its gunman be Ming Tsu: a Chinese man, orphaned in the United States, out on a journey to murder those who press-ganged him to work on the railroads. But The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is more than that, as it delves into the supernatural, the mystical, and the philosophical as Ming continues his journey across the American West. In this interview, Tom and I talk about the setting of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, and his choices around its characters. We’ll also talk about using a Chinese-American main character in a Western-type story: a traditionally “American” genre. Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he is currently in the PhD program at the University of California, Davis. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jackson Ford has some things in common with his protagonist, Teagan Frost. Both use nom de plumes. And both can move sht. With her telekinetic powers, Teagan can move inorganic objects while Ford (aka Rob Boffard) uses his creative powers to move plots at a rapid clip. Ford, and his publisher, Orbit, have also moved the cultural needle—specifically, by bringing three books with sht (asterisk and all) into the world. The most recent contribution, Eye of the Sh*t Storm (Orbit, 2021), is the third in Ford’sThe Frost Files series and continues Teagan’s attempts to learn about her origins while managing her government handlers and keeping Los Angeles safe from those with strange psychic powers like hers. “Teagan is not a typical superhero because she resents her ability to move things with her mind,” Ford says. “She would much rather learn how to cook, be a professional chef, and own her own restaurant… Her ability has forced her into a life she has no desire to be a part of.” In his New Books interview, Ford discusses (among other things) profanity, pseudonyms, and why Teagan, despite her extraordinary power, still needs the help of regular people. Born in South Africa, Ford splits his time between London and Vancouver. Under his real name, Rob Boffard, he is the author of the Outer Earth series and Adrift. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Edison Hark, the star of The Good Asian (Image Comics: 2021), the new comic series written by Pornsak Pichetshote and illustrated by Alexandre Tefenkgi, never signed up to investigate a murder in Chinatown. As the only Chinese-American law enforcement officer in the United States, he travels to San Francisco in 1936 to help find a Chinese maid who has run away from the household of the man who raised him. But he stumbles upon a crime scene that harkens back to an old crime legend: a hitman for the old Tongs, back for revenge. But while The Good Asian tells a thrilling noir story of crime, detectives and investigations, it also tells the story of the Chinese community, who at the time were still under scrutiny under laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act. The comic grapples with ideas of racial prejudice, respectability politics, and identity. In this interview, Pornsak and I talk about the setting and genre of The Good Asian, and what it means to star a Chinese-American lead in such a well-known genre. Pornsak Pichetshote was a Thai-American rising star editor at DC’s Vertigo imprint where he worked on such comics perennials as The Sandman and Swamp Thing. He left Vertigo to become an executive in DC Entertainment’s media team, where he started and oversaw DC TV’s department. He is also the writer of Infidel, also for Image Comics, which was his first work as a writer. He can be followed on Twitter at @real_pornsak, and on Instagram at @real_psak. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good Asian. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Jeanne Matthews about her new novel Devil by the Tail (D.X. Varos, 2021) It’s 1867, and a 20-something civil war widow has just set up a detective agency with a former rebel soldier named Gabriel Garnick. She uses a professional name, Mrs. Paschal, so nobody connects her with the former in-laws who are trying to stop her from receiving her dead husband’s estate. Garnick and Paschal get two cases on the same day – the first to help prove a man innocent of murdering his wife, the second to find reasonable doubt for an accused murderer. Imagine their surprise when the cases turn out to be linked? And imagine 19th Century pre-fire Chicago, teeming with corrupt politicians, gambling parlors, and bawdy houses of ill-repute. Also, someone is trying to murder Quinn Sinclair, aka Mrs. Paschal. Jeanne Matthews graduated from the University of Georgia with a degree in Journalism and has worked as a copywriter, a high school English and Drama teacher, and a paralegal. She worked for litigators for twenty years, and there was seldom a day when she didn’t fantasize about murder. So it was no wonder when her interested turned to writing murder mysteries. An avid traveler and crime fiction reader, she is the author of the Dinah Pelerin international mystery series (Five book set published by Poison Pen). Matthews and her husband, a law professor, currently live in Washington State with Jack Reacher, their Norwich terrier. She loves travel, hiking, and photography, plays old torch songs from the 1930’s and 40’s on piano after a few glasses of wine, and enjoy cooking and baking. She also plays a mean game of Scrabble. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

We have a collective memory of a primeval world embodied in myth. It is a world where spirits lived in the trees, water, and mountains, and nature was sacred. Was such a world ever possible, or was it doomed as soon as humans spread? What went wrong with our planet and whose fault is it? Are innovators, who look to science for answers, agents of positive change, or merely heedless apologists for human greed? These are some of the many questions that Bell’s new novel, Appleseed (Custom House, 2021) provokes. No doubt a few literature students will be inspired to write papers. Bell’s ambitious and original triptych of interlocking stories explores man’s relationship with the wilderness through three timelines, set in the past, the near future, and the far future, after a cataclysmic catastrophe. Snow Piercer has nothing on this chilly future world, bereft of any life. Such a novel is a challenge to reduce to a synopsis. In one time period, the late 1800s, a faun, Chapman, suppresses his identity out of love for his human brother, as well as fear of the Furies who chase him, carrying Orpheus’ howling head. Chapman might be, in some magical manner, responsible for Eurydice’s death, though the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice does not involve Chapman directly, but rather an unnamed shadowy shepherd, who in some accounts was a faun. Chapman’s fear of the women who pursue him leads him to renounce the wild. The second segment of the novel follows John Worth, a scientist who regrets his part in building the corporate empire that supplies a climate-change battered world with genetically modified foods, in return for absolute power. John, urged on by three wild women, former soldiers, returns to the company he helped found, to plot against the CEO, Eury, short for Eurydice. In the third part of the novel, something apparently has gone wrong, either with Eury’s plan to delay the disastrous effects of climate change through launching a swarm of nanobees into the stratosphere, or with John’s intention to subvert her. The world is a frozen wasteland, apparently populated only by a cyborg creature that seems modelled after the faun we first met planting apple seeds. The gorgeous writing and fraught symbolism will engage serious readers with a philosophical bent. You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kin by Miljenko Jergović (Archipelago Books, 2021) is a family story that covers more than a century; it takes readers to various geographical places and introduces them to a kaleidoscope of historical perturbations. The narrator seems to sincerely try to tell a truthful story, but acknowledges from the very beginning that it would probably be impossible to provide only true facts. Thus, the reader has no other choice than to rely on the narrator’s sincerity and make their way through the labyrinthine narrative in which everything seems to have its own story: places, objects, names, food, houses, etc. Gradually, the novel turns into an attempt to provide evidence for everything that the narrator seems to know and remember: family members and friends, wars and conflicts, marriages and adulteries, devotion and betrayal, happiness and despondency. The novel chapters resemble vignettes which lure the reader into a magical world in which nothing can be lost. In this interview, Russell Scott Valentino, translator of the novel, shares his insights about the novel and the translation journey through Miljenko Jergović’s family saga. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jeanne de St.-Rémy has a grudge against the world. Born into the French royal family—if admittedly by a somewhat labyrinthine route—she spends years of her childhood so disinherited and ignored that at the age of six she is begging in the streets of Paris. A lucky accident brings her to the attention of the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, who adopts the little waif, raises her as a daughter, and helps her prove her claim to be considered a relative of King Louis XV through a legitimized descendant of the previous royal family, the Valois. The marquise even helps Jeanne secure a pension, but Jeanne remains unsatisfied. She will settle for nothing less than full acceptance into the court at Versailles. Through a series of affairs and a forced marriage to Nicolas de La Motte, who becomes Jeanne’s loyal partner if not the husband of her heart, Jeanne ploughs through all obstacles on her path. Her greatest conquest is the Cardinal-Prince Louis de Rohan, a high-ranking aristocrat whose campaign to regain his influence with the new king, Louis XVI, is repeatedly challenged by a hostile Marie Antoinette. When Jeanne learns of a magnificent diamond necklace, a creation so elaborate and enormous that its purchase price would bankrupt a nation, the stage is set for a scandal that will bring down the very monarchy Jeanne is so desperate to enter. With a keen eye and a vivid appreciation for detail, Mary Martin Devlin creates, in The La Motte Woman (Cuidono Press, 2021), an indelible picture of how three clashing obsessions—Jeanne’s quest for the validation of her heritage, Rohan’s yearning for his appointment as prime minister, and the jewelers’ determination to produce a unique and, in their minds, perfect work of art—intersected to destroy the reputation of Queen Marie Antoinette, with catastrophic results for the French monarchy as a whole. A former professor of English and creative writing at Mount Holyoke College, Mary Martin Devlin has always had a passion for French literature and culture. In addition to The La Motte Woman, she is the author of Precious Pawn, based on the memoir of an aristocrat in the decadent reign of Louis XV, and Death in the Rainy Season, set among the American and European expat community of 1980s Zaire.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Helen Sword, writing champion, brings us into the word gym. Or maybe kitchen. Either way, The Writer's Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose (U Chicago Press, 2016) is a short, sharp introduction to great writing based around 5 principles: --use active verbs whenever possible; --favour concrete language over vague abstractions; --avoid long strings of prepositional phrases; --employ adjectives and adverbs only when they contribute something new to the meaning of a sentence; --reduce your dependence on four pernicious “waste words”: it, this, that, and there.

There are examples of the good - William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., John McPhee, A. S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Alison Gopnik, and well, the bad. But you can fix the bad - really Dr Sword's point. Dr Helen Sword received her doctorate in comparative literature from Princeton University and has lived since 2001 in New Zealand, where she is a Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland and runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Martín Prechtel, who's written a book about horses called The Mare and the Mouse (North Start Press of Saint Cloud, 2021). Actually, he's written three books about horses. The subtitle of this one is called Stories of My Horses, Volume 1, and there are two more volumes to come. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, "I'm not a horse person." Well, I'm not a horse person either. And if you aren't, it doesn't matter. You'll love hearing what Martin has to say. He's an amazing storyteller and a profound teacher. And if you are a horse person, I suspect you'll find Martín's vision of horses moving, rambunctious, insightful, deeply learned, and richly experienced. He may even change the way you understand your horse and, as importantly, he may also give your horse a better chance to understand you. Here's my conversation with the extraordinary and invaluable Martín Prechtel. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Martín Prechtel, who's an author and so much more than an author. He's a teacher, a musician, a farmer, a cook, a silversmith, a horseman, and...and...and... so much more, including a guiding light for many of us hoping to live as true human beings. He's got a new book called Rescuing the Light: Quotes from the Oral Teachings of Martín Prechtel (North Atlantic Books, 2021). His teaching now happens at his school in Northern New Mexico. It's called Boland's Kitchen, and that name in itself is a riddle that, over the course of our interview, lights the way to wisdom. I deeply admire and love Martín and all the work he does and I'm delighted to share our conversation with you. One note before we start: Martín doesn't use computers and doesn't really like using phones, for reasons you'll hear about. Toward the end of our conversation, our connection cut out, and I didn't have the chance to thank him on the air. I'm happy to do so now. Thank you, Martín, for your words and your wisdom. Jump up and live! Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today we are joined by Greg Larson, author of Clubbie: A Minor League Baseball Memoir (University of Nebraska, 2021). In Clubbie, Larson shares his unique perspective from his two-year stint as clubhouse attendant for the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Class A short-season affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Larson’s starry-eyed perceptions about the game were quickly erased by the reality of a job that was time-consuming and thankless. Larson brings the reader into the minor-league clubhouse, showing how young baseball professionals are literally playing for their jobs on a day-to-day basis. As the clubhouse attendant, Larson was charged with doing laundry, making sure the players had food after the game, and keeping players supplied with equipment. He writes about the scams run by food concession officials, and also describes some of the ingenious ways he added to his own bank account. Players had to pay clubhouse dues on a limited salary, and while Larson made more than the players, broken bats, deals with beer distributors and other team staff members helped him survive. Larson spent a year living out of a converted equipment closet at Ripken Stadium to save on living expenses, and his observations are memorable. Larson’s vivid portraits of Alan Mills, Gary Allenson, Matt Merullo and Brian Graham — and himself — create a fascinating look at baseball from the bottom, looking up. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary ﬁction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to ﬁnd a scientiﬁc theory of consciousness. But when he's offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focusing on his work, however, Kierk becomes obsessed with another project--investigating the sudden and suspicious death of a colleague. As his search for truth brings him closer to Carmen Green, another postdoc, their list of suspects grows, along with the sense that something sinister may be happening all around them. The Revelations (Overlook Press, 2021), not unlike its main character, is ambitious and abrasive, challenging and disarming. Bursting with ideas, ranging from Greek mythology to the dark realities of animal testing, to some of the biggest unanswered questions facing scientists today, The Revelations is written in muscular, hypnotic prose, and its cyclically dreamlike structure pushes the boundaries of literary ﬁction. Erik Hoel has crafted a stunning debut of rare power--an intense look at cutting-edge science, consciousness, and human connection. You can find Erik Hoel on Substack at https://erikhoel.substack.com/ and on Twitter @erikphoel. Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. He lives in Boston with two ragdoll kittens and a climate scientist.You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website, https://www.josephfridman.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fifth in the Henrietta and Inspector Howard Mystery Series, A Child Lost (She Writes Press, 2020) begins in 1935, with Henrietta’s younger sister, Elsie, falling in love with Gunther, a German refugee. He has come to America to locate Liesel, the mother of a little girl he’s been caring for, and has been working in maintenance at Elsie’s school. Elsie begs Henrietta and Clive to help find Liesel, which leads to the old Dunning Asylum on Chicago’s north side. The little girl, who has been having epileptic fits, is also spirited away to the horrible place. Henrietta and Clive brave filth and chaos to get her out, but Henrietta later realizes that everything wasn’t as it seemed. Meanwhile, Clive is assigned to investigate a spiritualist living on the north shore, who might be robbing people of their valuables. It seems like a boring case until Henrietta starts falling for the spiritualist’s visions. Michelle Cox holds a B.A. in English literature from Mundelein College, Chicago and is the author of the multiple award-winning Henrietta and Inspector Howard series as well as “Novel Notes of Local Lore,” a weekly blog dedicated to Chicago’s forgotten residents. She suspects she may have once lived in the 1930s and, having yet to discover a handy time machine lying around, has resorted to writing about the era as a way of getting herself back there. Coincidentally, her books have been praised by Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Booklist and many others, so she might be on to something. Unbeknownst to most, Michelle hoards board games she doesn’t have time to play and is, not surprisingly, addicted to period dramas and big band music. Also, marmalade. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Good Donkey,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Kolluri talks about writing fiction from the perspectives of different animals, and where the inspiration for those stories comes from. She also discusses how being mixed race can complicate conversations about race and identity in the U.S., how books and literature are making space for those conversations, and how she balances writing with a full-time job as an attorney. Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s short fiction has appeared in The Minnesota Review, Ecotone, and Southern Humanities Review. She was born and raised in Northern California and now lives in the Central Valley, where she is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel. Read her story in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-good-donkey. Read more about Talia and her work at taliakolluri.com. Below is a list of books and writers that Talia recommended in the podcast. On the Palestinian experience:

The Drone Eats with Me by Atef Abu Saif

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadeh

On the mixed-race experience:

Heidi Durrow, founder of the Mixed-Remixed Festival

The House of Deep Water by Jeni McFarland

Donna Miscolta

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden

The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Daniel Shapiro was a successful attorney in his early forties when his wife, Susan, suffered a brain bleed and a diagnosis that her future was uncertain. Stunned, and with three young children, the couple made the most of the few years that followed, before a massive second hemorrhage changed everything. Physically, Susan was badly compromised in her ability to speak, see, and walk. Mentally, she spiraled into depression and experienced a drastic personality change. The Thin Ledge: A Husband’s Memoir of Love, Trauma, and Unexpected Circumstances (River Grove Books, 2021) is about coping (often unsuccessfully) with the wreckage left in the wake of an illness that destroys a loved one. Shapiro addresses the questions that people living through unspeakable tragedy may never mention, but almost always ask. Daniel P. Shapiro completed his undergraduate degree as a member of Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Illinois, and earned a J.D. at the University of Chicago Law School. He grew up in the northern Chicago suburbs, his mother a homemaker and his father a professional artist. Daniel has always loved both photography and writing. Before practicing law, he was a contributing writer for a local newspaper. Over the years, and especially while undergoing the events described in his memoir, he found writing to be an effective way to access his inner thoughts and to think in a constructive way about the challenges he needed to address. Writing classes and working with excellent teachers (to whom he is immensely grateful) helped him hone his skills, with the result being his memoir, The Thin Ledge. He is already at work on a second book, a novel. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and divorced father. This work of fact-based fiction, or "faction," follows Toole as he wakes up in his rented apartment in upstate New York, meditates with the mantra "Duh," commutes via train and subway to an engineering school in New Jersey, teaches a William James essay on consciousness to freshmen, squabbles about Thomas Kuhn with colleagues over lunch, takes a ferry to Manhattan and spends the evening with his bossy, Tarot-reading girlfriend, Emily, on whom he plans to spring a big question. Throughout the day, Toole struggles to be rational while buffeted by fears and yearnings. Thoughts of sex and death keep intruding on his ruminations over quantum spookiness, the neural code, the Singularity and free will. Pay Attention is a profane, profound meditation on the entanglements of our inner and outer worlds and the elusiveness of truth. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This interview features a candid conversation with Greg Bailey, seasoned scholar of Sanskrit narrative Literature, on his multi-decade work on the Purāṇas and Mahābhārata, and on his new novel In Search of Bliss: A Tale of Early Buddhism (Vanguard Press, 2019). About the novel: Kshemapala is a monk from the North who has been tasked with an important scholarly mission: fill in the gaps in the history of the monk, Ananda, the Buddha's close companion, about whom there are legends but few facts. To achieve this he must journey south, towards the source of many of the stories and also towards experiences which will challenge his perception of his practice and of himself. Highly trained in Buddhist meditation techniques and detachment, he must take in and study the evidence, and understand the behaviour and choices of a monk from the past who seems to have done things rather differently. Along the way, Kshemapala is assisted by old and new acquaintances and teachers, and thrown into peril by his confrontation with the supernatural, despite his years of discipline. He is challenged mentally, physically and metaphysically, all of which lead him to consider his own direction. Raj Balkaran is a scholar, educator, consultant, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel The Wall (Harper Collins, 2020) is set in Sumer, a city enclosed in an impenetrable, unscalable barrier that seems sky high. To its inhabitants, whose ancestors have lived there for 2,000 years, the place is more than a city or even a country—it’s their universe. Sumer’s residents know something is on the other side but have no desire to explore beyond the wall. They are content with what they have, living comfortably with the resources, rules and hierarchies that have sustained them for centuries. But every couple generations, some people crave more. In this generation, a group calling themselves the Young Tarafians are determined to breach the wall once and for all. “It's not that there is some kind of very visible and wretched oppression that's keeping people down,” Bhatia says. “At the end of the day, the resources are distributed in a way that everyone has enough for at least a decent standard of life. So it's not meant to be a dystopia, and that's part of the point. … Rebellion need not only come from a situation of desperation … but you still may want to rebel and alter things.” When the troika of powers that rule Sumer—the civil government, the scientists and the religious elite—prosecute the Young Tarafians’ eloquent leader, a young queer woman named Mithila, each side has an opportunity to make their case. “It's actually taking a great risk by going beyond the wall. And for what? That makes the conflict between those who want to go beyond the wall and those who want to stay a much harder conflict to resolve,” says Bhatia, who is a lawyer and constitutional scholar. “Both sides have good arguments. It shouldn't be a very clear binary between who’s right or wrong.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Wall

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light—winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and finalist in the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction—tells the story of Joseph Kylander, whose childhood in early 20th-century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father’s obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong cousin Karelia’s fanciful storytelling and impulsive acts. The 1906 earthquake upends their eccentric routines, and they take refuge with a capricious patron and a group of artists looking to find meaning after the disaster. The Book of Lost Light explores family loyalty and betrayal, Finnish folklore, the nature of time and theater, and what it takes to recover from calamity and build a new life from the ashes. Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, and 100 Word Story, among others, and his stories have been shortlisted for the O. Henry Awards and the Pushcart Prize. His writing about architecture, urban design, and sustainability has appeared in Urban Land, Interior Design, Metropolis, and elsewhere. He is the coauthor, with his spouse and writing partner Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers and a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories. Ron earned his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. A former Stegner Fellow, he is an instructor in fiction writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. In his free time, he loves going to the theater, museums, and the San Francisco Bay. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Guest Gina Warren discusses her newest book Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement, published May 2021 by University of Washington Press. Warren chronicles her experience in starting a backyard chicken flock from bringing home day old chicks, feeding and housing them, and eventually butchering and cooking them as meat. Rather than offering practical advice or a how-to-guide to raising chickens, Warren instead demonstrates thoughtful grappling with what it means to be an ethical eater in a capitalist society. Warren’s journey with ethical eating begins as a vegetarian seeking alternative ways to acquire animal protein while causing the least amount of harm to animals and the environment and taking an active role in producing her own food. Warren states her mission clearly: “I chose to increase the overlapping territory in the Venn diagram between what I consume and what goods I can understand as part of a continuous process.” While raising a small flock of egg-laying chickens, Warren interrogates the industrial food system and the cruelties inflicted on poultry. However, Warren is also critical of the backyard chicken movement and the inequities in class privilege it can reveal. The Silicon Valley Tour de Coop brings up some complex paradoxes, revealing that the ability to raise chickens may be a product of privilege, and chicken zoning regulations are largely products of environmental racism and redlining. While raising animals and plants for food in urban areas can be a powerful act of undermining capitalism with agriculture, Warren points out many ways that these are still exclusive and incomplete actions. Similarly, in her chapter about dumpster diving for food to feed herself and her chickens, Warren acknowledges that being white, young, and female – “someone who doesn’t look like they need to be dumpster diving” - protects her in an encounter with the police. Warren writes with unflinching and unsentimental candor about the end of the chickens’ lives when she teaches a small group of interested learners about humane butchering. Her respect for their lives and pragmatic gratitude for their deaths is moving. The final chapters explore the act of eating meat, and Warren describes some delicious sounding preparations of liver pate, chicken feet, and stir-fried intestines, as well as the pleasure and pride of preparing meals for friends and family that align with her ethical values. Warren’s creative writing MFA and English PhD serve her well in blending narrative and research with a journalistic style that is accessible and entertaining while also mounting a well-supported critique of food systems. Gina G. Warren writes about animals, the natural world, and human relationships for publications such as Orion, Creative Nonfiction, and Terrain.org. She raises a flock of chickens in her backyard. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 2016, the German government announces a new prize for Hebrew writers around the world, the Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature, which will return the Hebrew Literary Center to it. Chezi, an Israeli guy of Iraqi descent who came to Berlin following his love for his German wife Helena, is the first winner of the award - for his book "Staying in Baghdad". On the morning of the victory, while Helena is having an abortion, a political storm arises in Israel due to his winning the prize. The Prize (Pardes Publishing, 2021) is a wild, honed and poignant satire about the literary industry - from the time the book was written to the days it was published, including editing and translating, distributing, publishing and submitting awards - and at the same time a touching novel about love and parenting, adolescence and identity. Shemoelof moves between these two axes - the soft and the sharpened - with admirable virtuosity, as he mobilizes alongside him a surge of humor, wisdom and daring. Mati Shemoelof is an Arab-Jew writer, poet, activist, author, and editor that was born and raised in Haifa, Israel. He am currently based in Berlin, Germany. He had already published ten books both in Israel and Germany. His writing is diverse. It includes fiction, poetry, plays, articles for magazines and newspapers, texts for art exhibitions, short stories, and more. His personal and artistic mission is to shine a light on injustice and discrimination. He looks to the past and to the future in order to find fresh new solutions for the present, and work to bridge existing cultural divides. For more see: https://mati-s.com/ Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

I only ever asked you for one thing,' my father said, a quiver in his voice. 'Just this one thing.' It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments. 'Oh father,' I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. 'The one thing you asked of me - is everything.' Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House of Adam proud. But Bani wanted more than this - he wanted to make his own choices. Being the first in his Australian Muslim family to go to university, he could see a different way. Years later, Bani will write his story to his son, Kahlil. Telling him of the choices that were made on Bani's behalf and those that he made for himself. Of the hurt he caused and the heartache he carries. Of the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned. In this moving and timely novel, Michael Mohammed Ahmad balances the complexities of modern love with the demands of family, tradition and faith. The Other Half of You is the powerful, insightful and unforgettable new novel from the Miles Franklin shortlisted author of The Lebs. Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ravi Shankar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “The Five-Room Box,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Shankar talks about constructing this essay on identity, family, and fitting in from an excerpt of his memoir, Correctional, about his time spent in prison. He also discusses how that time changed the course of his academic work, what it’s like to transition from poet to prose-writer, and the privilege and profiling Asian-Americans experience as the ‘model minority.’ Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart Prize-winning poet, translator, and professor. He has published fifteen books, including W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century, Recent Works Press’s The Many Uses of Mint, and the Muse India Award-winning Tamil translation The Autobiography of a Goddess. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and PBS NewsHour. He received his PhD from the University of Sydney, and his memoir Correctional is out this fall from University of Wisconsin Press. Read his essay in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-five-room-box. Read more about Ravi Shankar and his work at poetravishankar.com. Pre-order his memoir Correctional, out in October, here. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Correctional

Poet Ariana Brown searches for new origins in her debut book We Are Owed. (Grieveland Press, 2021). Brown has had over ten years of experience writing, performing, and teaching poetry that struggles towards freedom for all Black peoples. She identifies on her website as a “queer Black Mexican American poet” whose lived experiences within anti-Black cultures and societies have forced her to spin language into liberation. We Are Owed. achieves that goal by centering scenes of Black Mexican American life, history, and feeling. The title is a call to action, a demand, a recognition, a reparation, a reorientation, and a reclamation. Brown ushers in a new grammar that reaches beyond nation and builds from the foundational understanding that colonial and neocolonial nation-states, and the theory of borderlands set forth by Anzaldúa, are limiting to Black peoples. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017), leading edge thinker and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe embraces some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood. Creatively using memoir and the epistolary format, Dr. Akomolafe offers an engaging, thought-provoking look at a range of timely subjects, including the myths of modernity, climate change, food systems, and what it means to be human. Dr. Bayo Akomolafe is a writer, lecturer, and public intellectual. He is Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online writing course “We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence.” He is co-author and co-editor of “We Will Tell Our Own Story!” and creator of a new work called “I Coronoavirus, Mother, Monster, Activist,” which is available at bayoakomolafe.net. Dr.Susan Grelock Yusem is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark goes full-length for the first time in his dazzling debut novel: A Master of Djinn (Tordotcom, 2021). Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she's certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer. So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage. Alongside her Ministry colleagues and a familiar person from her past, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city--or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems... Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Camera Obscura (Red Hen Press, 2021) by Carl Marcum is a lyrical exploration of external and internal worlds. The heavens described in these poems could be the stars glittering above our heads, the pathways of faith, or the connection between human beings. Playing with scientific understandings of the world, along with the linguistic conventions of the poetic form, A Camera Obscura is a compelling journey that simultaneously drifts through the cosmos while being rooted to the ground beneath our feet. “When the sun rose it was smaller than in my dream. I had been asleep for what felt a long time, and woke confused and claustrophobic. The texture of the sky still magnetized me, a desert bright day. But the light is streaked like too much everything pulled to the edges of a window in storm.” — from “A Science Fiction” Carl Marcum is a Chicano poet from Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the collection Cue Lazarus, and his poems have appeared in the anthologies The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry and Latinx Rising: An Anthology of Latinx Science Fiction & Fantasy. Carl has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Taos Writers Conference. And he has also served as a Canto Mundo Fellow from 2011 to 2015. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When her father dies after a drawn-out illness, the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest (One World, 2021) wonders how one grieves if a family never talks about feelings. The father is one of Hong Kong’s ‘astronaut’ fathers, who stays there to work after the rest of the family leave before the 1997 handover, when Britain returns the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China. The protagonist turns to her mother and grandmother with questions about customs, religious traditions, and misunderstandings that occurred over the course of her life. Their answers, together with snippets of her own memories, help her understand her own actions. She also begins to understand her parents and why they made the decision to live a world apart for most of the year. And she realizes that even though they didn’t talk about love, it was always there. Pik-Shuen Fung is a Canadian writer and artist living in New York City. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kundiman, the Millay Colony, and Storyknife. She has an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts and a BA from Brown University. Ghost Forest is her first book. In her free time, she loves to cook, talk about food, and eat the delicious dishes cooked by her husband, who is a chef. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In a sense, those of us who love historical fiction live vicariously in the past. Many of us also fantasize about traveling in time—meeting our favorite writers in the flesh, hanging around with royalty, living the aristocratic lifestyle. We tend to forget or understate the very real benefits of the present, amenities we take for granted (indoor plumbing, central heat and air conditioning, refrigeration) and intangibles such as human rights and the presumption of innocence, still implemented in patchwork fashion across the globe. Professor Jessica Randall, modern-day heroine of The Play’s the Thing (TouchPoint Press, 2021), experiences this conundrum firsthand. One evening, while she is doing her best to stay focused on a dreadful amateur production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, she allows herself a brief escape—only to end up in an Elizabethan theater, watching an original production of the play with (as she realizes only later) the Bard himself in the role of Shylock. She stumbles out of that setting and back into her seat in the twenty-first-century auditorium, but later that evening, turned somnolent by student essays and one too many glasses of wine, Jessica finds herself trapped in what turns out to be William Shakespeare’s cupboard. When he at last deigns to unlock the door, he informs her that she is the latest among hundreds of screaming Jessicas who have been making his life hell for months. Will assures Jessica that she will soon vanish into the ether and return whence she came. She’s convinced it’s an elaborate dream, because how could it be real? But when dawn arrives, she is still in 1598, Will is asleep on the mattress next to her, and she can hear rats rustling under the filthy straw. Perhaps it’s not a dream after all. At that point, to keep herself sane on the off-chance that she can’t find a way home, Jessica decides she’d better apply her knowledge of the future to clean up Shakespeare, his rooms, and her own act before those rats in the corner give them both bubonic plague. Jessica Barksdale Inclán approaches her main character’s dilemma (there’s a funny story in the interview about how author and character come to have the same first name) with a deliciously light touch. The dialogue sparkles, Jessica’s struggles and flaws never fail to ring true, and the contrast between her unmistakably modern views and Will Shakespeare’s Elizabethan take on life are simultaneously revealing and thought-provoking. If you’re looking for a scientific explanation of time travel (assuming that such a thing exists), you won’t find it here, but the novel is, in every respect, a fun read. It will stay with you long after you reach the end. Jessica Barksdale Inclán's fifteenth novel,The Play’s the Thing, was published by TouchPoint Press in May 2021. Her other novels include the award-winning The Burning Hour as well as Her Daughter’s Eyes, The Matter of Grace, and When You Believe. Her second poetry collection, Grim Honey, came out in April 2021. C. P. Lesley is the author of 11 novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of the book and its use of the glossary as a form open up exciting ways of thinking and seeing. And this is very much to the point for Lopez-Pineiro, because the urban void about which he writes is a phenomenon that resists definition. It is, in his words, "unspecified and underspecified." And that's exactly what makes it so intriguing. Join me in hearing Lopez-Pineiro show us how some of the most seemingly overlooked and neglected areas of our urban environments may end up being the most crucial for our freedoms and our possibilities. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This year, transgender liberation is at the forefront of Pride Month discourse, with a staggering number of conservative, religious, and gender critical-backed bills challenging trans people’s rights to use public restrooms, participate in organized sports, and even expect inclusive language at the doctor’s office. These would-be laws seek to legislate and restrict trans identity—especially that of trans children—despite the fact that trans people have always existed and will continue to exist, living lives that sometimes include having children of their own. For trans masculine writer Krys Malcolm Belc, pregnancy taught him more about gender identity and transition than he expected—an embodied experience that ultimately encouraged him to begin Hormone Replacement Therapy. In his stunning experimental debut, The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, Belc uses original photographs and documents to outline the expansion of his family and the surprising revelations of this journey. The result is a can’t-miss book about trans identity and parenthood full of poignancy, humor, and love. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Krys Malcolm Belc to learn more about The Natural Mother of the Child, available now from Counterpoint (2021). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Wyatt Townley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Instructions for the Endgame,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Townley talks about experiencing poetry in all parts of her life—in dance and yoga, in astronomy and physics, and in nature. She also discusses her time as Poet Laureate of Kansas, the pleasure of revising poems, and what it’s like seeing her work performed as an opera. Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her books include four collections of poetry: Rewriting the Body, The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees. Wyatt’s work has been read on NPR, featured in American Life in Poetry, and published in journals ranging from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Formerly a dancer, Wyatt has developed and trademarked her own yoga system, Yoganetics, now practiced on six continents. Read Wyatt’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/wyatt-townley. Read more about Wyatt Townley, her poetry, and Yoganetics at wyatttownley.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

"Your problem is you have a Russian soul," Anna's mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War-and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien culture for the first time, she must come to terms with the aspects of the past that haunt her own life. With its intricate insight into the everyday rhythms of an almost forgotten way of life in Brezhnev's Soviet Union, Forget Russia (Tailwinds Press, 2020) is a disquieting multi-generational epic about coming of age, forgotten history, and the loss of innocence in all of its forms. L. Bordetsky-Williams (aka Lisa Williams) is the author of Forget Russia, published by Tailwinds Press, December 2020 (https://www.forgetrussia.com). She has also published the memoir, Letters to Virginia Woolf, The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, and three poetry chapbooks. She is a Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey and lives in New York City. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Where does DNA end and the soul begin? It’s a question that Evelyn Caldwell, the brilliant genetic researcher at the center of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, never asks as she develops her award-winning technique for human cloning, which takes DNA from “sample to sentience” in 100 days. In The Echo Wife, clones are tools, created for specific time-limited purposes—to serve as a body double to draw fire from potential assassins, for example, or to provide donor organs. The question of a soul never enters into it. “Clones aren’t people. …They’re specimens,” Evelyn explains. “They’re temporary, and when they stop being useful, they become biomedical waste. They are disposable.” Evelyn’s attitudes evolve when her ex-husband, Nathan, secretly uses the Caldwell Method to create Martine—a new wife scaffolded from Evelyn’s DNA but modified to be more docile and easy going. Because of Martine’s compliant nature (and complete reliance on Nathan for her knowledge of the world), Martine is eager to provide Nathan with the child Evelyn never wanted. Evelyn is horrified by Martine’s existence—not only because Nathan stole her DNA to build a twin who lacks what Nathan calls Evelyn’s “needless venom,” but because Martine’s pregnancy should be impossible (clones are usually sterile) and threatens the future of the Caldwell Method. Clones’ “inability to produce children is something that Evelyn uses to help maintain a sense of them being inhuman,” Gailey says. “So Martine's pregnancy … poses a huge threat to all of Evelyn's work.” The pregnancy also poses a threat to Evelyn’s sense of self as she and Martine join forces to deal with multiple crises—murder and betrayal foremost among them—in addition to the pregnancy and Evelyn’s unexamined childhood traumas that contributed to her becoming a brilliant and fierce maverick. Gailey’s debut novella, River of Teeth, was a Hugo and Nebula award finalist. In 2018, they won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. They are the author of seven novels. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

It can be easy to forget amongst the glistening skyscrapers, bustling streets and neon lights, but the Pearl River Delta used to be a haven for banditry and piracy. As the authority of Imperial China waned, pirate fleets based out of Guangdong Province roamed the waves, raiding traders and taking captives. One of these captives, and later pirates was Cheng Yat Sou—the “wife of Cheng Yat”—who rose from humble beginnings to eventually bring together the competing pirate fleets into a confederation. She is also the star of Larry Feign’s first novel The Flower Boat Girl (Top Floor Books, 2021). Larry starts the story of the pirate queen from her abduction by Cheng Yat, and writes of how she gains a foothold among the pirate fleets. More information—and a sample chapter—can be found on the book’s website. Larry and I talk about Cheng Yat Sou, early-nineteenth century China, and pirate fleets. We also talk about how Larry wrote the book, and what he learned from being one of Hong Kong’s most prominent cartoonists. Larry Feign is an award-winning artist and writer based in Hong Kong. He is well known for his long-running daily political comic strip “Lily Wong”, which satirized life in Hong Kong before and after the handover to China until he retired the cartoon in 2007. Feign’s work has appeared in Time, The Economist, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and other publications around the world. He also directed animated cartoons for Walt Disney Television and Cartoon Network. He is a MacDowell Fellow and three-time recipient of Amnesty International Human Rights Press Awards. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Flower Boat Girl. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Karen Salyer McElmurray about her novel Wanting Radiance (UP of Kentucky, 2020). Fifteen-year-old Miracelle Loving hears the gunshot that kills her mother, and runs to hold her while she dies. She spends the next two decades roaming, fortune telling and picking up odd jobs. Then, as if in a dream, she hears her mother’s voice urging her to seek answers about where she came from. Miracelle finds love, but isn’t ready for it, and she finds a possible path, but doesn’t recognize it. She embarks on a solitary journey that no amount of fortune telling can prepare her for and discovers a home she never knew, a father she never met, and a grandfather she didn’t know existed. Perhaps the most important thing she learns is that she can’t love another person if she doesn’t love herself. Karen Salyer McElmurray earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Virginia, an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, where she studied American Literature and Fiction Writing. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Physician on the Nile: A Description of Egypt and Journal of the Famine Years (NYU Press, 2021) is a unique text that will fascinate specialists and general readers alike. Written by the polymath and physician ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī, and intended for the Abbasid caliph al-Nāṣir (r. 1180-1225 CE), the first part of the book offers detailed descriptions of Egypt’s geography, plants, animals, and local cuisine, including a recipe for a giant picnic pie made with three entire roast lambs and dozens of chickens. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf’s text is also a pioneering work of ancient Egyptology, with detailed observations of Pharaonic monuments, sculptures, and mummies. An early and ardent champion of archaeological conservation, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf condemns the vandalism wrought by tomb-robbers and notes with distaste that Egyptian grocers price their goods with labels written on recycled mummy-wrappings. The book’s second half relates his horrific eyewitness account of the great famine that afflicted Egypt in the years 597–598/1200–1202. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a keen observer of humanity, and he offers vivid first-hand depictions of starvation, cannibalism, and a society in moral free-fall. At times funny and witty, at others poignant and harrowing, al-Baghdadi's voice is rendered through the expert translation of Tim Mackintosh-Smith, a travel writer and Arabist who has been based in Sana'a, Yemen, for four decades. In this interview we discuss the art of translating a text for a modern audience, and explore this fascinating text, published in a bilingual Arabic-English version by the Library of Arabic Literature (New York University Press, 2021), which is distinguished by the acute, humane, and ever-curious mind of its author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Silvia Spring speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her debut short story “The Home Front,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Spring talks about the inspiration and process behind this story, which tangles with the difficulties of coming into adulthood, and the experience of living abroad without feeling part of the community. Spring drew from her own experience studying and living in London in the U.K., and her time as a journalist at Newsweek, embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The conversation also includes discussion of the revision process; writing without an MFA; and U.S. foreign policy, today and over the last few years. Silvia Spring is the Foreign Policy Lead on TikTok’s U.S. Public Policy Team. Prior to joining TikTok, she spent three years as Airbnb’s Foreign Policy Manager. Silvia was a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State from 2010-2017, serving in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, and the U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States. She started her career at Newsweek as a Special Correspondent based in London and reported from Kenya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Read “The Home Front” in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-home-front. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I spoke to anthropologist Alisse Waterston and artist Charlotte Corden to ask them questions, such as: What will become of us in these trying times? How will we pass the time that we have on earth? These questions draw on their gorgeously rendered graphic form book, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning (University of Toronto Press, 2020), which invites readers to explore the political catastrophes and moral disasters of the past and present, to reveal issues that beg to be studied, understood, confronted, and resisted. A profound work of anthropology and art, this book is for anyone yearning to understand the darkness and hoping to hold onto the light. It is a powerful story of encounters with writers, philosophers, activists, and anthropologists whose words are as meaningful today as they were during the times in which they were written. This book is at once a lament over the darkness of our times, an affirmation of the value of knowledge and introspection, and a consideration of truth, lies, and the dangers of the trivial. In a time when many of us struggle with the feeling that we cannot do enough to change the course of the future, this book is a call to action, asking us to envision and create an alternative world from the one in which we now live. Light in Dark Times is beautiful to look at and to hold – an exquisite work of art that is lively, informative, enlightening, deeply moving, and inspiring. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Lee Zacharias about her new book What a Wonderful World this Could Be (Madville Publishing, 2021). Alex has always wanted a real family. Her father commits suicide, her mother has never noticed where she is, and at 15, she falls in love with a 27-year-old photographer. When she comes of age, she’s about to marry him, but someone else has turned her head, Ted Neal, a charismatic activist on his way to Mississippi for 1964’s Freedom Summer. Alex just wants to take pictures, but she and Ted invite some of his friends to live together in a collective that functions like a sort of family. Alex is happy, but the conversations focus in on anti-war movement of the 60s, and some of the so-called family members get radicalized by the ‘Weathermen.’ Alex is incensed to learn that the FBI is following her even after the ‘family’ disperses and shocked when Ted disappears. Eleven years later he shows up again, but now he’s dying and Alex, who hasn’t remarried, has to figure out what love means. Lee Zacharias, who holds degrees from Indiana University Hollins, College, and the University of Arkansas, has taught at Princeton University and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she is Emerita Professor of English, as well as many conferences, most recently the Wildacres Writers Workshop. She is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; three previous novels, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has co-edited an anthology of stories, Runaway, released in 2020, with Luanne Smith and Michael Gills. Zacharias has received fellowships and is a recipient of several awards. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals, including, among others, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Five Points, Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, Outdoor Photographer, and Our State. Her essays have been named Notable Essays of the Year by The Best American Essays, which reprinted her essay "Buzzards" in The Best American Essays 2008, and she served as editor of The Greensboro Review for a decade. Zacharias, when she’s not writing, loves photographing landscapes and birds. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Listen to this interview of Brooke Rollins, Assistant Professor of English at Lehigh University. We talk about lots of Greeks and about one Frenchman and (if you write) also about you. Brooke Rollins : "I think there is a way that practice in reading and writing–––that it lines up so nicely with physical training. You know, to run a marathon, you don't simply just run 26.2 miles every day to practise for that. There are things that gradually take you up to that, but it's persistent. It's over an extended period of time. Regularity in reading and writing is important. And I certainly feel like the contemporary university doesn't do enough of that with writing. There's first-year courses, and then the thinking is, 'Well, they've had that, they've passed that bar, and now they can move on to their fields and not worry about writing anymore. We've taken care of that.' But in fact, writing development is necessary along the whole course of study. That's why writing-in-the-discipline programs are so important." Daniel Shea heads Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Daniel is Director of the Writing Program at Heidelberg University, Germany. Daniel's YouTube Channel is called Write Your Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Constance Congdon's 2 Washington Square (Broadway Play Publishing, 2020) is a free-wheeling adaptation of Henry James' novel Washington Square set on the cusp of the 1960s as one era gives way to a startlingly different one. As always, Congdon's dialogue crackles with intensity and wit, echoing James' own razor-sharp observations of characters from eighty years earlier. This play also includes several dynamic and compelling roles for women actors. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, I interview Anahid Nersessian, professor of English at UCLA, about her book, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (University of Chicago Press, 2021). In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them—“Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”—are among the most celebrated poems in the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life—of capitalism, of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet—as well as a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book emerges from Nersessian’s lifelong attachment to Keats’s poetry; but more, it “is a love story: between [Nersessian] and Keats, and not just Keats.” Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own losses—and she, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved. Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats’s enduring work. Britt Edelen is a Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. He focuses on modernism and the relationship(s) between language, philosophy, and literature. You can find him on Twitter or send him an email. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

David Lodge meets Franz Kafka meets Stephen King? All attempts to classify The Scapegoat, let alone to summarize what happens in this compelling and terribly troubling first novel by Sara Davis, seem destined to fail. As the author tells Duncan McCargo, her book has not always been understood by readers in the ways she imagined - but then, The Scapegoat (Farrer, Straus and Giroux 2021) is now out of her hands. In this lively conversation full of laughter, Sara explains how in her next book she hopes to achieve "a more intentionally calibrated level of confusion". The Scapegoat tells the story of an unnamed university employee on a campus eerily reminiscent of Stanford, who struggles to maintain his grip on reality after the demise of his father and a series of strange incidents that follow - which Sara insists are nevertheless "real world and non-fantastical". Dear reader, no online blurb can do justice to this unusual book: just listen to Sara's remarkable voice in this podcast, and then buy yourself a copy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A story about an alien invasion typically revolves around diplomacy, military strategy, technological one-upmanship, and brinksmanship. But the invaders in Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary: A Novel (Ballantine Books, 2021) are anything but typical. Rather than a scheming sentient enemy, Weir gives us Astrophage, an opponent who is mindless—and microscopic. Similar to mold, Astrophage lives on—and taps energy from—the surface of stars. “It’s not intelligent in any way. It doesn’t care about us. But it gets to the point where there is so much of it on our sun that the sun is starting to lose luminance—it’s getting dimmer. And a four or five percent dimming of the sun would be fatal to life on Earth,” says Weir, who was a guest on New Books in Science Fiction in 2014 to talk about his runaway bestseller The Martian. An unlikely antagonist deserves an unlikely hero. Enter Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher, who long ago authored a scientific paper that declared water isn’t a prerequisite for life. This once-ridiculed thesis draws the attention of the woman mustering the worldwide response to Astrophage. Eventually, Ryland finds himself waking from a years-long coma without remembering how or why he got there 12 light years from Earth, where he must figure out how to cure our sun of its infection. While Astrophage is a deadly invader, another extraterrestrial plays a collaborative role. Thanks to the friendship that emerges between Ryland and Rocky, a hard-shelled, spider-like sentient creature with blood of mercury who breathes ammonia and hails from a planet with 29 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth, Project Hail Mary is as much a story about cross-cultural and cross-species exchange as it is a story of science, problem-solving and heroism. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

A young man who turns his desire to join the army into a long stint as a volunteer ambulance driver. A teacher living in an old slum who is the only one brave—or foolish—enough to confront the gangs. A refugee who becomes a community organiser. A woman in a traditional village looking at the new development quickly encroaching on their land. A bored engineer who finds his calling as a crime reporter. These people are subjects of Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City (Melville House, 2021), the debut by Samira Shackle. Samira travels to Karachi, the home city of her mother, and tells the stories of ordinary people trying to live their lives in the midst of terrible violence: first by the gangs, then by the Taliban. In this interview, I ask Samira to talk about the city of Karachi, and the five people she writes about in her book. We’ll talk about the turning points in the violence there, and what it was like to write about her mother’s home city. Samira Shackle is a freelance British-Pakistani writer and reporter based in London. She is the editor of the New Humanist magazine, and a regular contributor to the Guardian Long Read. She can be followed on Twitter at @samirashackle. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Karachi Vice. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Political Theorist Robert Bartlett spoke with the New Books in Political Science podcast about two of his recent publications, which take on translating the work of two distinct classical thinkers, Aristotle and Aristophanes. In discussing these thinkers, we talked about two of Aristophanes’ earliest extant plays, The Acharnians and The Knights. We also discussed Aristotle’s text, The Art of Rhetoric. All three of these works focus on the interaction of the words spoken by a public individual, and how those words are also received and considered by an audience, especially the citizens of the state. This conversation took us to ancient Athens and some of the earliest western thinking about the interrelationship between political rhetoric and emotions, and how these connections can be both useful and dangerous, especially for democracies. Bartlett explains that Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 2019) is an important component of Aristotle’s thinking about politics, and one of his later works. The Art of Rhetoric explores the idea and art of persuasion, and Aristotle provides a defense of rhetoric for the polis. Bartlett also examines the way that Aristotle’s Rhetoric, while attacked by Thomas Hobbes in his writing, as he does with so many of Aristotle’s works, actually provides the basis for Hobbes’ understanding of the passions, and thus the basis for Hobbes’ own political theory. In an effort to examine the way that rhetoric and persuasion work, especially within politics, Aristotle delineates a clear account of the passions in Book II of The Rhetoric, and this, combined with the three modes of persuasion (ethos, pathos, logos), are key to considering how rhetoric can be used, for good or ill. It is inevitable that political rhetoric will come forward in societies, however large or small, simple or complex. Thus, Aristotle’s work explains not only how to best make use of rhetoric, it also explains the ways in which rhetoric can be misused, abused, and how it can threaten the society when used corruptly, especially by demagogues. Bartlett’s translation of Aristotle’s text guides the reader with clarity and accessibility, and his interpretative essay explores these important dimensions of understanding how rhetoric works, how it accesses our emotions, and how it can be used corruptly. This is particularly important to consider in our current political climates, in the United States and elsewhere, as we have seen the rise of demagogues and the inflaming of passions within the political sphere. Against Demagogues: What Aristophanes Can Teach Us about the Perils of Populism and the Fate of Democracy (University of California Press, 2020) examines many of the same themes as Aristotle explores in The Rhetoric, but in Aristophanes’ work, Bartlett notes, the use of comedy and narrative skewer the demagogue and his abuse of rhetoric. Once again Bartlett has translated the ancient Greek work, in this case, the two plays, The Acharnians and The Knights, and has provided an interpretative essay of each play. Against Demagogues also provides the contemporary reader with considerations of Aristophanes’ relevance, especially in his attack on demagogues. As Bartlett notes, the term “demagogue” itself only become negative in its valence when Aristophanes uses it this way in The Knights. Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics

Author Diana Stevan's sequel to the award-winning Sunflowers Under Fire. Lukia's story continues in Lilacs in the Dust Bowl (Peregrin Publishing, 2021), an inspirational family saga about love and heartache during the Great Depression. In 1929, when Lukia Mazurets, a widow and a Ukrainian peasant farmer, immigrates to Canada with her four children, she has no idea the stock market is about to crash and throw the world into a deep depression. Falling grain prices, the ravages of nature, and unexpected family conflicts threaten to smash her dreams of family unity in a strange land. And when love knocks on her door again, awakening desire she thought was long gone, Lukia has to choose between having a man in her life or the children she’s sacrificed everything for. Diana Stevan is also the author of the novels, A Cry from The Deep and The Rubber Fence and the novelette The Blue Nightgown. A former family therapist, she is the mother of two daughters and lives with her husband Robert in West Vancouver and on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

LILACS in the DUST BOWL

Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident in 2014, One Kind Favor (WTAW Press, 2021) explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. After the lynching of Lincoln Lennox is discovered and subsequently covered up in the small fictional community of Cord, North Carolina, the ghosts who frequent the all-in-one bar and consignment shop take on the responsibility of unearthing the truth and acting as the memory for the town that longs to forget and continues to hate. A reimagined Kathy Acker, the groundbreaking literary icon, engages Lincoln in a love triangle and brings a transgressive post-punk esthetic to the mission. The down-the-rabbit-hole satirical storytelling of One Kind Favor, Kevin McIlvoy’s sixth novel, echoes Appalachian ghost stories in which haunting presences will, at last, have their way. Kevin McIlvoy has published five novels, A Waltz (Lynx House Press), The Fifth Station (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill; paperback, Collier/Macmillan), Little Peg (Atheneum/Macmillan; paperback, Harper Perennial), Hyssop (TriQuarterly Books; paperback, Avon), At the Gate of All Wonder (Tupelo Press); a short story collection, The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf Press); and a collection of prose poems and short-short stories, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way Books). His fiction has appeared in Harper's, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. He has taught fiction at Warren Wilson College and New Mexico State University and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction. For twenty-seven years, McIlvoy worked as fiction editor and editor in chief of the literary magazine, Puerto del Sol. He lives in Asheville, NC, plays blues harmonica, takes ballroom dancing classes with his wife, and has been a serious gardener for four decades. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Ava Reid about her new book The Wolf and the Woodsman (Harper Voyager, 2021) The wolf, in the title refers to a pagan woman, given to the dreaded Woodsmen to keep her village safe. She’s part of a tithe, sent to satisfy the King, who demands a quota of witches every year. The impoverished villages hidden in the woods are inhabited by women with magical powers, who worship the old Gods. The Woodsmen, a religious paramilitary order who serve the king, bring selected women to the capital, where their eventual fates are a mystery. Évike, the metaphorical wolf of the story, is an illiterate angry young woman, who has been taunted by the villagers. She’s also not a witch. She’s clad in a witch’s wolf pelt and sent with the Woodsmen so that the true witches can remain safe to guard the village. When misfortune besets the Woodsmen, and only the one-eyed Gáspár remains to guard her, she learns that neither she or he are who they appear to be. The trials of their journey reveal latent magic in her and lay bare his misery as the less-favored son of the king. Though Gáspár’s piety and rigidity infuriate Évike, she finds herself drawn to him physically and emotionally. As Évike journeys to the north, and then to her country’s capital, meeting her estranged father and the king himself, she learns that the world is a complex place, with more at stake than she ever realized. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives—identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic—celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass (Chelsea Green, 2021): three metaphors to help us understand our world, one that is assailed by the seductive promises of social media and shadowed by a health crisis that has brought loneliness and isolation to an all-time high. Smoke Hole is a passionate call to arms and an invitation to use these stories to face the complexities of contemporary life, from fake news, parenthood, climate crises, addictive technology and more. Shaw urges us to reclaim our imagination and untangle ourselves from modern menace, letting these tales be our guide. Dr Martin Shaw is a writer and one of the most widely regarded teachers of the mythic imagination. He is the author of the award winning A Branch From The Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower, and Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (2016). He also directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK, and he devised and led the Oral Tradition course at Stanford University. And he has been published in Orion Magazine, Poetry International, Kenyon Review, Poetry Magazine, and Mississippi Review. Susan Grelock Yusem, PhD, is an independent researcher trained in depth psychology, with an emphasis on community, liberation, and eco-psychologies. Her work centers around interconnection and encompasses regenerative food systems, the arts and conservation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What more can we learn about legendary American writer Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79), dubbed by Bethany Hicok “the most stunning poet of the twentieth century”, by exploring the wonderful archives of her life and work at Vassar? Why are literary archives coming back into vogue? How do new techniques in digital humanities create novel possibilities for archival-based research and publication? And how can we develop collaborative methods of studying and teaching in literary archives? In this lively, well-crafted podcast, leading Bishop scholar Bethany Hicok of Williams College completely fails to control her infectious enthusiasm for Elizabeth Bishop’s writings. She explains to Duncan McCargo why Bishop has become for her the poet of the pandemic, and above all what happened when she spent three weeks embedded in the Vassar archives with sixteen other scholars and poets – a project that resulted in this beautifully produced and copiously illustrated edited volume. Since Elizabeth Bishop and the Literary Archive is an Open Access publication, you can and should download it (free of charge), so you can read along here. Duncan McCargo is an eclectic, internationalist political scientist and literature buff: his day job is directing the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

For as often as it may seem to be the case, life doesn’t exist in extremes. Whatever pain, love, desire, or hurt, moving through life is a balancing act. We learn to hold onto what is important for our own growth, but we also learn that sometimes we must carry bits of the world for those who walk beside us and those yet to come. This balancing act teaches us to jettison what no longer serves us just as much as it teaches us to grip tightly to what matters most. In a collection that is equal measures an exploration of pain after her uncle’s passing and an honoring of her own heart, Nicole Danielle’s book Broken Ballads (2019) asks who gets to be innocent? How do we move towards the life we want? What legacy do we leave for future generations? In her debut book, Nicole Danielle finds a way to unearth joy without using blinders to hide the tender spots of the heart that need to heal. She mosaics together the shattered bits of life and shows they can still be beautiful. They can still be a reflection of who we are, what we want, and where we are headed. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Nicole Danielle is a writer, singer, and educator. She currently resides in New Jersey with her family. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Broken Ballads: A Poetry Collection

Guest Kate Lebo discusses her newest book, The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly with Recipes (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). While Lebo has authored more traditional cookbooks with stories, this collection of essays with recipes has more in common with creative nonfiction, autobiography, or a quirky reference book for plant identification. Lebo offers a unique blending of the academic – historical and botanical – with the narrative – personal and often painful. The book is organized in 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet, represented by one fruit. Though the essays do have the encapsulated feel of being whole on their own, there are some narrative threads and mysteries that have to be worked out as you get further into the book. Unlike a traditional cookbook that emphasizes pleasure and ease, Lebo’s essays touch on quite a bit of personal pain – illness, death of loved ones, family secrets, heartache and break ups, abortion – and provide recipes that are unapologetically complicated with difficult to find ingredients. Still, readers who enjoy foraging, gardening, and good personal essays will find much to love in this collection. One of the threads that runs through the book is the slipperiness of food as poison and medicine. Starting right at the beginning with aronia and bitter almonds/cherry pits, Lebo meditates on the role that food can play in healing the body and the spirit while also being keenly aware of the way that even the most wholesome of whole fruits can carry poison. In a chapter about juniper, Lebo meditates on the berry as an ingredient in gin and as an abortifacient. The Wheat chapter describes the end of a relationship and the way that baking with flour can be healing for one person and maybe poison to her partner with celiac disease. The Book of Difficult Fruit explodes an elementary understanding of food as something that always nourishes or always brings people together. While chapters like Kiwi, Yuzu, and Zucchini return to those heartwarming moments where feeding and food seem to be metaphors for relationships of care and nurturing, even these moments do not come without complications. Kate Lebo is author the chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and editor of the anthology Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze (Sasquatch Books), which she edited with Samuel Ligon. Kate is also the author of Pie School: Lessons in Fruit, Flour & Butter (Sasquatch Books) and the poetry/ephemera/recipe collection A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Through the Arts Heritage Apprenticeship Program from the Washington Center for Cultural Traditions, she is an apprenticed cheesemaker to Lora Lea Misterly of Quillisascut Farm. Carrie Helms Tippen is Assistant Professor of English at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches courses in American Literature. Her 2018 book, Inventing Authenticity: How Cookbook Writers Redefine Southern Identity (University of Arkansas Press), examines the rhetorical strategies that writers use to prove the authenticity of their recipes in the narrative headnotes of contemporary cookbooks. Her academic work has been published in Gastronomica, Food and Foodways, American Studies, Southern Quarterly, and Food, Culture, and Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

KC Trommer speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “The Couple,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Trommer discusses writing about artwork she finds compelling and sometimes disturbing, like the Louise Bourgeois sculpture explored in this poem. She also discusses her Queens-centered poetry project QUEENSBOUND, her work as a visual artist, and her experience living a block and a half from Elmhurst Hospital in Jackson Heights, the epicenter of the early pandemic. Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She is 2021 poet in residence at Works on Water on Governors Island. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the weekly Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights. Read KC’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/kc-trommer. Explore the QUEENSBOUND map and listen to those poems at queensbound.com. Read more by KC Trommer and explore her visual art at kctrommer.com. Follow KC on Twitter at @kctrommer. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The year is 1985. Durga is visiting her grandmother Mary in rural Malaysia. It’s not a particularly happy occasion: Mary is tough and sharp-tongued, and “home” sparks bad memories for Durga. But a fireworks accident that sends Mary to hospital begins to unravel family secrets that had been building over generations, built by both Mary and Durga. Fragile Monsters, the debut novel by Catherine Menon (Viking, 2021), jumps between the Malaysian Emergency and the Eighties to explore themes of gender, class, and ethnicity in telling a story about a dark family history. In this interview, Catherine and I discuss the historical setting of Fragile Monsters: a time period that normally doesn’t feature in mainstream English-language fiction. We talk about how she explores memory and shame, gender and race. Catherine Menon is Australian-British, has Malaysian heritage and lives in London. She is a University lecturer in robotics and has both a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in Creative Writing. Her short story collection, Subjunctive Moods, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018. Her short stories have won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, Bare Fiction and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and she’s been a judge for several international short fiction competitions. Her website can be found here, and she can be followed on Twitter at @cg_menon. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Fragile Monsters. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fragile Monsters

Joanna Scott is the author of 12 works of fiction, including Arrogance, a PEN/Faulkner finalist; and The Manikin, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The episode explores the line between fact and fantasy, between what’s known, forgotten, or less known than characters in these short stories may believe. The degree to which we’re all limited by our sense of perspective is a related theme here as Scott argues, aptly enough, that a story is always in the first-person at some level because it’s an act of make-belief in a world without certainty. Among other writers invoked in this session were Harold Pinter and his ability to bring characters from distinctively different backgrounds into conflict, Marcel Proust for his attention to detail (a writerly trait Scott shares), and finally Jorge Borges for the ability to show a mind at play with the kind of paradoxes that Scott likewise relishes. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Do you have a cookbook in you? Thinking about a memoir with recipes? How about a food blog? Have you ever yearned to be an Instagram Influencer or dreamt of joining the waning ranks of restaurant reviewers? If that’s the case, stop whatever you are doing and get ahold of Will Write for Food: Pursue Your Passion and Bring Home the Dough Writing Recipes, Cookbooks, Blogs and More by Dianne Jacob, out this month in its fourth edition by Hachette Books. It’s no exaggeration to say that Dianne Jacob is America’s foremost food writing guru, and Will Write For Food, first published in 2005, offers the most comprehensive, unvarnished look at the always developing and perennially competitive world of food writing on the market today. Will Write for Food has been translated into Korean, Chinese, and Spanish, and is used as a textbook in universities and culinary schools. Will Write for Food has received three international awards for excellence, including the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book in 2005. The second edition won the Gourman World Cookbook Award in 2010 for best book in the USA in its category, and the third edition won a Silver Nautilus award in the Creative Process category. Now a fourth edition is being released in May 2021 by Hachette Go. When Jacob first wrote Will Write for Food, she confesses to having a somewhat “snobby” view of food bloggers, a segment of the food writing world that was just gaining momentum. In the latest iteration of Will Write for Food, Jacob dedicates a lengthy and comprehensive chapter to food blogging, charting the meteoric rise of the superstars such as David Lebovitz, Deb Perlman (The SmittenKitchen), and Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman), as well as outlining the considerable challenges to making a food blog pay. Will Write for Food also delves into the knotty problem of cultural appropriation, at a moment when food writing is becoming more global and inclusive, and offers solid advice on how to celebrate foreign cuisines not by purloining them but by assiduous attribution and helping to shine a generous spotlight on the chefs and restauranteurs creating these innovations. Will Write for Food deftly navigates the immense role played by social media in food writing today — another aspect of the guild that Jacob confesses was not on her radar screen when she wrote the first edition of the book. And while social media stardom is not a sure path to success in food writing, Jacob is at pains to point out that it is an important part of the food writer’s toolbox, as is photography and videography, and a strong writer’s voice, adroit recipe writing skills, and an ability to convey the sensual aspects of food to the page. Dianne Jacob is a writing coach, author, and free-lance editor. She has coached food writers around the world, and many have signed with major publishers and appeared in leading broadsheets, websites, podcasts, and magazines. Dianne’s popular blog and indispensable newsletter helps writers and bloggers keep up with trends, issues, and techniques in the world of food writing. Dianne is a popular speaker and teacher throughout the world. She is the co-author of two cookbooks with Chicago chef Craig Priebe, The United States of Pizza (Rizzoli, 2015) and Grilled Pizzas & Piadinas (DK Publishing, 2008). Find out more about Dianne on her website, www.diannej.com. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In story after story in her diverse new collection, Rising and Other Stories, Gale Massey illustrates the moments that shape and alter destiny. Bringing each to life through interconnected themes of moving water and a sense of loss, Massey shares with us an unvarnished narrative of a world that objectifies women and the strength and resourcefulness required to attempt to overcome those limitations. From the panicked mother in Racine, who escapes to the ocean and a young girl's last fishing expedition with a dying father in Glass to the inevitable end in Marked and the gamble in Not so Fast, these stories show how simple twists of fate can change a person forever. Ivy Waters and Long Time Coming both explore the loss of a father in very different ways, and how the identities of the daughters are rooted in those losses. And Elise's life in Rising is told in contrasts as she develops the use of her volition to pull her toward the life she deserves. Massey’s protagonists are everyday folk depicted in stories that explore the scars of redemption, despair, daring and longing, a visceral sense of fate, and, most of all, each character’s desires and will to live. These stories will transform you and deepen your view of the world, as Massey helps us discern societal constructs and their acute burdens, and the many ways that people –particularly women and girls – attempt to rise above them. Gale Massey’s debut novel, The Girl from Blind River, received a 2018 Florida Book Award and was a finalist for the Clara Johnson award. Her work has been featured in Lambda Literary, CutBank, CrimeReads, Sabal, the Tampa Bay Times, the Wall Street Journal, Saw Palm, and Tampa Bay Noir. Gale was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Suwanee Writers Conference, a fellow at Writers in Paradise, and has served as a panel judge for the Lamdba Literary Awards. She has been nominated for a Pushcart prize in both fiction and nonfiction. Morris Ardoin is author of STONE MOTEL – MEMOIRS OF A CAJUN BOY (2020, University Press of Mississippi). A communications practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ann, Fran, & Mary Ann (53rd State Press, 2020) is a new play by Erin Courtney, one of the most exciting contemporary American playwrights. This is a play that engages with themes of science, religion, and trauma through a highly theatrical and character-driven storytelling style. Ann and Mary Ann were both witnesses of traumatic events in their childhoods and were drawn to neuroscience as a way to understand and perhaps heal from their trauma. When Mary Ann begins experimenting with inducing spiritual experience, Ann's skepticism regarding the supernatural drives a wedge between them. When Ann's patient Fran begins experiencing Capgras syndrome, which convinces her that her loved ones are imposters, Mary Ann's desire to heal Fran conflicts with Ann's desire to study her. The interactions of these three characters open questions of medical ethics, the meaning of faith, and the possibility of healing. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This is the second episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies. This episode features two of the winners in Creative Writing: Poetry: Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley, whose poetry collection Colonize Me explores the lives of those communities and peoples on the intersections of indigeneity, migration, Asian, queerness, and lower class; and Jan-Henry Gray, whose collection Documents traces Gray’s upbringing as a queer undocumented Filipino American. Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley belongs to the Onondaga Nation of Indigenous Americans in New York and is an assistant professor of poetry and nonfiction in Old Dominion University’s MFA program. His poetry collection Colonize Me won the AAAS award in Creative Writing: Poetry. Jan-Henry Gray currently teaches at Adelphi University in New York. Born in the Philippines and raised in California where he worked as a chef, Jan lived undocumented in the U.S. for more than 32 years. His poetry collection Documents won honorable mention in Creative Writing: Poetry. Christopher B. Patterson is an Assistant Professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The name of Dorothy Hale is not well known these days. In the 1920s, she enjoyed a career on Broadway as a dancer, including in a leading role with Fred Astaire. When an accidental injury ended that career, she auditioned, successfully, for the filmmaker Samuel Goldwyn and landed a part opposite Ronald Coleman, who would later star in Lost Horizon. But Dorothy’s film career did not take off, and she moved into art, writing, and museum work in support of her second husband, Gardner Hale, a well-known fresco painter and portraitist, until his tragic death in 1931. Dorothy survived the stock-market crash of 1929 with her wealth intact and remained a light of New York society into the 1930s. Her closest friend—Clare Boothe, who married Henry Luce in 1935—branched out from an active career in magazine publishing, including a stint as managing editor of Vanity Fair, to produce a Broadway play titled The Women. The play lampooned members of their social circle, evoking both amusement and outrage. Dorothy Hale then starred in Boothe Luce’s next play, Abide with Me. When Hale fell to her death from the window of her apartment building in October 1938, Boothe Luce commissioned a commemorative painting from their mutual friend Frida Kahlo. This painting, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale (1939), was the spark that lit the imagination of Pamela Hamilton, a long-time producer for NBC News. She began to research Hale’s life and death and uncovered the kind of anomalies that delight both fiction and nonfiction writers. For reasons explained in this interview, Hamilton decided to turn her findings and her speculations about their meaning into a novel, and Lady Be Good: The Life and Times of Dorothy Hale (Köehler Books, 2021) is the result. Against the backdrop of New York high society, the Algonquin Set, the art world, and politics under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this novel paints a picture of a vivacious, determined woman and offers an alternative vision of her final hours. C. P. Lesley is the author of 11 novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

During the Cultural Revolution, many young Chinese in the cities were encouraged — if not ordered — to move to the countryside. Millions of young Chinese in high school and university moved to rural China ostensibly to “receive re-education from the poorest lower and middle peasants to understand what China really is” (to quote Mao Zedong, at the time). Many students remained in the countryside until the end of the Cultural Revolution almost a decade later. One of these young Chinese people was the mother of Emei Burell, who turned these stories into a graphic novel: We Served the People: My Mother's Storie (Archaia, 2020). The book is roughly split into two halves: her mother’s hard work on a rubber plantation in Yunnan, and her struggles a decade later to restart her education upon her return home. In this interview, Emei talks about her mother’s story, both during her time in the countryside and when she returned home. We talk about what it was like for her to turn these tales into a graphic novel, and what may have been gained from expressing them in a visual format. Emei Burell is a cartoonist and illustrator from Sweden. Her work has also appeared in Adventure Time Comics, Hip Hop Family Tree, Studygroupcomics, and a number of publications in Sweden, Denmark, the UK and Chile. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of We Served the People. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Not long ago, the only resource for uncovering our familial pasts was to consult libraries and archives, combing old newspapers for birth announcements and obituaries. These days, many people are turning to websites like Ancestry and 23andMe, taking DNA tests to learn more about their ancestors and where they came from—often discovering long buried secrets and long lost relatives in the process. But for some, the answers to these questions exist not in archives or in their DNA, but within a suitcase. When writer Danielle Geller’s estranged mother passed away, she left behind just eight suitcases of belongings, cataloging her wayward spirit, moving between boyfriends, states, and jobs, at times experiencing homelessness. In her debut memoir, Dog Flowers (One World, 2021), Geller, trained as an archivist, consolidates the most important artifacts from the collection—never before seen photographs, documents, letters, and diaries—piecing together a portrait of the mother she grew up without, and reconnecting with her Navajo heritage in the process. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down to chat with Danielle Geller about her striking family memoir, Dog Flowers, available now from One World (2021). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Back in 1997, when Anthony Valerio’s Conversation with Johnny was first published, the world hadn’t yet seen The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Goodfellas. In this slim volume, Valerio explores two distinct Italian American stereotypes: the dashing man about town and the successful gangster. Nicholas, the descendant of parents who emigrated to America, goes back to the old Italian New York neighborhood where Johnny, the old but still powerful gangster resides, surrounded by acolytes and luxury. The source of Johnny’s power and wealth is assumed to be crime, but he is is a caring and nurturing godfather, listening closely as Nicholas cries about his married, lover calling it quits. He is also a ruthless don who can shower Nicholas with wealth, get him a job as a maître-d at a famous restaurant, or create a retirement home for Italian American Writers. But he can’t promise Nicholas an Italian-American culture that focuses on solely on art as if organized crime never happened. Anthony Valerio is the author of 12 books of fiction and non-fiction. As a book editor in major publishing houses, including McGraw-Hill, he was fortunate to have edited great writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Shel Silverstein and others. His short stories have appeared in the Paris Review and have been published in anthologies by Random House, the Viking Press, and William Morrow. He has taught undergrad and post-grad writing at New York University, City University of New York, and Wesleyan University, and he has been a fiction judge at PEN's Prison Writing Committee. He works every day, is a jazz afficionado, and a passionate golfer who tries to get out in nature and on the links. About Anthony Valerio’s work, his friend and legendary children’s book author, the late Shel Silvertein said: "He knows his craft: he gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be." I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Conversation with Johnny: a novel of power and sex

Jennifer Jean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “California,” which appears on The Common online, in a special portfolio of writing from the Lusosphere (Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora). Jean talks about writing this poem to be in conversation with Joni Mitchell’s song of the same title, and how music works its way into much of her poetry, in both rhythm and language. She also discusses writing her new poetry collection Object Lesson which centers on trauma, and co-translating poems by Iraqi women poets with an Arabic translator. Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include The Fool and Object Lesson, out this year from Lily Books. Her teaching resource, Object Lesson: A Guide To Writing Poetry, is also out this year. Jennifer’s awards include a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Fellowship, a DISQUIET Fellowship to write and study poetry in Portugal, a “Her Story Is” Residency (where she worked with Iraqi women artists in Dubai), and an Ambassador for Peace Award for her activism in the arts. She’s the translations editor for Talking Writing Magazine and the program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's Online Writing Program. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and children. Order Object Lesson and the companion teaching resource, Object Lesson: A Guide To Writing Poetry, here. Learn more about Jennifer Jean and her work at jenniferjeanwriter.weebly.com. Follow Jennifer Jean on Twitter at @fishwifetales. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desires by Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi (Princeton University Press, 2021). The poems are presented here both in Arabic and English, and are accompanied by an introduction and commentary. The masterful and accessible translations are truly a thrilling literary experience. Ibn ‘Arabi’s poems evoke numerous themes, such as of flora and fauna, nature, sacred spaces, especially of the Kaaba, love, longing, and grief. For instance, the longing of a lost beloved, which Sufis would have read as the Divine, is a central thematic thread woven throughout the collection of poetry, and is gendered feminine. The collection of poems along with Sells critical introduction and notes provides stunning insights to both the tradition of Arabic love poetry and to the mystical thought and poetic prowess of Ibn 'Arabi. This collection of poems will be of interest to anyone interested in Arabic poetry, Islamic literature, Ibn 'Arabi, Sufism, and much more. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Vanessa Carlisle about her new book Take Me with You (Running Wild, 2021). Kindred Powell's youth is marked by a secret that her white mother and Black father kept from her. After her father Carl's unjust incarceration and her mother's death from illness, Kindred moves from Los Angeles to New York in a desperate search for peace. There, she finds her girlfriend Nautica, a career in sex work, and a kinky boy toy named Griffin. But when Carl goes missing from LA's Skid Row, Kindred must drop everything to find him. Keep an eye out for the special edition of the South Atlantic Quarterly edited by Heather Berg and Featuring more of Vanessa's work. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Doors of Eden (Orbit, 2020) the multiverse is filled with parallel Earths where evolution takes different twists and turns. The forks in the road and the paths species take vary from Earth to Earth, seeding sentience in a wide variety of organisms. In one, giant mollusks “understand and communicate profound truths about the nature of existence.” In another, a creature twice the size of the average human with traits of fish, salamander and slug creates a permanent ice age and must upload its citizens to supercomputers to survive. Toddler-sized rats pave the planet with Industrial Age warrens in a different Earth. And in still another version of our planet, giant immortal spacefaring trilobites establish themselves at the top of the evolutionary heap for all eternity. Tchiakovsky’s characters learn about the existence of other Earths because the boundaries between them have sundered, necessitating urgent action. No single species has the smarts or technology to fix the problem by itself, so they must create an all-star team of the best and brightest among rats, trilobites, humans and more if any their worlds hopes to continue. While mankind’s dominance of Earth has often been mythologized as inevitable, The Doors of Eden presents a countervailing narrative, one that elevates chance as the most important factor in our species’ success. “One of the big things you run into in studies of evolution is this assumption that we are what it was all aimed towards when, of course, we're only one rung of the ladder that's going to run a long way beyond us,” Tchiakovsky says. “If the conditions had been slightly different, we would have been very different. … How other sentient races might have developed from a completely different starting point was very much the point of the book, to be honest. I needed to find a plot that humans could get involved in that would showcase all of those different earths.” Adrian Tchiakovsky is the author of over 20 novels and winner of the Arthur C. Clarke, British Fantasy and British Science Fiction Awards. He lives in Leeds, England. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Set in rural England, award-winning writer Claire Fuller's new novel Unsettled Ground (Tin House Books, 2021) explores what happens to two middle-aged twins, Jeanie and Julius, when their mother Dot – with whom they have lived their whole lives – suddenly dies. It’s a story full of secrets in which nothing is quite as it seems, and despite its apparently idyllic setting the tale is full of dramatic turns, most of them rather dark. Unsettled Ground has just been shortlisted for the 2021 Womens’ Prize of Fiction, and has been making quite a splash. In this engaging conversation, Claire tells Duncan McCargo why all her books are rather dark, why she is not romantic about rural life, why Unsettled Ground doesn't exactly have a happy ending, and why the novel contains a hidden social message. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, we are talking to Mark Krotov, the publisher and co-editor of n + 1, a magazine of politics, essays and fiction described once: “like The Paris Review, but not dead” (Keith Gessen, co-founder). Mark was born in Moscow and left Russia for Atlanta at the age of six. He graduated from Columbia in 2008. Before joining n + 1, he used to work as an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Rebecca D’Harlingue about her novel The Lines Between Us (She Writes Press, 2020). A widow in 17th century Spain discovers that her beloved niece, Juliana, has suddenly disappeared. Juliana records her forced journey in the diary she received from Tia Ana. Years later, when she feels herself to be nearing the end of her life, she writes to Ana, explains why she fled, and tells her that she is a nun in the new world. Ana’s response provokes Juliana into sharing her life story and demanding that Mercedes, a nun who hasn’t yet taken her vows, leave the convent. The years pass, and Mercedes, near the end of her own life, passes Juliana’s packet to her granddaughter with a demand that the mothers among her descendants keep the secret of this packet from their own daughters, only passing it to one granddaughter in each generation. Three hundred years later and we’re in 20th century America, when a college Spanish professor finds the packet while cleaning out her mother’s closet after her mother’s untimely death. She wonders if the secret is still worth keeping. Rebecca D’Harlingue was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and never got used to the humidity. Growing up, her mother read every spare moment, and her father often just had to read out loud some new passage from a book he was immersed in. Her high school English teacher inspired her to read on a deeper level, with some unexpected choices like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which fed into D’Harlingue’s enchantment with all things Arthurian. She also loves languages, having studied Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, and even taking an ill-fated stab at Mandarin. She had completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in Spanish language and literature when she had her first child, felt reality strike, and went back to school to get an MBA in health services administration. After working in that field for a number of years, she quit her job to start her novel, but abandoned it, only to pick it up twenty years later, after having taught English as a Second Language to adults for many years. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Arthur. D’Harlingue’s debut novel, The Lines Between Us, won in New Fiction in the 2021 Independent Press Awards, and was a finalist in Best New Fiction in both the 2020 International Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards. It was also a finalist in the 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Historical Fiction. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020), esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers. Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses Tumblr and Twitter, listens to pop music, and fights contemporary patriarchy. Burt bears careful fealty to Callimachus’s whole poems, even as she builds freely from some of the hundreds of surviving fragments. Here is an ancient Greek poet made fresh for our current times. An informative foreword by classicist Mark Payne places Burt’s renderings of Callimachus in literary and historical context. After Callimachus is at once a contribution to contemporary poetry and a new endeavor in the art of classical adaptation and translation. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against the author's personal journey as his mother declines into dementia and eventual death. Written with a poet's eye for detail and quiet metaphor, Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint (Belt, 2021) is an intimate look at one man's engagement with both civic and familial trauma. This gentle, observant book is for readers seeking to better understand the human experience of the Flint Water Crisis, and a vivid investigation into how we all heal. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere, the editors of the new anthology The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press, 2020). The anthology brings together the best of Brevity Magazine, which publishes works of literary nonfiction that are less than 750 words. So how do you write about, say, the experience of becoming a mother or losing a father or coming of age or the nature of our age, all in less than 750 words? And how do you do it powerfully, beautifully, and artfully? It seems impossible. And yet for over twenty years, this is exactly what Brevity has given us: thousands of literary gems that glow and pulse with our humanity. Today I get a chance to ask Dinty and Zoë about how these 750-words-or-less wonders work and how the magazine has fostered a new literary genre into American letters. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An exhilaratingly comical, crosscultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn't (New Europe Books, 2021) brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. It starts in the late 1990s, after the fall of communism, and has at its center the mail-order marriage between a California man (Sammy) and a Russian woman (Tania) who comes to America, which engenders a series of hilarious cultural misunderstandings. The novel's four parts take place alternately in California and Moldova, and comprise short chapters whose point of view moves seamlessly between that of the omniscient narrator and that of various characters. Delivered in arresting prose, both realities--late 90s, bohemian/hipster California and postcommunist Moldova--thus come together from opposite points of view. Above all, this novel is a comedy of manners that depicts the cultural (and personality) clash between Tania and Sammy, Anna (Sammy's teenage daughter) and Irina, and Bill (Sammy's neighbor) and Serioja (Tania's brother). It is also a comedy of errors in the tradition of playful, multiple love triangles. The novel reaches a shocking climax involving a stolen Egon Schiele painting and alluding to the real history of East Mountain Drive, whose bohemian community was destroyed in the 2008 "Tea Fire." A literary tour de force and a rollicking satire of both suburban America and urban Eastern Europe, is a must for fans of Gary Schteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook), Keith Gessen (A Terrible Country), and Lara Vapnyar (Divide Me By Zero) Alta Ifland was born and grew up in Communist Romania. She came as a political refugee to the US in 1991 and, after a PhD in French language and literature, she taught for a brief period in academia, then started to work as book reviewer, a writer in her third language (English) and an occasional literary translator from/into Romanian, French and English. She is the author of two collections of prose poems, Voix de glace/Voice of ice (Les Figues Press, 2007), bilingual and self-translated from French, and The Snail’s Song (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011), as well as two books of short stories, Elegy for a Fabulous World (Ninebark Press, 2009), and Death-in-a-Box (Subito Press, 2010). With Eireene Nealand she has translated from French the recent novel by Marguerite Duras, The Darkroom (Contra Mundum Press, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Portrait is a story full of ambiguity and suspense, one that works on many different levels and holds the reader’s attention until the very last page. Recently published to great acclaim, the book will soon become a Sky TV mini-series. In what she called a 'beautiful' conversation with Duncan McCargo, Ilaria Bernadini explains, inter alia: why she chose to write The Portrait (Simon and Schuster, 2021) in English; the disarmingly rich imaginative hinterlands of her secondary characters; what it was like to have her own portrait painted; and, most importantly, how, when Martìn falls desperately ill, Valeria suddenly becomes open to new people and to re-reading closed chapters of her life. If you want to know how far The Portrait trangresses into the realm of magical realism, and what possible sequels Ilaria may write, you need to listen to this intriguing podcast about an extremely compelling and important new novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male student a “disgusting fascist” and leave in anger. Scenes like this are seen in Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence (Princeton University Press, 2021) is a graphic novel written by Professor Jenny White and illustrated by Ergün Gündüz. The book combines Jenny’s own experiences in Turkey with insights gleaned from interviews to illustrate Turkey’s political conflict in the late 1970s, between right-wing and left-wing movements. You can watch a promotional video for the book, and the book can be ordered from the Princeton University Press website. Jenny has also put together a Spotify playlist of songs from the era. Those interested in an academic treatment of these ideas can read her 2017 article in The Brown Journal of World Affairs titled “Spindle Autocracy In The New Turkey”. In this interview, I ask Jenny to talk about central figures in her telling of Turkish politics, and how their views developed over time. We talk about that period of Turkish contemporary history and what it was like. And we also discuss her choice of format: why write a graphic novel? Jenny White is a social anthropologist and professor at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. She is former president of the Turkish Studies Association and former president of the American Anthropological Association Middle East Section. She has published four books and numerous articles about contemporary Turkish society and politics. She also has published a series of three novels set in 1880s Istanbul. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Turkish Kaleidoscope. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In All Sorrows Can Be Borne (Rare Bird Books, 2021), Loren Stephens tells the story, inspired by true events, of a Japanese woman who survives the bombing of Hiroshima, joins her half-sister in Osaka and gives up her dream of becoming a theater star. Later, she marries the man of her dreams and gives birth to a beautiful son. After her husband is diagnosed with tuberculosis, he convinces Noriko to send the toddler to his sister and her Japanese American husband, who live in Montana. Eighteen years later, Noriko’s son enlists in the U.S. Navy and gets sent to Japan. This is a novel about Japanese society and postwar cultural norms, the human cost of war, and a mother’s love. Loren Stephens is a widely published essayist and fiction and nonfiction storyteller. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, MacGuffin, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Forge, Crack the Spine, Amuse Bouche, The Writer’s Launch, the Summerset Review, the Montreal Literary Review, and Tablet Travel Magazine to name a few. She is a two-time nominee of the Pushcart Prize and the book Paris Nights: My Year at the Moulin Rouge, by Cliff Simon with Loren Stephens was named one of the best titles from an independent press by Kirkus. She is president and founder of the ghostwriting companies, Write Wisdom and Bright Star Memoirs. Prior to establishing her company Loren was a documentary filmmaker. Among her credits are Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist, produced for PBS and nominated for an Emmy Award; Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman? produced for Coronet Films and recipient of a Golden Apple from the National Education Association; and Los Pastores: The Shepherd’s Play produced for the Latino Consortium of PBS and recipient of a Cine Gold Eagle and nominated for an Imagen Award. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mira Sucharov’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), is a work that takes seriously the feminist adage that the “personal is political,” and vice versa. Through an intimate telling of her life, Sucharov uses the work to trace her shifting relationship to Israel, and the Israeli-Plaestinitan conflict, the meaning of diaspora Jewish identity, and what writing about International Relation can look like. The memoir covers topics such as the divorce of her parents, her time spent at Jewish summer camps as a child, visits to Israel, and her time in graduate school then later as a professional academic working in the field of Political Science, specializing in Israel-Palestine. Throughout, Sucharov touches on themes of identity, gender, disability, and home. It is a work of use to scholars across the humanities and social sciences for its honest approach to the subjective dynamics of academic engagement. Mira Sucharov is Professor of Political Science and University Chair of Teaching Innovation at Carleton University. She is the author of Public Influence: A Guide to Op-Ed Writing and Social Media Engagement (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and The International Self: Psychoanalysis and the Search for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (SUNY Press, 2005). She is also co-editor of the volumes Social Justice and Israel/Palestine: Foundational & Contemporary Debates, and Methodology and Emotion in International Relations: Parsing the Passions. In this gripping and honest memoir, Mira Sucharov shows what a search for political and emotional home looks like. Sucharov suffered from childhood phobias triggered by her parents' divorce, and she sought emotional refuge in Jewish summer camp. But three years spent living in Israel in her twenties shook her to her core. Ultimately, encounters with colleagues, students, friends and lovers force her to confront what it means to be able to write, advocate and teach about Israel/Palestine in a way that balances affirmation with authenticity. Claire English is PhD Candidate in the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant (Post Hill Press, 2021) is the riveting memoir of a top transplant doctor who rode the emotional rollercoaster of saving and losing lives—until it was time to step back and reassess his own life. A young father with a rare form of lung cancer who has been turned down for a transplant by several hospitals. A kid who was considered not “smart enough” to be worthy of a transplant. A young mother dying on the waiting list in front of her two small children. A father losing his oldest daughter after a transplant goes awry. The nights waiting for donor lungs to become available, understanding that someone needed to die so that another patient could live. These are some of the stories in Exhale, a memoir about Dr. Weill’s ten years spent directing the lung transplant program at Stanford. Through these stories, he shows not only the miracle of transplantation, but also how it is a very human endeavor performed by people with strengths and weaknesses, powerful attributes, and profound flaws. Exhale is an inside look at the world of high-stakes medicine, complete with the decisions that are confronted, the mistakes that are made, and the story of a transplant doctor’s slow recognition that he needed to step away from the front lines. This book is an exploration of holding on too tight, of losing one’s way, and of the power of another kind of decision—to leave behind everything for a fresh start. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Andrea Stewart about The Bone Shard Daughter: The Drowning Empire Book One (Hachette UK, 2020). In a world of floating islands, various narrators try to achieve or avoid their destiny, or just understand the mysteries of their existence. There’s Lin, the Emperor’s daughter, set against her foster brother by the manipulative Emperor himself, who fosters the rivalry between them by bestowing keys as mark of his favor. The keys open various rooms which hold the secret to his power. The Emperor’s most powerful tool is the bone shard magic that he uses to program constructs, assemblages of beasts that he builds which then execute his commands. When the Emperor begins to show Lin’s foster brother how to use the bone shards, Lin is determined to find out the secret as well and position herself to be the next Emperor. Then there’s Jovis, a talkative smuggler whose one aim in life is to find the woman he loves, who disappeared one day on a boat with blue sails. Jovis’s quest keeps getting sidelined though, as he becomes more and more involved with the resistance movement against the Emperor, led by the Shardless Few. The Emperor’s constructs are animated with small pieces of bone harvested from children, which he engraves with magical commands. Once the bone shard is activated, life drains from the donor. The Shardless Few have managed to evade the Emperor, and hope to break his rule over the Islands. Other characters include a woman who gathers mangoes all day and has only dim memories of being brought there by a boat with blue sails. Who is she and why is she on this remote island? Does she know anything about Jovis’s lost love? We also meet the governor’s daughter, whose lover embroils her in the struggle of the Shardless. Will the governor’s daughter turn against her own father? As the story progresses, the characters come together in surprising ways. New alliances are forged, and secrets revealed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Deborah Lindsay Williams speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her “‘You Like to Have Some Cup of Tea?’ and Other Questions About Complicity and Place,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Williams talks about living and writing in Abu Dhabi, traveling to South Africa with her family, and how narrow the western view of these places can be, often simplifying very complex issues of racial hierarchy, economics, culture, and history. She also discusses her novel-in-progress, The Corset and the Veil, based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who fled England in 1809 in search of alternatives to her life as an impoverished aristocrat. Deborah Lindsay Williams teaches in the literature and creative writing program at NYU Abu Dhabi. With Cyrus Patell, she is co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940, for which she also wrote the chapter on children’s literature. She is currently working on a book called The Necessity of YA Fiction, which will be part of the Oxford Literary Agendas series. She has published essays in various publications, including The New York Times, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, Brevity, and Motherwell. Read “‘You Like to Have Some Cup of Tea?’ and Other Questions About Complicity and Place” by Deborah Lindsay Williams at thecommononline.org/you-like-to-have-some-cup-of-tea. Read “Bad English” by Cathy Park Hong, from Minor Feelings, at buzzfeednews.com. Learn more about Deborah Lindsay Williams, her work, and her teaching at mannahattamamma.com. Follow Deborah Lindsay Williams on Twitter at @mannahattamamma. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sherlock Holmes is one of the rare literary characters who has achieved a kind of cultural immortality. As Bonnie MacBird notes in this interview, display an image of a deerstalker hat and a pipe almost anywhere in the world, and people can identify the great detective without a second thought. So is it any wonder that an entire industry is devoted to expanding the Conan Doyle canon? Not all these attempts succeed, but MacBird’s novels are a gem. The Three Locks (Collins Crime Club, 2021), fourth in her series and set in 1887, opens with a mysterious package delivered to Dr. John Watson. London is in the midst of a heat wave, Watson’s friend Holmes has withdrawn in one of his periodic funks, and the package offers the rather disgruntled doctor a welcome distraction. Its appeal increases when Watson discovers that it contains an engraved silver box sent by his father’s half-sister, an aunt he didn’t know he had, and represents his mother’s last gift to him. But as he struggles to unlock the box, Holmes appears, warning of danger. Watson’s drive to prove Holmes wrong (he rejects his friend’s suggestion that the aunt’s letter may be a forgery and the lock designed to cause harm) must compete with the demands of two other cases. The wife of an escape artist requests help in protecting her husband from an angry rival, her former lover—a case that becomes more urgent when the escape artist’s most dramatic stunt goes awry, leading to murder. Then the rebellious daughter of a Cambridge don goes missing, to the great distress of the local deacon who has unwisely fallen in love with her. Holmes initially dismisses the second case, although he takes a personal interest in the first. But when a doll made to resemble the young woman is found in the Jesus Lock on the Cam River, with a broken arm and an illegible threat written in purple ink on its cloth chest, the hunt is on, for both the don’s daughter and the person who wishes her harm. In time, it becomes clear that the two cases are connected—and that Holmes must defeat not only a cunning villain but the over-zealous local police. C. P. Lesley is the author of 11 novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Space operas take readers far from Earth with stories about alien cultures and battles between good and evil. But while usually set in distant galaxies in the far flung future or past, they inevitably tell us, like any good science fiction, about our lives today. Ginger Smith’s debut The Rush's Edge (Angry Robot, 2020) takes place when humanity is spread across the galaxy and soldiers are born in labs, but it touches on subjects we grapple with now: blind loyalty to authority, the ethics of genetic science, and the prejudices that divide humans. Halvor Cullen is a VAT—a member of the genetically engineered Vanguard Assault Troops who are programmed to be loyal to their commander and addicted to the rush of battle. VATs are released from duty after seven years of service, but their bodies burn out quickly, and they die young. But it’s when they’re released from duty that things get interesting. How does a person programmed to be a soldier find purpose or meaningful relationships when they’re no longer a soldier? “VATs don’t get the chance to have a family or friends or the kinds of experiences we all take for granted,” Smith says. “Hal is learning a lot about what it means to be a human during this story. He knows about fighting but he doesn’t understand love, he doesn’t understand the difference between blind loyalty and the loyalty that people earn.” Smith wrote The Rush’s Edge in a response to a challenge from her husband. “I’d played around in fanfic, and my husband said, ‘you’ve got to write something original.’ I said, ‘Fine, I’ll write you a book.’” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

What do you ask a novelist who has won a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur genius grant? Cocktail advice, of course. When I had the honor of chatting with Viet Thanh Nguyen about his two novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, we started by discussing what beverages would go well with his books. While the first book is a spy novel and the second is a noir mafia story, they both use the same hard-drinking narrator to explore issues of race and racism, colonialism and decolonization, and violence and non-violence. Set in Southern California in the 1970s and Paris, France in the 1980s, the novels combine a history of the Vietnamese refugee experience with a critique of whiteness and a generous dose of literary criticism. The books are also full of humor, which is at times ribald and scatological. Dr. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Professor Nguyen is the author of several books including Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America and Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War. About a year ago I got to chat with him about that book here on New Books, so check the New Books archive for that interview. He also edited Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field with Janet Hoskins. He has a collection of short stories called The Refugees and edited The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. He also co-wrote Chicken of the Sea, but I suspect his co-author Ellison and son did most of the heavy lifting on that one. This children’s book was illustrated by the amazing Thi Bui and her son Hien Bui-Stafford. Grove Press published The Sympathizer in 2015 and The Committed in 2021. Michael G. Vann is a professor of world history at California State University, Sacramento. A specialist in imperialism and the Cold War in Southeast Asia, he is the author of The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empires, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2018). When he’s not reading or talking about new books with smart people, Mike can be found surfing in Santa Cruz, California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Drawing from his/her own experience as a trans performer, sex worker, and undocumented immigrant, Iván Monalisa Ojeda chronicles the lives of Latinx queer and trans immigrants in New York City. Whether she is struggling with addiction, clashing with law enforcement, or is being subjected to personal violence, each character choses her own path of defiance, often responding to her fate with with irreverent dark humor. What emerges is the portrait of a group of friends who express unquestioning solidarity and love for each other, and of an unfamiliar, glittering and violent, New York City that will draw readers in and swallow them whole. On every page of Las Biuty Queens: Stories (Astra House, 2021), Iván Monalisa's unique narrative talent is on display as he/she artfully transforms the language of the streets, making it his/her own -- rich with rhythm and debauchery. This bold new collection positions Ojeda as a fresh and necessary voice within the canon of world literature. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researcher whose primary interest is the lived experiences of sex workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Ukrainian literary scene today is particularly vibrant. The voice of Serhiy Zhadan is distinct, well-known, and easily-recognizable. In 2021, Yale University Press published his novel titled The Orphanage (Yale UP, 2021), which originally appeared in 2017. In this interview, translators Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler talk about their team work on the novel translation into English. This is not their first translation of Zhadan’s works: Voroshilovgrad in their translation was published a few years ago. When answering the question about why they chose The Orphanage as their translation project, Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler mentioned that they wanted to make this novel available to Anglophone readers. They find it transformative, as such that can change the way we look at life. Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler share their reading of the novel while drawing attention to the episodes that they found compelling. They also comment on the language of Serhiy Zhadan and how they tried to render the most essential linguistic nuances so that the English version of the text had a similar impact on readers as the original on those who read in Ukrainian. The Orphanage is a commentary on the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict but the events that are depicted in the novel seem to take place outside of some specifically marked location: these are, however, easily recognized by everyone who is displaced—physically or imaginatively—by the current war. This simultaneous sense of both everywhere and nowhere enables an insight into a war beyond the limits of states and nations. As Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler point out, a humane dimension is the center of Zhadan’s The Orphanage. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a PhD student in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fátima Policarpo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Her Borders Become Her,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Policarpo talks about creating an essay that includes elements of ghost stories, using language barriers and rich settings to set up complicated dynamics between family members who bully, and are later bullied in turn. She also discusses her current manuscript, a longer work incorporating many of the ideas and themes explored in this essay, and about her work teaching writing and literature with a focus on human rights education. Fátima Policarpo is a Portuguese American writer. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Ninth Letter. Her work has been supported by grants from the Luso-American Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; and by fellowships from the DISQUIET International Literary Program, which she attended as a 2016 Fellow; and the Vermont Studio Center, where she resided as a 2018 NEA Fellow. She lives in Northern California with her family. Reach out to Fátima on Twitter @flpolicarpo. Read “Her Borders Become Her” by Fátima Policarpo at thecommononline.org/her-borders-become-her. Follow Fátima Policarpo on Twitter at @flpolicarpo. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

May 1857. The Indian city of Shahjahanabad, today called Delhi, is tense. British officers are worried about rumors of insubordination and rebellion elsewhere in India, while the local residents both await and fear a coming storm of revolutionary fervor. Trying to make a living in this setting is Mirza Ghalib, one of India’s most celebrated poets, well known for his works in Urdu and Persian. He is also the protagonist, at least in a fictionalised form, of Murder at the Mushaira (Aleph Book Company, 2021) by Raza Mir. The novel is a murder mystery: a particularly disliked poet is murdered at a poetry recital, forcing Ghalib ito play detective, balancing both haughty English officials and passionate Indian mutineers as he attempts to seek the truth. In this interview, Raza introduces both Ghalib and Shahjahanabad. We talk about the historical roots of his story, including where he diverges from historical accuracy. Finally, we discuss why literary figures like Ghalib are so popular as detectives. Raza Mir teaches management at William Paterson University in the USA. He has written a few academic books, and three books of translation and literary criticism about Urdu poetry and poets. Murder at the Mushaira is his first novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Murder at the Mushaira. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Carol Cram about her new book Love Among the Recipes (New Arcadia Publishing, 2020). After Genna’s husband betrays her, she finds a way to spend six months writing a cookbook based on the city of Paris. In this lighthearted women’s fiction, Cram’s protagonist pairs both famous and lesser-known Parisian landmarks with often mouth-watering sounding recipes. Genna shops and cooks, sometimes for friends, sometimes for her landlord, but always for herself. Each chapter starts with a description of a different kind of macaron in varying colors and flavors that often describe the mood of the chapter that follows. In addition to exploring Paris, making friends with people she meets in her French class, and meeting a charming widower, Genna begins to understand that she has it in her power to create her own happiness. Carol M. Cram loves the arts, food, travel, and writing novels about people who follow their passions. Three previous novels of historical fiction, The Towers of Tuscany (Lake Union Publishing, 2014) and A Woman of Note (Lake Union Publishing, 2015), and Muse on Fire (New Arcadia Publishing 2018) are also about women in the arts, and she matches her travel-inspired vignettes with pastel drawings created by her husband, Canadian artist Gregg Simpson in Pastel & Pen: Travels in Europe (New Arcadia Publishing, 2018). CCarol expresses her enthusiasm for the written word, the arts, and her love of travel on Artsy Traveler (www.artsytraveler.com) and Art In Fiction (www.artinfiction.com), and on the Art In Fiction Podcast in her chats with authors who write novels inspired by the arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Felicia Rose Chavez' The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom (Breakbeat Poets, 2020) is a practical and persuasive guide to revolutionizing the teaching of creative writing. Combining theory, memoir, and pedagogy, this book guides the reader through the process of de-centering whiteness (and de-centering the instructor) to allow all students but particularly students of color to find their unique voices and pursue their personal and and artistic goals. The insights in this book are derived from the creative writing classroom, but they are readily applicable to any creative pursuit. This is a must-read book for creative writing instructors looking for ways to break down the rigid hierarchies that have defined the creative writing classroom for more than eighty years. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Owed (Penguin, 2020) is the second collection of poems by Dr. Joshua Bennett, poet, professor, and artist. This volume is a wide-ranging, celebratory book focused on what Bennett calls "the Black quotidian," including the poetry of the barbershop, plastic slip-covers on couches, and the benign struggle between a father and a son over a pair of long johns. Throughout the book, Bennett's attention to detail and gift for both sound and sense are on dazzling display. In this conversation we discuss Owed, as well as Bennett's evolving relationship to spirituality, his process of learning to write out loud through poetry slams, and his experience of being a new father. Bennett is also the author of the poetry volume The Sobbing School, the monograph Being Property Once Myself, and the upcoming Spoken Word: A Cultural History. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Alina Stefanescu posits that At First & Then by Danielle Rose is a collection in which “the feminine is reclaimed.” And it is. It is also a collection of lushly and cleverly crafted poetry that sees the self and the body as a multi-faceted state of being. One that is unafraid to dissect and question what makes the speaker who she is, what she is willing to let go of, and ultimately what moves her forward. Rose writes of expectation, experience, longing, violence, and possibility through the lenses of nature and society and marks her transition both internally and externally via poems which ask to spoken aloud. Danielle Rose is the author of At First & Then, available now from Black Lawrence Press, and The History of Mountains, forthcoming from Variant Lit. Her work can be found in Palette Poetry, Hobart & Sundog Lit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America--racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them--proved fruitful topics for America's best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945–1970 (Anchor Books, 2021), Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, and Mary McCarthy, adroitly pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, boxing, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy and Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita. Here is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," alongside Richard Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" and Flannery O'Connor's "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction." Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly white and male travelers. In an increasingly globalized world, many writers are beginning to raise questions about the ethics of travel writing and its tropes, especially the way western travelers tend to characterize cultures that are unfamiliar to them. These new books challenge the conventional approach, instead asking readers to consider perspectives other than their own. As a young native woman and member of the Karuk tribe, Ursula Pike joined the Peace Corps because she’d always dreamed of helping others. She was ecstatic to learn she would be assigned to serve in small town Kantuta, Bolivia. While at first Pike looked forward to helping the native people of Kantuta, she quickly realized they had less need for her help—and more to teach her—than she had imagined. In this thoughtful debut, An Indian Among Los Indígenas: A Native Travel Memoir, Pike examines the complicated ways we help one another, asking timely questions about how one can become of service to a community as an outsider. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Ursula Pike to learn more about her memoir, An Indian Among Los Indígenas, available now from Heyday Books (2021). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The horror of the battlefield is fresh for Princess Askia. She’s just been forced to flee her kingdom, the northern country of Seravesh, where her cousin now rules under the protection of the Emperor of Roven. All that remains of her army is a loyal general and her last remaining legion, the Black Wolves—not enough to protect her former kingdom from men who are willing to burn entire towns to the ground in order to subjugate the population. Askia has one hope left, and it will not depend on her skill with a sword. Her father, a healer, once helped the Emperor of Vishir, the only land capable of matching Roven in strength. If Askia can reach Vishir and convince Emperor Armaan that Roven’s ruler will eventually challenge the peace and prosperity he’s created, Vishir might be drawn into the war before it’s too late to save Askia’s homeland. But how to obtain the favor of Vishir’s Emperor, Armaan? Should she take advantage of his son’s infatuation with her? Should she try to earn the friendship of his principal wife, a stern woman who seems put off by Askia? Should she accept the help of the religious zealots who champion her cause, even though they tortured her years ago, on suspicion of being a witch like her father. In a court full of devious strangers, Askia will have to learn whom to trust, and whose help to ask for. But it is her own concealed dark magic which ultimately holds the key to her survival. Full of twists and turns, The Frozen Crown (Harper Voyager, 2020)--the first installment of the Greta Kelly’s Warrior Witch Duology--left me checking publication dates for the follow-up. If you like strong heroines, court intrigues, magic, and a touch of sensual sizzle, this novel is for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books) is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and possibility in elliptical, enigmatic poems. Here, "joy would crawl over broken glass, if that was the way." Here, sleep is “a circle whose diameter might be small," a circle "pitifully small," a "wrecked and empty hypothetical circle." Paired with Sloat's stunning mixed-media collage, each poem is a miniature canvas, a brief associative profile of the psyche―its foibles, obsessions, and delights. (Description by the publisher.) “When I was doing [Hotel Almighty] and even now when I work on projects, a lot of what I find I’m doing is just expressing a love of reading and of books themselves,” says Sloat in discussing her new book. “I mean, I just love paper. To take a book and be able to make it into something — that was really fun and exciting for me." Sarah J. Sloat is the author of Hotel Almighty, a collection of visual poetry published in September by Sarabande Books. Born in New Jersey, Sarah has lived in Kansas, China, and Italy, and now splits her time between Frankfurt and Barcelona, where she works as a news editor. She has spent most of the pandemic in Germany with her husband and son, eating take-out schnitzel and working in her pyjamas. Her favorite poets include Federico Garcia Lorca, Vasko Popa, Natasha Trethewey and Charles Wright. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to KT Sparks about her debut novel Four Dead Horses (Regal House, 2021) On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of Lake Michigan—the first of four equine corpses marking the trail that will lead Martin out of the small-minded small town of Pierre, Michigan, onto the open ranges of Elko, Nevada, and into the open arms, or at least open mics, of the cowboy poets who gather there to perform. Along the way, he nurtures a dying mother, who insists the only thing wrong with her is tennis elbow; corrals a demented father, who believes he’s Father Christmas; assists the dissolute local newspaper editor; and serves stints as horse rustler and pet mortician. For thirty years, Martin searches for an escape route to the West, to poetry, and to his first love, the cowgirl Ginger, but never manages to get much farther than the city limits of his Midwestern hometown—that is, until a world- famous cow horse dies while touring through Pierre, and Martin is tapped to transport its remains to the funeral at the 32nd Annual Elko Cowboy Poetry Confluence. KT Sparks is a writer and farmer whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Pank, and elsewhere. She received an AB in Politics, Economics, Rhetoric, and Law from University of Chicago, an MA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford University, Brasenose College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University in Charlotte, an educational grounding that matches her lifelong interest in everything and mastery of nothing. She spent twenty-five years in Washington DC, most of it in the US Senate, as a policy analyst and speechwriter and continues to be involved in progressive politics. When she's not reading fiction (all types) or trying to banish weeds from the vegetable garden, she practices Zen Buddhism, binges British detective series, and cooks stuff grown on the farm (or by her more talented neighbors). Her greatest passion is her large distended family, which includes children, stepchildren, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, siblings, parents, in-laws, exes, and seemingly unending concentric circles of spouses, partners, fiancés, more exes, and more spouses—shining bright and swirling outward, like the rings of Jupiter, but less dusty. KT lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with her husband, dog, a fluctuating population of barn cats, and no horses, dead or alive, waiting for the kids to come visit, or at least call for God’s sake. Four Dead Horses is her first novel. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Last Platoon: A Novel of the Afghanistan War (Bombardier Books, 2020) is a riveting book of infantry ground combat. As a work of fiction it is superb, showing the personal drama, drives and experiences of regular Marines combined with the high ambitions and political maneuverings of the highest ranks, including the President and Secretary of Defense. This narrative is not just fictional. It is a pastiche of the lives of Marines that Bing West has followed over the course of the last twenty years, with each firefight being a compilation of his own, personal experiences. This fact makes this book of interest not just to people looking to read fiction, but also to anyone who wants to know what war is like, how it impacts the people around them and just what happens in the far reaches of Afghanistan. More than an action story, this is a story of the morality of war told by someone who knows how it feels and what it means. In this episode, Bing and I discuss his life and background; his experiences of America’s wars in the Middle East; his analysis of America’s success and failures; how these wars compare to his own, Vietnam, and the wars of the past; and what challenges future warfare could pose to the United States. Jeffrey Bristol holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Boston University, a J.D. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago. He practices law, works as an independent scholar and serves as a naval officer in the US Navy Reserve. He lives in Tampa, Fl. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Writer and translator Edgar Garbelotto speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his short story “A Fourteen-Hour Lesson in Theosophy,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. The story imagines the final hours of author Clarice Lispector’s life. In this conversation, Garbelotto talks about the process of fictionalizing a real person, and bringing her to life in the streets of Rio. Garbelotto also discusses the experience of writing and translating in English, which is his second language, and the way that experience has changed his approach to writing original work. Portuguese is a more playful, allegorical language than English, Garbelotto says, and he’s learned to approach each language differently. Edgar Garbelotto is a writer and translator born in Brazil and based in the US for 20 years. His translation of João Gilberto Noll’s novel Lord won the 2020 Jabuti Prize as Best Brazilian Book Published Abroad and was a finalist for the 2020 Lambda Literary Award in Best Gay Fiction. His translation of Noll’s novel Harmada was published by Two Lines Press in November 2020 and Hugs & Cuddles, another award-winning novel by Noll, is forthcoming from the same publisher in Fall 2022. He has received fellowships from the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois and lives in Chicago, where he is currently editing his debut novel Terra Incognita, written in both Portuguese and English. Read “A Fourteen-Hour Lesson in Theosophy” by Edgar Garbelotto at thecommononline.org/a-fourteen-hour-lesson-in-theosophy. Find Edgar Garbelotto’s translations of Lord and Harmada here. Follow Edgar Garbelotto on Twitter at @EdgarGarbelotto The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In My Private Lennon: Explorations From a Fan Who Never Screamed (Mad Creek Press, 2020), Sibbie O'Sullivan offers a new point of view from which to consider the Beatles’ impact on society and on the individual. In a series of linked autobiographical essays that explore the musical, cultural, and personal aspects of intense music fandom, Sibbie O’Sullivan dismantles the grand narrative of the fifteen-year-old hysterical female Beatles fan and replaces it with an introspective and often humorous tale about how the band shaped her intellectual and artistic development. My Private Lennon charts the author’s realization that the Beatles, especially John Lennon, were a crucial force in her development. A radical departure from other books written by Beatles fans, My Private Lennon invites its readers to consider subjects not usually found in works about Lennon and the band, such as the constraints of memory, the male body, grief, the female breast, race, cultural issues, and the importance of privacy in our over-mediated world. In pieces that engage cultural issues and historical contexts, My Private Lennon creates a witty and provocative intimacy with readers who value the power of art to change one’s life and who love John Lennon and the Beatles. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

At the end of its life, the phoenix bursts into flames and a younger bird rises from the ashes. The roc is large enough to carry an elephant in its claws. The caladrius absorbs disease, curing the ill. The rain heron, which can take the form of steam, liquid or ice, controls the climate around it. Unlike the first three mythical birds, whose legends are hundreds or thousands of years old, the rain heron is a new entry in the library of imaginary beasts, introduced in the novel bearing its name by Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott. Set in an unnamed country beset by a military coup and climate disruptions, The Rain Heron (FSG Originals, 2021) is a story of survivors searching for peace but finding violence in both nature and society. The characters are tested and exposed by the titular creature, which exacts a price from those who dare covet it. “What I was really trying to do was create a mythical creature that embodies both the beauty and the savagery of nature,” Arnott says. “I wanted something that is totally captivating, the way many natural environments and phenomena can be, but also is really, really dangerous.” Arnott’s descriptions of nature are inspired by the beauty of his Australian home state of Tasmania, where he has spent long stretches hiking in the bush and fishing in the cold waters. “It always comes through in my writing a lot. There's lots of descriptions of natural places because that's generally where I've been and what I'm interested in. I tried living in a big city for a while and I just I just couldn't do it.” Robbie Arnott is the author of the novel Flames, which won the Margaret Scott Prize, was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Not the Booker Prize, and the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. In 2019, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. The Rain Heron was one of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2021. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Sometimes you come across a book that pulls you in from every angle. It offers you the space to explore your own fears and hopes all while taking you on a perilous adventure into the unknown with a character you feel you’ve met in real life. That’s a good novel, to me. That’s Alison Stine’s Road Out of Winter: An Apocalyptic Thriller (Mira Books, 2020). In the novel, Wylodine is a marijuana farmer watching everyone she loves leave her small town. As climate change has devastated her world, she chooses to find her own way out of Appalachia. What she finds along the way is more than new faces to call family, more than new freedom and strength, despite the snow and hard earth, she finds a way to grow. Described as “Urgent and poignant, Road Out of Winter is a glimpse of an all-too-possible near future.” Listen in as Ali and I talk about Wylodine’s dystopia, our own pandemic-strained year, and the writerly life. And check out Appalachian singer-songwriter Liz Pahl’s song, “Wylodine,” inspired by the novel.

Ellee Achten is a writer and editor exploring issues of home, health, memory, and attachment. She writes everything from magazine features to lyrical memoir to sci-fi novels. She is currently working on many projects, including a collection of essays about the traumatic connection between the body and mind. She can be reached at: elleeachten@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Family stories are the texture of the human fabric. From every land, from every time, they bring the past to life for young ears. In the beginning of the twentieth century, when there were no borders in the Middle East (it was then called la grande Syrie), Elia Zughaib grew up first in Damascus, then in the mountains of Lebanon. In a rural culture, animals and humans work in tandem. Children play in the surrounding fields and streams. Traditional celebrations mark the seasons of the year. When history intervened and Lebanon became a battleground between England and France, his family left their home and applied for asylum in America. The migration began. The achievement of Helen Zughaib is to bring these memories to life through art. The book’s 25 paintings appear facing Elia’s stories. He serves as the hakawati, the traditional storyteller. The stories in Stories My Father Told Me: Memories of a Childhood in Syria and Lebanon (Cune Press, 2020) are simply told, but they are not simple. Their power is enormous. Helen’s voice is as powerful as his: geometrical shapes, stunning patterns, fierce colors, and people, people, people, young and old. They are delivering milk, planting olive trees, building bonfires for Eid Al Salib, going to a wedding, drying figs, watching the show box, and learning lessons: about charity and compassion and about blind charity. The good, the glad, the sad, and the wise all inhabit these pages. Helen Zughaib’s gouaches are in public and private collections: the White House, the Library of Congress, World Bank, American Embassy in Baghad. She has been a cultural envoy for the U.S. State Department, conducting art workshops in Saudi Arabia and Palestine. Her work has been exhibited internationally and has been presented to heads of state by President Obama and the former Secretary of State Hillary Cinton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Philip Boehm, who has translated over thirty books from German and Polish into English, has translated a recently discovered German manuscript Darkness at Noon (Scribner, 2019) by the late Arthur Koestler. Originally published in 1940, Koestler’s book eventually became an international bestseller. He told in fictional form the realistic story of a former Soviet Communist Party leader who became a victim of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The story is loosely modeled on Nikolai Bukharin’s show trial in 1938. Koestler’s book was originally translated into English by his girlfriend and the original was thought to have been lost during World War II. However, in 2015, a graduate student in Switzerland discovered a copy of the original German manuscript and this was the work Boehm translated into English for this recent edition. During this interview we discuss the plot, its relevance to real Soviet purges, and the translation process. Ian J. Drake is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence, Montclair State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

There have been more than a few contenders for the title of “World Conqueror,” but eight hundred years after the fact, Genghis Khan’s claim to the title remains unmatched. Over the course of four decades, he and his heirs built a realm that stretched from the Korean Peninsula to the plains of Hungary and from northern Siberia to India. And unlike the later conquests of Hitler and Bonaparte, the charismatic authority of Genghis Khan endured long after the initial union fractured into warring khanates. Tackling even the establishment period of such a massive undertaking within the covers of a single historical novel poses a challenge for any author. In The Sky Worshipers (History through Fiction, 2021), F.M. Deemyad approaches the problem by focusing on three foreign princesses, captured in different places (northern China, Central Asia, and Poland) by Genghis, his son Ogodei, and his grandson Hulagu. These three women, each for her own reasons, together create a secret eyewitness account of the Mongol rise and expansion. The female perspective allows Deemyad to avoid extended discussion of wartime atrocities and focus on the human cost of conquest and battles. Yet the atrocities are there too, reflected in the permanent scars left on survivors who must deal with disruption and loss even as they struggle to avoid being coopted into a world they neither created nor chose. In often haunting prose, Deemyad brings to life a slice of the past that, although not forgotten, has receded from view, obscured by the more recent disasters and tragedies of the twentieth century. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Warhol's Mother's Pantry: Art America and the Mom in Pop (Mad Creek Press, 2020), M.I. Devine introduces readers to a collection of 21st-century multi-genre essays inspired by Andy Warhol's mother, Julia, that provide a literary and cultural history of new pop humanism. "Here are Leonard Cohen’s last songs and Molly Bloom’s last words; Vampire Weekend’s Rostam and Philip Larkin too; Stevie Smith, John Donne, and Kendrick Lamar; sonnets and selfies; early cinema and post–9/11 film, pop hooks, and pop art." Devine's series of essays examines his histories and relationships with pop culture and art. Rebekah Buchanan is an Associate Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

As the push for a Universal Healthcare system in the United States becomes more and more popular among the American people, we’re beginning to have more public conversations about access to and affordability of medical care. While many of us may not consider our health insurance until we need it, for those with chronic conditions, the American medical system can be a nightmare of insurance claims bureaucracy and that prevents patients from getting the care they need at a cost they can afford. Worse, the rising prices of drugs and treatments developed in this for-profit system mean that some patients receive more medical care than they want or need, sometimes at the expense of their quality of life. When a young Katherine E. Standefer was suddenly diagnosed with Long QT Syndrome—the same congenital heart condition as her younger sister—she was faced with what felt like an impossible choice: implant a cardiac defibrillator and be forever tied to the American Medical System, or take a chance with death. In her stunning debut, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown, Spark, 2020) Standefer explores this system as both a patient and a consumer, visiting factories in California as well as mining communities in Rwanda and Madagascar where the metals in her defibrillator were sourced to learn more about the true human cost of the device that was meant to save her life. Throughout, Standefer wonders whether her life is worth this price, and asks us to reimagine approaches to care—both in medical and environmental. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, Father Guards the Sheep, (University of Iowa Press, 2020), by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh. Sari Rosenblatt earned an MFA (1984) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won awards for her stories from Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Glimmer Train, New Millenium Writings, and Ms Magazine. She has been published in the Iowa Review and has taught fiction writing at several schools, most recently the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. Her first book of short stories, Father Guards the Sheep, was winner of the 2020 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Sari has also completed a novel, "Daughter of Retail", based on the first short story in Father Guards the Sheep. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Casey Walker speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his short story “Vigilância,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Walker talks about writing World War II-era Lisbon through the eyes of a police informer who trades in secrets. Walker also discusses the complex nature of complicity in his novel Last Days in Shanghai, and the historical and personal background behind his current project Mexicali, a new novel set in the Mexican-American borderlands. Casey Walker is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University. He is the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is currently finishing a new novel, Mexicali, exploring the history of the Mexican-American borderlands where he was born and raised. Read “Vigilância” by Casey Walker at thecommononline.org/vigilancia. Learn more about Casey Walker and his work at caseymwalker.com, and find his book Last Days in Shanghai here. Follow Casey Walker on Twitter at @CaseyMWalker. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When Elisabeth Parker and her husband leave Massachusetts and arrive in California to join her father, she quickly learns that her father is not who she thought he was. It’s 1849, and she also realizes that her new husband is also not who she thought. She’s forced to confront her preconceived notions of family, love, and opportunity, and finds comfort in corresponding with her childhood friend back home, writer Louisa May Alcott. She also spends time with a mysterious and handsome native Californian. Armed with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance, she sets out to determine her role in building the West, even as she comes to terms with the sacrifices she must make to achieve independence and happiness. A gripping and illuminating window into life in the Old West, Prospects of a Woman (She Writes Press, 2020) is the story of one woman’s passionate quest to carve out a place for herself in the liberal and bewildering society that emerged during the California gold rush frenzy. Born and raised on the American River in Sacramento, Wendy Voorsanger has long held an intense interest in the historical women of California. Her debut historical novel—Prospects of a Woman—tells the story of one woman’s passionate quest to carve out a place for herself in the liberal and bewildering society that emerged during the California gold rush frenzy, and is included in 2 BuzzFeed Books must read lists. Voorsanger currently manages SheIsCalifornia.net, a blog dedicated to chronicling the accomplishments of California women throughout history. She earned a BA in journalism from Cal Poly SLO and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has attended Hedgebrook, the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and Lit Camp. She is a member of the Castro Writers' Cooperative, the Lit Camp Advisory Board, the Historical Novel Society, and the San Mateo Public Library Literary Society. She lives in northern California with her husband and 2 boys. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

After Australia (Affirm Press with the Sweatshop Literacy Movement 2021). No, Australia has not ended - it's a book edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule and the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage and hope. An anthology, twelve of Australia’s most daring Indigenous writers and writers of colour provide a glimpse of Australia as we head toward the year 2050. Unique voices and a great editor - whose input is apparent, but he's humbly kept in the background to let the writers shine, and we all benefit. Featuring Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Ortiz, Roanna Gonsalves, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law and Hannah Donnelly. Edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad. Original concept by Lena Nahlous. Michael Mohammed Ahmad is the founding director of Sweatshop Literacy Movement and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology, After Australia (Affirm Press, 2021). Mohammed's debut novel, The Tribe (Giramondo, 2014), won the 2015 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelists of the Year Award. His second novel, The Lebs (Hachette Australia, 2018) won the 2019 NSW Premier's Multicultural Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Mohammed received his Doctorate of Creative Arts from Western Sydney University in 2017 Bede Haines is a solicitor, specialising in litigation and a partner at Holding Redlich, an Australian commercial law firm. He lives in Sydney, Australia. Known to read books, ride bikes and eat cereal (often). bede.haines@holdingredlich.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Compiled around 1235, the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, or Ogura's 100 Poems by 100 Poets, is one of the most important collections of poetry in Japan. Though the poets include emperors and empresses, courtiers and high priests, ladies-in-waiting and soldier-calligraphers, the collection is far more than a fascinating historical document. As the translators, James Hadley and Nell Regan, note in A Gap in the Clouds: A New Translation of Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (Dedalus Press, 2020), "these beautiful poems have endured because their themes are universal and readily understood by contemporary readers". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The title of S. B. Divya’s debut novel, Machinehood (Gallery/Saga Press, 2021), refers to an underground band of rebels (or terrorists, depending on your view) who threaten to unplug the world from the tech essential to modern life unless all intelligences—human and man-made—are given equal rights. The book opens with Welga, the story’s hero, ordering black coffee from a bot in Chennai, India; the bot puts milk in the coffee while insisting that the drink is still “black.” A human vendor across the street fills Welga’s order properly, without milk, and then summarizes her experiences with the two vendors in a tidy lesson: “Bots work faster, but human mind is smarter.” The vendor’s words foreshadow the fault line that runs through the book. On the one hand, humans rely on bots to run their homes and economy, on the other, humans compete with bots, constantly afraid of falling physically and mentally behind. “Once upon a time, we harnessed animals to help us,” Divya says. “Now we've turned to machines and, as those machines get increasingly intelligent, the competition in certain sectors is going to also ramp up. There's an existential fear right now for a lot of people that AIs are going to replace them and then they're not going to have work. So in part, this novel is exploring that particular concern, but not so much as a dystopia, more as a realistic vision … of what the future could look like when we have to coexist with these very, very capable machines.” Set 75 years in the future, the AIs in Welga’s world have not yet achieved sentience (hence they’re referred to as “weak” AIs.) Still, they are stronger and process information faster than humans. To keep up, humans use mechanized exoskeletons to make themselves stronger and pills to speed their thinking and reflexes, greying the distinction between humans and bots. “How much of a difference is there really between human beings, cyborgs and AI-based robots? And should we be making as much distinction between those categories as we do today, especially going forward as all of these things get more sophisticated? I was really interested in looking at the blurring of those lines and interrogating at what point we decide to give machines rights, especially when they provide us with so much free labor.” S.B. Divya was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards for her novella Runtime. She is co-editor of Escape Pod, with Mur Lafferty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An old farmer, trying to build a plane in his village. A young man that gambles everything on the roaring stock market. A community transformed by a magical fruit that evokes vivid memories. A Chinese woman unable to understand her American partner. People stuck in a train station, waiting for a train that never comes. These stories, among others, make up Land of Big Numbers (Mariner Books: 2021), the debut story collection by Te-Ping Chen. Chen’s fiction spans a wide array of styles and narratives, from vignettes that feel like they could have been plucked from the newspapers, through surreal allegories for Chinese society, to character examinations of cross-cultural relationships. In this interview, Te-Ping and I talk about the different stories in “Land of Big Numbers”, and her choice of styles, narratives and themes. We talk about how these stories are based on her time in China, as well as the differences between writing for fiction and writing for journalism. Te-Ping Chen is a fiction writer and journalist. She is a Wall Street Journal correspondent in Philadelphia who was previously based in Beijing and Hong Kong. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Granta and Tin House. She can be followed on Twitter at @tepingchen. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Land of Big Numbers. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

By combining the spirit of fiction with the fabulism of Indian mythology and in-depth academic research, Vanessa R. Sasson shares the evocative story of the Buddha from the perspective of a forgotten woman: Yasodhara, the Buddha's wife. Although often marginalized, Yasodhara's narrative here comes to life. Written with a strong feminist voice, we encounter Yasodhara as a fiercely independent, passionate and resilient individual. We witness her joys and sorrows, her expectations and frustrations, her fairy-tale wedding, and her overwhelming devastation at the departure of her beloved. It is through her eyes that we witness Siddhattha's slow transformation, from a sheltered prince to a deeply sensitive young man. On the way, we see how the gods watch over the future Buddha from the clouds, how the king and his ministers try to keep the suffering of the world from him and how he eventually renounces the throne, his wife and newly-born son to seek enlightenment. Along with a foreword from Wendy Doniger, Yasodhara and the Buddha (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) includes a scholarly introduction to Yasodhara's narrative and offers extensive notes along with study questions, to help readers navigate the traditional literature in a new way, making this an essential book for anyone wanting to learn about Buddhist narratives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Evening Plays (Theatre Communications Group, 2020) collects three plays by experimental playwright Richard Maxwell. The plays are inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, and all three concern death and dying. The Evening focuses on characters whose lives revolve around cage-fighting and drinking, and also includes searing meditations on the process of dying. Samara reads a bit like a western, though one filtered through a mystic sensibility reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges. Paradiso is, like its Dantean precursor, a fractured, future-oriented work that exists on the border of the human. Videos of many of Maxwell's plays, including the three discussed in this interview, can be found on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/nycplayers. Several of his paintings are currently on view between Dunkin’ Donuts and Frames Bowling Alley on the second floor of the south building at Port Authority Bus Terminal. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kate Moran, a graduate of Smith College, has been making her living tutoring students in French when her college friend Emmie Van Alden appears out of the blue and talks Kate into joining a group of alumnae intent on offering relief to rural families in war-torn France. Despite her mother’s disapproval, in July 1917 Kate boards an ocean liner with the Smith College Relief Unit. She knows few of the other alumnae and dislikes some of those she remembers from her college days. Even her friendship with Emmie has been tarnished since graduation by their disparate family backgrounds. After a dangerous journey across the Atlantic, where German U-boats still patrol the seas, the Smith women reach Paris. There they encounter one obstacle after another: incomplete paperwork, missing supplies, trucks delivered in pieces, absent members of their unit, and a simmering coup against their leader. Somehow they overcome their difficulties and reach their intended destination in Picardy, not far from the River Somme. But no sooner have they begun to make headway in their central mission—to restore farmlands and villages destroyed during the German invasion—than they hear of a renewed offensive that may undo all their hard work. In Band of Sisters (William Morrow, 2021), Lauren Willig brings to life, with her signature flair, a little-known but riveting chapter in the history of World War I. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Sisters, appeared in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Already in her late twenties, Tara is relieved when her parents arrange a marriage with a man who lives across the world in Atlanta. But she understands quickly that her husband doesn’t love her or even want her. The ensuing loneliness brings up memories of being left at age eight with her grandparents and mentally ill uncle when her family moved to Dubai. Now, as her husband isolates her and becomes increasingly abusive, she accepts the help of American strangers to leave and set up a life of her own. The scandal, even across oceans, is insurmountable, and she’s pressured into moving back into her husband’s house. This time when the violence escalates, Tara finds the strength, despite fear of being shunned, not only to leave, but to seek love outside the community. Purple Lotus is a story of a woman facing her fears and choosing her own path. Veena Rao is an award-winning journalist and author. Purple Lotus (She Writes Press, 2020), her recently released debut novel, is the winner of the She Writes Press and SparkPress Toward Equality in Publishing (STEP) contest. She is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of NRI Pulse, an Atlanta-based news publication. She has been recognized by The Limca Book of Records (the Indian version of the Guinness Book of Records) as the first Indian woman to edit and publish a newspaper outside India. When she is not writing or meeting press deadlines, you will find her meditating or photographing the flora and fauna on her wooded walk route. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Katherine Vaz speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her short story “The Treasure Hunt of August Dias,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Vaz talks about her long career of writing novels and short stories about Portuguese and Portuguese-American characters, and their rich, complex communities. She also discusses her current project, a heavily researched historical novel about Portuguese immigrants set during the Civil War. Katherine Vaz is the author of the novels Saudade and Mariana, the latter translated in six languages. Her story collection Fado & Other Stories won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and the collection Our Lady of the Artichokes & Other Portuguese-American Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. She is the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress, and she served on the six-person Presidential Delegation to the World’s Fair in Lisbon in 1998. She is a teacher of “Writing the Luso Experience,” a workshop at the DISQUIET conference each summer in Lisbon. Read “The Treasure Hunt of August Dias” by Katherine Vaz at thecommononline.org/the-treasure-hunt-of-august-dias. Learn more about Katherine Vaz and her work at katherinevaz.com, and find her books and collections here. Follow Katherine Vaz on Twitter at @KatherineVaz1. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Patrick Madden, an essayist. Now, for most of us, an essay—that thing we were assigned to write in high school or maybe that thing we stayed up all night writing in college—doesn't immediately evoke feelings of joy and excitement or associations of pleasure and profundity. No, an essay isn't something we usually chose to do. And we can take that view of the essay even further. I'm guessing most of us didn't grow up hoping to be an essayist. In fact, we might be surprised to recall that such an identity actually exists. When, after all, is the last time you met an essayist, if you ever have? Well, I'm happy to say that, if you haven't, today is the day, and I couldn't think of a better essayist to dispel any wizened views of the essay that you or I might hold than Madden. His new book Disparates: Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2020) is full of delights and surprises and goofy jokes and riffs on rock lyrics and doodles and, just as often, moving insights on how all of these things are intrinsic to what makes us human. And in the spirit of Madden's essays, this interview also has a surprise guest, one who's intelligence and good humor has made this conversation a high for me in nearly a decade of conversations for the New Books Network. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Michael P. F. Smith about his book The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown (Viking, 2021) Michael Smith is a folk singer who has shared the stage with luminaries such as Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He’s also a playwright, whose works include Wood Guthrie Dreams and Ain’t No Sin. The Good Hand is his first book. This episode looks at what life is like in the oil fields of North Dakota. It covers a wide range of topics from how much oil (black gold) has influenced our standard and style of living to just how miserable the wages are for workers handling the rigs. Lonely, often violent men blanket Williston, North Dakota, many of them the earlier victims of abusive fathers. The episode touches on notable characters like Huck and the Wildebeest, and most of all Magic Mike (the author and narrator). It’s safe to say that the open spaces of North Dakota are another feature the episode addresses. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Journey to the West, and especially the character of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is beloved by readers across China, East Asia, and beyond. The story and its characters have been written and rewritten in books, comics, graphic novels, movies, television shows, and video games. In many ways, Journey to the West and Son Wukong have become archetypes: stories and characters that people refer to and recognise, without ever looking at the original source material. But for those interested in reading the original novel, we now have a new translation of Journey to the West (Penguin Classics: 2021) from Professor Julia Lovell. This new translation takes the original 1592 novel by Wu Cheng’en and presents its adventures, humor, satire and spiritual insights for a modern audience. In this interview, Julia and I talk about Journey to the West: its story, its characters, and its history, before and after the publication of the 1592 novel. We talk about what motivated this new translation. Finally, we end by discussing how Journey to the West and the Monkey King have had an impact on popular culture far beyond China, through Japan, Southeast Asia and the West. Julia Lovell is a Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research primarily focuses on the relationship between culture and modern Chinese nation-building, and on the wide-ranging impacts of modern China’s encounters with the world beyond its borders. She is the author of several well-received histories of China, including The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Pan Macmillan: 2011), and Maoism: A Global History (Bodley Head: 2019). She has also translated several works of Chinese literature, including The Real Story of Ah-Q and Lust, Caution. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Monkey King. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Man Who Loved His Wife (Mayapple Press, 2021), Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters who grapple with the minutiae of their lives while considering family, fate, love, death, the afterlife, the divine presence, and spirituality. Peppered with Yiddishisms and salted with sisters, brothers, parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, and friends, Moses tells the stories of regular people faced with the problems of daily life but weighted with the 4000-year-old history of Judaism. She is reminiscent of writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Grade, and Philip Roth (to name a few) who captured the spirit of humanity in a specific time and place. Jennifer Anne Moses was born in 1959 and grew up in McLean, Virginia. She always wanted to be a writer, so she read a lot and later earned a degree at Tufts. Eventually she married, had three children, taught herself to paint, and moved from Washington D.C. to Baton Rouge, Louisiana to Montclair, NJ. In addition to her books (Food and Whine, The Book of Joshua, Bagels and Grits, Visiting Hours, Tales from My Closet, and The Art of Dumpster Diving), she's published dozens of essays, articles, Op Ed pieces, and short stories. Her work has also been anthologized in the Pushcart Prizes and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Moses loves to bicycle, garden, play the piano, and dance, although she can’t do it like she used to. She also adores her two smelly mutts. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Book of Wings (Véhicule Press, 2011) is a stunningly mesmerizing debut novel by Tawhida Tanya Evanson. It follows the journey of the protagonist Maya across vast geographies, such as Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and Morocco, as she reels from the end of a passionate relationship with her lover and partner, Shams. In this modern Sufi love story, Maya, a bi-racial Black woman, seeks Shams, her lost beloved, and this quest propels her on a spiritual search that unfolds in a physical return to her homeland in Morocco in North Africa; a return that is symbolic of the inner return to one’s spiritual origins, so modeled by the Sufis. Evanson also draws from various Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions such as spirituality, music, and storytelling. These intricate Sufi, Islamic, and Afro-Caribbean diasporic traditions appear through personalities that Maya encounters on her travels, namely figures such as Muhammad, Ali, Hassan, Husayn, Fatima, Hajar or saints, dervishes, ancestors, masters, and holy ones. The novel is textured with Sufi themes, symbols, and teachings, such as in how spiritual states of beauty and love are evoked or the summation to annihilate the ego. These appear not only in the storyline but also in the prose, such as the use of repetition as Sufi pedagogy and as a literary device. This exquisite and compelling novel would be a welcome text to incorporate into numerous courses that deal with a wide range of topics such as the hero’s quest and mystical journey or topical courses such as on Sufism, Islam, gender, sexuality, or Afro-Caribbean diaspora, Canadian literature, and much more. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca. You can follow her on Twitter via @shobhanaxavier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Seanan McGuire's Across the Green Grass Fields (Tor.com, 2021), a stand-alone novel in the Wayward Children series, a portal transports a horse-loving ten-year old, Regan, to Hooflands. Soon she becomes part of a centaur herd, learning how to herd unicorns, finding her place as an apprentice healer, and making a new best friend her own age, a centaur girl named Chicory. She finds herself at ease in her new role and other than missing her parents, would be content to continue in her life. But the population of Hooflands has expectations for her, expectations that even running away can’t evade. Humans have always saved Hooflands from bad things. And too soon, it will be Regan’s turn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

While there has been a recent boom in Jewish literacy and learning within the US, few resources exist to enable American Jews to experience the rich primary sources of Yiddish culture. Stepping into this void, Miriam Udel has crafted collection, Honey on the Page: A Treasury of Yiddish Children's Literature (NYU Press, 2020), which offers a feast of beguiling original translations of stories and poems for children. Arranged thematically―from school days to the holidays―the book takes readers from Jewish holidays and history to folktales and fables, from stories of humanistic ethics to multi-generational family sagas. Featuring many works that are appearing in English for the first time, and written by both prominent and lesser-known authors, this anthology spans the Yiddish-speaking globe―drawing from materials published in Eastern Europe, New York, and Latin America from the 1910s, during the interwar period, and up through the 1970s. With its vast scope, Honey on the Page offers a cornucopia of delights to families, individuals and educators seeking literature that speaks to Jewish children about their religious, cultural, and ethical heritage. Complemented by whimsical, humorous illustrations by Paula Cohen, an acclaimed children’s book illustrator, Udel’s evocative translations of Yiddish stories and poetry will delight young and older readers alike. Miriam Udel is associate professor of German Studies and Jewish Studies at Emory University. She was ordained in 2019 as part of the first cohort of the Executive Ordination Track at Yeshivat Maharat, a program designed to bring qualified mid-career women into the Orthodox rabbinate. Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bina Shah speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her short story “Weeds and Flowers,” which appears in Issue 19 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Shah talks about how the people she observes and encounters in her life in Karachi, Pakistan, inspire her work in fiction. She also discusses her 2018 feminist dystopian novel Before She Sleeps, and the sequel she’s working on now, in addition to her work as a journalist. Bina Shah is a Karachi-based author of five novels and two collections of short stories, including the feminist dystopia Before She Sleeps, published in 2018. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and Pakistan’s biggest English-language newspaper, Dawn, as well as other international newspapers and journals. Read “Weeds and Flowers” by Bina Shah at thecommononline.org/weeds-and-flowers. Learn more about Bina Shah and her work at thefeministani.wordpress.com, and find her novel Before She Sleeps here. Follow Bina Shah on Twitter at twitter.com/BinaShah. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Humans have found many ways to divide and stratify—by skin color, ancestry, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, health status, body type or size, and so on. The list is so long that it’s hard to imagine it getting longer, and yet debut author Chris Panatier has found a way. In The Phlebotomist (Angry Robot, 2020)t, society is divided (as the title suggests) by something invisible to the naked eye: blood type. Universal donors—those with Type O negative—are the most valued. Universal recipients—those who are AB positive—are the least valued. With incomes based on the market value of their blood, universal donors end up at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy and universal recipients at the bottom. Meanwhile, those running the show—executives of the company Patriot—are the richest of all, living in exclusive enclaves. It is vampiric capitalism in more ways than one. The name of the company is a reference to the Patriot Act—a real-life example of creeping authoritarianism that parallels the world of The Phlebotomist (Angry Robot, 2020) “This ubiquitous contractor, Patriot, has slowly crept into the realm of individual rights and privacy until one day, everyone wakes up, and there's a mandatory blood draw, and they have to give blood every day and are under surveillance and tracked everywhere,” Panatier explains. “All of that started as a patriotic thing to do. There was a war, people were asked to give blood, and so they proudly did it. And then slowly … people were under the boot of the government and this enigmatic contractor. ... It's a bit of an allegory for sure. … because these are things I see in our everyday lives.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Heather Bell Adams’ first novel, Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press 2017), won the gold medal for the Southeast region in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and was selected for Deep South Magazine’s Fall/Winter Reading List. Her short fiction, which has won the James Still Fiction Prize and Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award, appears in The Thomas Wolfe Review, Atticus Review, Pembroke Magazine, Broad River Review, The Petigru Review, Pisgah Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Hendersonville, NC, Heather lives in Raleigh with her husband and son. She works as a lawyer and volunteers on the Raleigh Review fiction staff. She loves hot yoga and does not love cooking. The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books, 2020) appears on Summer Reading Lists for Deep South Magazine, Writer’s Bone, The Big Other and Buzz Feed. The story opens in Savannah, Ga with ninety- year-old Audrey Thorpe living in her historic mansion on palm-tree-lined Victory Drive, determined to retain her independence. When her health begins to fade and she stumbles at a fund-raising event, her granddaughter hires fellow mom Laurel to be a part-time caregiver. Laurel and Audrey seem to bond—until Audrey disappears. As the story moves between the verdant jungles of the war-torn Philippines, where Audrey served as a nurse, and glittering modern-day Savannah, friendships new and old are tested. Along the way, Audrey grapples with one of life’s heart-wrenching truths: You can only outrun your secrets for so long. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A tale of passion and obsession from a philosophy professor who learns to play Bach on the piano as an adult. Dan Moller grew up listening to heavy metal in the Boston suburbs. But one day, something shifted when he dug out his mother's record of The Art of the Fugue, inexplicably wedged between ABBA's greatest hits and Kenny Rogers. Moller was fixated on Bach ever since. In The Way of Bach, he draws us into fresh and often improbably hilarious things about Bach and his music. Did you know the Goldberg Variations contain a song about his mom cooking too much cabbage? Just what is so special about Bach’s music? Why does it continue to resonate even today? What can modern Americans—steeped in pop culture—can learn from European craftsmanship? And, because it is Bach, why do some people see a connection between music and God? By turn witty and though-provoking, Moller infuses The Way of Bach with philosophical considerations about how music and art enable us to contemplate life's biggest questions. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and a PhD Candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I spoke with Max Gross about his book The Lost Shtetl (HarperCollins, 2020). Imagine a Jewish village hidden in the forests of Poland that somehow escapes the Holocaust. Eighty years later, a young woman divorces her husband and runs into the surrounding forest. The town sends a young man to find her. He’s an orphan and expendable because he’s not that good a marriage prospect, but suddenly he finds himself in modern-day Poland. He finds it hard to believe that all the Jews of Poland have been murdered along with most of Europe’s Jewry. Officials toss him in an institution and study him for months until a Yiddish translator is found. And when they fly him home in a helicopter, the townspeople think the Messiah has finally come. The Lost Shtetl is about love, family, community, religion, class, government, politics, antisemitism, assimilation, and history itself. Although the town never heard of electricity, running water, or cars, never advanced in science or medicine, and never even heard of sliced bread, it’s not clear that progress is going to be good for everyone in Kreskol. Max Gross was born in New York City in 1978 and is the son of two writers. After attending Saint Ann’s School and Dartmouth College, he worked at the Forward and as a travel correspondent for the New York Post before becoming the Editor-in-Chief of Commercial Observer. He wrote a book about dating called "From Schlub to Stud" but has since been rescued from the single man's fate by his beloved wife and son, with whom he lives in Queens, New York. The Lost Shtetl, his first novel, is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award, a recipient of an honorable mention for the Sophie Brody Medal, and winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award. Gross is also a lifelong traveler, having studied in Scotland and London, and having lived in Arad, Israel for a year. When not writing, he is a degenerate poker player who once had the distinction of beating the 2003 World Series of Poker champion, Chris Moneymaker, in a media versus professional tournament. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Translator Jethro Soutar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about three pieces he translated from Portuguese for Issue 20 of The Common magazine. These pieces appear in a special portfolio of writing from and about the Lusosphere—Portugal’s colonial and linguistic diaspora around the globe. In this conversation, Soutar talks about the complexities of translating poetry and prose: capturing not just the meaning of a piece but the feeling and atmosphere of it, and the culture behind the scenes. He also explains a little of the colonial and racial history of Portugal, Cape Verde, and Mozambique, and how those events echo today through the literature and language of modern Lusophone countries. Jethro Soutar is a translator of Spanish and Portuguese. He has a particular focus on works from Africa and has translated novels from Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde. He is also editor of Dedalus Africa and a co-founder of Ragpicker Press. Originally from Sheffield in the UK, he now lives in Lisbon, Portugal. Read “Maria, I’m Going To War,” “In Our Skin—A Journey,” and “Another Education,” all translated by Jethro Soutar, at thecommononline.org/tag/jethro-soutar. Explore The Common’s portfolio of writing from the Lusosphere at thecommononline.org/luso. Learn more about Dedalus Africa at dedalusbooks.com, and about Ragpicker Press at ragpickerpress.co.uk. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Juliane Okot Bitek, of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, has written a terrific book of poetry on the 1994 Genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Published in 2016 by the University of Alberta, and simply titled, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), Okot Bitek’s poetry is a form of witnessing violence that records the senseless loss of life in a way that reminds us violence is human and universal. Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of (white, foreign) producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In his pathbreaking graphic novel, Berlin (Drawn and Quarterly, 2018), Jason Lutes creates a multifaceted exploration of urban life during the Weimar Republic. The book contains a variety of mostly fictional characters, all of whom capture aspects of the political, cultural, and social life of Berlin during the final years of Germany’s first democratic experiment. Beautifully drawn, this work provides a compelling alternative to readers used to reading only textual accounts of the period. Much the narrative revolves around two characters: Marthe Müller and Kurt Severing. The former is an art student from Cologne, spending time in Berlin. The latter is a journalist and keen observer of Weimar politics. The journey of these two characters as well as many others reveals much about the specific situation in Germany during this era as well as elements of the human condition. The novel appeals not only to the increasing number of graphic book readers, but also to anyone interested in the failure of Weimar democracy, the nature of popular culture during the 1920s, and the history of sexuality. Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 (German and European Studies)

Mary Godwin Shelley had yet to reach her nineteenth birthday when she had the dream that gave rise to the classic Gothic horror tale Frankenstein. The daughter of a dissenting English clergyman and Britain’s first feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin lost her mother not long after her birth. After an unconventional upbringing by the standards of late eighteenth-century Europe, followed by the arrival of a very conventional and far from accommodating stepmother, at the age of fourteen Mary fell madly in love with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, they eloped to Europe, leaving behind Percy’s wife and child but bringing along Mary’s stepsister, Claire. For the next decade, the trio traveled around the continent—especially France, Switzerland, and Italy—with occasional returns to London to secure funds. Through trips over the Alps by mule, sailing expeditions on Lake Como, and wild parties thrown by Lord Byron—a misogynist who belittles Mary’s talents even as he engages in a wild affair with Claire—Mary records in her journal the events and experiences that will blossom into her first and best-known novel. In Vindicated (Cuidono Press, 2020) Kathleen Williams Renk re-creates Mary’s inner world. Her crisp, utterly compelling prose brings to life a woman whose creation, as in the novel Frankenstein itself, has taken on a life of its own, eclipsing its creator. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Travelers often become enchanted with the first country that captures their hearts and gives them license to be free. For Wade Davis, it was Colombia. In his new book Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia (Knopf, 2020), the bestselling author tells of his travels on the mighty Magdalena, the river that made possible the nation. Along the way, he finds a people who have overcome years of conflict precisely because of their character, informed by an enduring spirit of place, and a deep love of a land that is home to the greatest ecological and geographical diversity on the planet. Only in Colombia can a traveler wash ashore in a coastal desert, follow waterways through wetlands as wide as the sky, ascend narrow tracks through dense tropical forests, and reach verdant Andean valleys rising to soaring ice-clad summits. This rugged and impossible geography finds its perfect coefficient in the topography of the Colombian spirit: restive, potent, at times placid and calm, in moments explosive and wild. Both a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer, the Magdalena has served in dark times as the graveyard of the nation. And yet, always, it returns as a river of life. At once an absorbing adventure and an inspiring tale of hope and redemption, Magdalena gives us a rare, kaleidoscopic picture of a nation on the verge of a new period of peace. Braiding together memoir, history, and journalism, Wade Davis tells the story of the country's most magnificent river, and in doing so, tells the epic story of Colombia. Akash Ondaatje is a historical researcher focusing on the interconnected lives of humans and animals. He studied at McGill University (B.A. History) and Queen’s University (M.A. History), where he researched human-animal relations and transatlantic exchanges in eighteenth-century British culture through his thesis, Animal Ascension: Elevation and Debasement Through Human-Animal Associations in English Satire, 1700-1820. Contact: 17amo2@queensu.ca Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This episode covers a range of topics from Old’s use of line breaks (enjambment that runs contrary to the tedious, end-stopped rhyming lines of hymnals) to the degree to which any art work can be really considered to be autobiographical as artists work from intuition. The episode features Olds reading from two of her poems in Arias (Knopf, 2019). Sharon Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry. Arias was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize and her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Eric Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program. Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Arranged marriages have been around for centuries, and in The Light Years (Angry Robot, 2020), R.W.W. Greene imagines they’ll be around for centuries more. With the addition of speed-of-light travel, Greene’s character Adem Saddiq can sign a contract with the parents of his wife-to-be before she’s even born, take to space on his family’s freighter and return several months later to find his 26-year-old bride, Hisako Sasaki, waiting for him. Because time dilation allows him to jump 26 years into the future, he can have his bride made-to-order, specifying what degrees and skills she’ll need to play a productive part in the family business. He can even require that she receive genetic modifications to make her a genius. Greene imagines that the same considerations that shaped arranged marriages in the past will shape them in the future. Hisako’s “parents are very poor. They’re refugees,” he explains. “Their only way to get out of this situation is to sign the contract. It's going to allow Adem and his family to pay for Hisako’s schooling, which she wouldn't otherwise have gotten. It’s going to pay for a family apartment, which they wouldn't otherwise have had. And it's going to make sure that she has a life that's going to be far better than her parents’.” Understandably, Hisako sees the situation differently. “If you're the mom and the dad, then you see [the arranged marriage] as something that would be good for your kid. If you’re the kid, your whole life has been stolen from you and preordained and pre-contracted. Like Hisako, you'd be a little pissed about it.” The Light Years is Greene’s first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Merciful (Haywire Books, 2021) by Jon Sealy nineteen-year-old Samantha James is killed while riding her bike home from work in a small coastal town one dark summer night in South Carolina. It’s a hit and run, and when they learn who did it, the townspeople want Daniel Hayward, the alleged driver, to pay for his crime. The headlines are compelling, but the truth is unclear. Everyone has an opinion - the media, the prosecutor, the defense attorney, Daniel, and Samantha’s family. Delving into each of the characters, the author pauses to reflect on culture, social pressures, family, and history. Ultimately, The Merciful is a morality play about one moment, one accident, one decision, and the way an instant can change the course of a life forever. Jon Sealy is the author of The Whiskey Baron, The Edge of America, and The Merciful, as well as the craft book So You Want to Be a Novelist. An upstate South Carolina native, he has a degree in English from the College of Charleston and an MFA in fiction writing from Purdue University. He currently lives with his family in the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, where he is the publisher of Haywire Books. When he's not writing or editing, you'll probably find him lifting weights in his garage, playing "swing monster" with his kids, or rafting on a river. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tanya Coke is a lawyer, writer, and philanthropy executive at the Ford Foundation. She speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about “Brother Love,” her essay from Issue 19 of The Common magazine. Coke discusses both the beautiful and the difficult parts of writing about her own family, the process of being a writer and an artist, and what it means to helm the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Race & Ethnic Justice division. Tanya Coke is director of the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team, focusing on issues of mass incarceration, harsh treatment of immigrants, and gender and reproductive justice. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and USA Today. She is currently working on a graphic novel about race and suburban motherhood. Read “Brother Love” by Tanya Coke at thecommononline.org/brother-love. Find out more about Tanya Coke’s work with the Ford Foundation here. Follow her on Twitter @TanyaCoke. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“These violent delights have violent ends. And in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss, consume.” These Violent Delights (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2020) is the debut novel by Chloe Gong. At first glance, the book seems like Romeo and Juliet transplanted to 1920s Shanghai: two rival families, and two main characters: Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov. But Chloe Gong takes the tropes of Romeo and Juliet and transforms them in ways beyond the new setting: Juliette and Roma have already had their teenage relationship, an epidemic of madness stalks the population of Shanghai, and there are rumors of a monster in the Huangpu River. These Violent Delights is a thrilling tale of intrigue and investigation, woven with horror and fantasy elements. More information can be found at Chloe’s website. In this interview, Chloe and I talk about her book, and how its elements connect to the setting of 1920s Shanghai. We talk about the various ways she works in the tropes of Romeo and Juliet into the story, and some of the unintended parallels to the present day! Chloe Gong is a student at the University of Pennsylvania, studying English and international relations. During her breaks, she’s either at home in New Zealand or visiting her many relatives in Shanghai. Chloe has been known to mysteriously appear when “Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s best plays and doesn’t deserve its slander in pop culture” is chanted into a mirror three times. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of These Violent Delights. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Alexs Thompson about his new memoir, I'll Go: War, Religion, and Coming Home, from Cairo to Kansas City (2020). Let me begin with a moment of honesty. When I first heard about Thompson's memoir, I was skeptical that it was true. The experiences about which Thompson writes seem too remarkable, such as setting out to Egypt right after the 9/11 attacks in America with only a backpack and without a plan to study Arabic among fundamentalist Muslims, even though Thompson didn't know Arabic and isn't a Muslim, to working with combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to briefing major intelligence agencies and working with top military officials such as General Petraeus. His life experience seemed more vast and more varied than a person could fit in multiple lives, let alone one. Did I mentioned that Thompson also earned his PhD in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago while many of these events unfolded? And yet I found out: it's true; he's true; and he's here with us today to share some of his remarkable story. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau's Memory’s Eyes is a contemporary New York Oedipus novel. It is written for readers who enjoy playing with concepts and storylines, here namely the classical Oedipus myth, Sophocles’ three Theban plays, the psychoanalytical concept of the Oedipus complex, and its pop-cultural adaptations in cartoons and jokes. Tragic and funny, playful, but also challenging, readers will find themselves simultaneously knowing and not knowing, anticipating and surprised by how the truth slowly emerges. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com and his website address is https://www.drphiliplance.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Everywhere young Russian noblewoman Darya Sheremeteva turns, someone in her circle of family and friends reminds her that she exists to serve a single purpose: to marry a powerful man selected by her male relatives and bear children, preferably sons, to continue his line. But after years in isolation nursing her elderly father, Darya questions whether marriage and motherhood constitute the best, never mind the only, future for a woman of twenty-five. Should she not instead take monastic vows and surrender her will to the soaring ritual of the Orthodox Church? When a cousin lays claim to her father's estate, Darya's decision acquires a new urgency. Because this cousin will stop at nothing to advance his career, and his most valuable asset is Darya herself. Years ago, C. P. Lesley decided to focus on sixteenth-century Russia. After all, they say, “write what you know,” and as a historian with a Stanford doctorate, that’s what she knew. It was also a time and place filled with exciting and dramatic events, some of which defy belief. The result was a mystery story set in 1530s Moscow about a young couple resolving a series of crimes by combining clues they pick up in the gender-segregated worlds of husbands and wives. Although she didn’t complete that novel, the original idea gave rise to The Golden Lynx, which became the basis of a series called Legends of the Five Directions and led to her becoming the host of New Books in Historical Fiction here on the New Books Network. After almost a decade spent creating an entire world of characters, she couldn’t bear to let them go, and the result is Songs of Steppe & Forest, a less tightly linked set of books that exist in the same story space five to ten years later and feature characters who, for one reason or another, took a back seat in the Legends novels. Songs of Steppe and Forest will answer the question, “What made Ivan the Terrible so terrible?”. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, C.P. Lesley edits other people's manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet. That love of ballet also finds expression in her Tarkei Chronicles series, "Desert Flower" and "Kingdom of the Shades." I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Translator Elisabeth Jaquette speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about four stories she translated from Arabic for Issue 19 of The Common magazine. These stories appear in a special portfolio of fiction from established and emerging Sudanese writers. In this conversation, Jaquette talks about the delights and difficulties of translating from Arabic, as well as her thoughts on form, style, and satire in literature from the Arab world. She also discusses translating Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, which is currently a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). Her work has been shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and TA First Translation Prize, longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and several English PEN Translates Awards. Jaquette has taught translation at Bread Loaf Translators' Conference, among other places, and was a judge for the 2019 National Book Award in Translated Literature. She has an MA from Columbia University, a BA from Swarthmore College, and was a CASA Fellow at the American University in Cairo. She is also a member of the translators' collective Cedilla & Co. Read “The Creator” and other stories translated by Elisabeth Jaquette at thecommononline.org/tag/elisabeth-jaquette. Find out more about Elisabeth Jaquette at elisabethjaquette.com. Read her introduction to Words Without Borders’ Arabic young adult literature feature here. Learn more about the American Literary Translators Association: ALTA's Crowdcast page: online programming from the ALTA43 conference, some free ALTA's Emerging Translator Mentorship Program The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The first chapter of Rebecca Roanhorse’s new novel, Black Sun (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020), features a mother and child sharing a tender moment that takes an unexpected turn, ending in violence. It’s a powerful beginning to a story whose characters struggle with the legacies of family expectations, historical trauma, and myth. These three strands are most powerfully manifest in Serapio, the child in the opening scene, who is raised to fulfill a legacy on the day of the convergence, a solar eclipse on the winter solstice. His sole purpose is to avenge a massacre of his mother’s clan, drawing upon magic to carry out the mission. And yet he has never lived among his mother’s clan, nor was he alive when the massacre occurred, raising complex questions about duty, history, and how individuals find meaning in their lives. “Serapio has always been on the outside,” Roanhorse says. “He feels like he has a purpose, a destiny tied up with something pretty dark, that he's doing on behalf of people that don't even know he exists.” Roanhorse explores “what that feels like and what your obligations are even to the point of putting aside your own needs to try to fulfill something that in the long run may not be the best thing for you, but you’ve been set on that path by others. How do you break free of that, if you can, and if you should? I think those are the sort of questions I'm trying to raise that I hope readers struggle with and think about.” Set in a fictional Mesoamerica and inspired by American indigenous and Polynesian cultures, Black Sun is the first book in a planned trilogy. Roanhorse appeared on New Books in Science Fiction in 2018 to talk about Trail of Lightning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When Mike Anthony moved to New York City to become an actor, he’d imagined being under the bright lights of Broadway, living a life full of fame and fortune. Instead, he took a job not on stage for a Broadway show, but behind its bar, and found a life full of meaning. In Life at Hamilton: Sometimes You Throw Away Your Shot, Only to Find Your Story (Waterside, 2020), Mike takes us along on his journey, recounting his extraordinary experiences as Hamilton rocketed into Broadway history, from its unparalleled opening night, through the 2016 election, to its COVID-19 intermission. On display along the way are Mike’s heartfelt and often humorous encounters with the show’s patrons, including some of the most famous celebrities in the world, and its biggest (and littlest) Hamilfans. Mike’s story is a testament to the potent power of theater to connect, to inspire, and to heal. For as long as there have been people, they have put on plays. Life At Hamilton reminds us why. Alexandra Salkin is currently a student at University of California, Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Katherine recalls being young and friendless. While growing up in the 40’ and 50’s, she remembers when her mother packed up and left, her father remarried, and she was left to focus on her studies – she was an exceptional mathematician. But she’d been wrong about her family – she later learned that the woman who gave birth to her had been murdered by the Nazis during WWII. In graduate school pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, Katherine gets involved with her brilliant teacher and travels to Germany for a year of research and introspection. She follows a few clues about her mother, most with dead ends, and discovers snippets of the truth. Nothing is as it seems, and she is nearly derailed time and again. The Tenth Muse (HarperCollins, 2019) is an engrossing tale about identity and the passion for knowledge. Catherine Chung earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago and an MFA at Cornell University. She has worked at a think tank and has gotten encouragement from a number of foundations and family members. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. she was a Granta New Voice and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. Chung has published work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta. She lives in New York City. Before the pandemic, she loved traveling, skiing, hiking, and eating foods prepared by other people. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

New Books in Performing Arts own Andy Boyd has written a new play about a young experimental playwright named Andy Boyd who pitches Georges Lucas his screenplay for a new Star Wars film. The concept: a prequel to the prequels that fleshes out the economic and social implications of the mysterious Trade Federation. Andy’s script is a full on Marxist allegory where The Trade Federation is The International Monetary Fund, the Gungans are the Zapatistas, and the Jedi are an international community reluctant to push for any real structural change- the UN, basically. Lucas thinks the movie sounds really boring and unceremoniously kicks Andy out of his office. Then things really get weird. Andy Boyd joins host Toney Brown, as he discusses his life and relationship to the Star Wars Franchise, Marxism, Socialism, Globalization, US Imperialism and the future of leftism in American Theater. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. You can buy his brand new play The Trade Federation, Or, Let’s Explore Globalization Through the Star Wars Prequels through NoPassport Press for only $8. “Worth every penny!”- Toney Brown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 2013, poet Lauren Russell acquired a copy of the diary of her great-great-grandfather, Robert Wallace Hubert, a Captain in the Confederate Army. After his return from the Civil War, he fathered twenty children by three of his former slaves. One of those children was the poet’s great-grandmother. Through several years of research, Russell would seek the words to fill the diary’s omissions and to imagine the voice of her great-great-grandmother, Peggy Hubert, a black woman silenced by history. The result is a hybrid work of verse, prose, images and documents that traversed centuries as the past bleeds into the present. Lauren Russell is the author of Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020) and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and work has appeared in various publications, including the The New York Times Magazine and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. She was assistant director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh from 2016 to 2020. In August 2020, she joined the faculty of Michigan State University as an assistant professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities and director of the RCAH Center for Poetry. Philip Lance, Ph.D. is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Los Angeles. He can be reached at PhilipJLance@gmail.com and his website address is https://www.drphiliplance.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Ilona Andrews about her book Emerald Blaze: A Hidden Legacy Novel (Avon Books, 2020). Catalina Baylor is the titular Prime of House Baylor, where she and her crew, including her dangerous cousin Leon, engage in detective work. She’s also secretly the Deputy to the Texas Warden, charged with keeping the potent serum that creates magical powers out of the hands of evildoers. She’s just picked up the pieces of her broken heart and set her mind to keeping her extended family safe, when a new challenge disrupts her life. Four of Houston’s most powerful houses have a business deal with a nasty old codger by the name of Lander Morton. The focus of it is the swampy Pit, which is full of magical hazmat. Once it’s cleaned up, there’s a fortune to be made in real estate development. When Lander Morton’s son is tortured and killed onsite of the Pit, Morton is convinced one of the other Houses is behind it. In addition to hiring Catalina to conduct the investigation, he also hires a suave Italian assassin to kill whoever Catalina identifies as the preparator. The problem—the assassin is Alessandro, Catalina’s ex, who walked out on her without warning and left her bereft. Now Alessandro claims he took the job with Morton in order to protect her. But can she believe him? An entertaining and fun read with romantic sizzle. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Art Is Everything (TriQuarterly Books, 2021), L.A. native Amanda Ruiz is a successful Chicana performance artist who is madly in love with her girlfriend, Xochitl. Amanda is about to enjoy a residency at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and plans to film a groundbreaking documentary in Mexico. Then Xochitl’s biological clock begins beeping, Amanda’s father dies, and Amanda is assaulted during an Uber ride. Her life and art are upended and she’s not sure how to get back on track. Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat posts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything is about a woman who has to grapple with being derailed. After earning her J.D. at Stanford Law School, Yxta Maya Murray clerked for two judges and then joined the Loyola Law School faculty in 1995. Recipient of an Art Writer’s Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation, she published a one-act play about the Christine Blasey Ford hearings, titled Advice and Consent (LARB Books 2019) and was named a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in Fiction. Her scholarly work focuses on Community Constitutionalism, Criminal Law, Property Law, Gender Justice, and Law and Literature. Professor Murray has published in a number of law journals, where her most recent work concerns FEMA’s failures in Puerto Rico. As a novelist and art critic, she has published six books and won a 1999 Whiting Writer’s Award. Her seventh novel, Art Is Everything, is being published by TriQuarterly Books. When she is not teaching, reading, or writing, Murray enjoys running, photography, painting, and eating. I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The world created by Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice has established a place for itself in contemporary culture that few other novels can match, yet amid the countless spinoffs, some stand out. Molly Greeley seems to have a special gift for creating novels that, although based on Austen’s creations, take on a life of their own. In 2019’s The Clergyman’s Wife, Greeley imagined how the marriage between Charlotte Lucas, the friend of Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and Mr. Collins, Austen’s risible antagonist, might have worked out after three years. The Heiress: The Revelations of Anne de Bourgh (William Morrow, 2020) takes up the story of a character who in the original Pride and Prejudice exists mostly as an example of the kind of young woman that novel’s hero, Mr. Darcy, should prefer to Elizabeth, if only in the opinion of Anne’s formidable mother, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Now, to anyone familiar with Lady Catherine, the thought of being her daughter is itself enough to cause shudders of alarm, but on the surface, Anne has a privileged life, including the right—rare for a woman in eighteenth-century Europe—to inherit her father’s estate. In this, she occupies the opposite position from Charlotte Lucas, who married Mr. Collins solely to avoid becoming an elderly, unwanted spinster living in genteel poverty. But all is not well in Anne’s world, either. A fractious although healthy baby, she undergoes “treatment” for what we assume is colic that leaves her addicted to laudanum, an opiate. Her father wants to wean Anne of the drug, but her mother insists on following the advice of the local quack even as Anne becomes more listless and emaciated. A governess sparks Anne’s interest in poetry and mathematics, but it’s only when Anne herself awakens to the dangers of laudanum and decides to rid herself of her addiction at all costs that she begins to grow into her inheritance. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Writer Omer Friedlander speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Operation Tamar,” which appears in Issue 19 of The Common magazine. “Operation Tamar” is set in Israel, where Friedlander grew up. In this conversation, Friedlander talks about the setting and inspiration for this story and others, and the editing and revision that went into “Operation Tamar” before publication. He also discusses his current projects, a novel and a short story collection recently sold to Random House for publication. Omer Friedlander grew up in Tel-Aviv. His short story collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, and his novel, The Glass Golem, are both forthcoming from Random House. He has a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MFA from Boston University, where he was supported by the Saul Bellow Fellowship. He is a Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University. His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Work-Study Scholarship, Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and others. Read “Operation Tamar” by Omer Friedlander at thecommononline.org/operation-tamar. Find out more about Omer Friedlander at omerfriedlander.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

There is something quintessentially American about the idea of the west. Though the time of western expansion has long since passed, stories about cowboys on horses and pioneers panning for gold resonate with us to this day, living on in our books, our movies, and our in cultural imaginations. Through these stories, the west has come to represent values like stoicism, self-reliance, and rugged individualism. For many who call it home, the west also represents a heritage, a tradition, and a way of life. But how many of these collective conceptions of the west are actually true? In her stunning debut essay collection, Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), author Bethany Maile reaches into the depths of her childhood on the prairies of Eagle, Idaho to determine where the many myths about the American west begin and end. To help answer these questions, Maile goes on expeditions to an Idaho rodeo pageant, a Lady Antebellum concert, a livestock auction house, a gun range, and more. All the while, Maile attempts to reconcile her western sense of self, with what she knows to be true: that when we tell ourselves the same stories over and over again, without evolution, a piece of them—and of us—begins to die. Today on New Books in Literature, please join us as we sit down with Bethany Maile to learn more about Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis, available now from the University of Nebraska Press (2020). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies and teaches creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Elizabeth McCulloch was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lived in New England, the Midwest, Canada, and the South, before putting down roots in Gainesville, Florida, almost forty years ago. Previously a lawyer, then a teacher, she has had children of various stripes: one born, two foster, one step, and the granddaughter she is now raising with her husband. Elizabeth has always loved to read and always wanted to write. She began seriously pursuing her dream over 30 years ago, with pauses in the pursuit for various events and catastrophes. She has completed three novels and is working on a fourth. At her blog, The Feminist Grandma, she writes illustrated personal essays about family, friends, aging, social justice issues, and whatever takes her fancy. At Big Books from Small Presses, she posts illustrated reviews and other essays about books. Both blogs are at her website, elizabethmccullochauthor.com. When Elizabeth isn’t reading or writing, she sings at a nursing home, swims, gardens, dances, cooks, and has mastered baking pie crusts. In Dreaming the Marsh (Twisted Road, 2019), a giant sinkhole begins swallowing an enormous swath of a marsh-like ecosystem that has been slated for development, along with parts of a highway and a large lake. The citizens of Opakulla, Florida struggle to understand what is happening as the land is sucked under. They’re also perplexed by un-erasable writing that appears on their new town hall. The sinkhole starts wreaking havoc with their lives and nobody knows what to do about it. A lovesick geologist wants to study it, the real estate developers relish its wild beauty, the mayor and members of the town commission want something done to stop it, and the owner of a local café, who speaks with the Ancients, understands it. But she isn’t telling. As host for New Books in Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction. I also adore well-written mysteries. I try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices need more attention. Due to the high number of books currently on my list, I do not consider self-published books. If your upcoming or recently published literary novel or mystery might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020) is a sweeping novel about climate change and how people of the near future start to slow, stop and reverse it. The story opens with a devastating heat wave that kills thousands in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. From there, Kim Stanley Robinson pulls back to show us the world’s reaction, taking readers from the eponymous Ministry for the Future (which advocates for new laws and policies, like carbon quantitative easing) to scientists in Antarctica, where glaciologists pump out water from under glaciers to slow their slide into the ocean. The book’s kaleidoscope of viewpoints goes beyond humans to include animals, inanimate objects and abstract concepts, like caribou, a carbon atom and history. Robinson also uses multiple forms, from traditional first- and third-person narratives and eyewitness accounts, to meeting notes and history lessons, to riddles and dialogues. The effect is epic, conveying both the complexity of the problem and a wake-up call. “I want to make the very strong point that it's never game over,” Robinson says. “It’s never too late to start doing the right things.” And the right things add up. The novel spans 30 year, and over that time, the cumulative efforts of individuals, governments, scientists and even terrorists start to reverse the damage. “Especially for young people, I'm always trying to emphasize that it's not like we were having fun … in the carbon-burn years and now you've got to suffer and live like saints forever. It's actually that we were obese and hurting and stupid. And now you could be smart and stylish and clever and have more fun.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

In The Lonely Letters (Duke UP, 2020), A tells Moth: “Writing about and thinking with joy is what sustains me, daily. It nourishes me. I do not write about joy primarily because I always have it. I write about joy, Black joy, because I want to generate it, I want it to emerge, I want to participate in its constant unfolding.” But alongside joy, A admits to Moth, come loneliness, exclusion, and unfulfilled desire. The Lonely Letters is an epistolary blackqueer critique of the normative world in which Ashon T. Crawley—writing as A—meditates on the interrelation of blackqueer life, sounds of the Black church, theology, mysticism, and love. Throughout his letters, A explores blackness and queerness in the musical and embodied experience of Blackpentecostal spaces and the potential for platonic and erotic connection in a world that conspires against blackqueer life. Both a rigorous study and a performance, The Lonely Letters gestures toward understanding the capacity for what we study to work on us, to transform us, and to change how we inhabit the world. Ashon T. Crawley is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tara Skurtu is an American poet and writer, writing coach, and public speaker. She speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about “Offering,” her poem from Issue 19 of The Common magazine. “Offering,” and many more of Skurtu’s poems, are set in Bucharest, Romania, where the poet has lived for several years. Skurtu discusses the inspiration and process behind the poem, her thoughts on teaching creative writing, and her time studying with poet Louise Glück. This conversation also includes the story behind the International Poetry Circle, an online poetry-reading initiative Skurtu started on Twitter in the early days of the pandemic. Tara Skurtu is a two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Boston University, where she studied with Nobel Laureate Louise Glück and three-term U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Her poems are published internationally and translated into ten languages. She is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game. Before moving to Romania, she was a lecturer in creative writing at Boston University and taught composition to incarcerated students through BU’s Prison Education Program. She is currently based in Bucharest, where she coaches writing clients around the world and is working on her forthcoming poetry collection Faith Farm. Read “Offering” by Tara Skurtu at thecommononline.org/offering. Find out more about Tara Skurtu at taraskurtu.com, or visit her writing coach page at taraskurtu.com/oneonone. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

"Ivy Lin was a thief but you would never know it to look at her” White Ivy (Simon & Schuster: 2020), the debut novel by Susie Yang, is the story of Ivy Lin, a Chinese-American teenager growing up just outside of Boston, where she struggles to achieve the trappings of suburban teenagerhood. Years later, as a 27-year-old teacher haunted by confused feelings about her upbringing, she comes across characters from her past, which spurs a desire — perhaps an obsessive one — to remake her life. “White Ivy” has won rave reviews in publications and book clubs across the United States over the past few months. Before turning to writing, Susie Yang originally launched a tech start-up that taught 20,000 people how to code. She then studied creative writing at Tin House and Sackett Street. She was born in China, came to the United States as a child, and now resides in the UK. You can follow her on Twitter at @susieyyang. In this interview, Susie and I discuss White Ivy’s character and setting in New england. We’ll delve into how Ivy’s Chinese heritage interacts with the story, and how it leads to important observations about wealth and gender. We’ll also discuss the idea of “immigrant fiction”: is it a label that helps or hurts up-and-coming writers? You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of White Ivy. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Seattle journalist Alienor Crespo flies to Spain to apply for citizenship as a descendant of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition, in 1492. She meets a long-lost cousin and begins to discover her family’s history. A strong and self-aware woman, Alienor is also invited into the hidden tunnels of a fantastic library, which for half a century has been preserving medieval Jewish and Muslim scholarly books that were saved from the Inquisition’s fires. The library is called the “Zahara” and is protected by a secret society of caretakers in a hidden fortress. But there is a violently fascist political group trying to restore the pure blood line of Iberia, trying to make Spain great again. And one of Alienor’s cousins is a member. Meanwhile, she has been connecting with her female ancestors in moments of spiritually awakening time travel. Today I talked to Joyce Yarrow about her new book Zahara and the Lost Books of Light (Adelaide Books, 2020). Yarrow began her writing life scribbling poems on the subway and observing human behavior from every walk of life. Her published novels of suspense include Ask the Dead (Martin Brown), Russian Reckoning available in hardcover as The Last Matryoshka (Five Star Mysteries), and Rivers Run Back, co-authored with Arindam Roy (Vitasta, New Delhi). Yarrow is a Pushcart Prize Nominee with short stories and essays that have appeared in Inkwell Journal, Whistling Shade, Descant, Arabesques, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Weber: The Contemporary West. She is a member of Sisters in Crime and has presented workshops on "The Place of Place in Mystery Writing" at conferences in the US and India. A New York native now living in Seattle, Yarrow is a trained musician, a writing tutor at the local community college and a prolific reader. When she is not reading, writing, or teaching, she loves being outdoors in nature, hiking, and canoeing in nearby Lake Washington. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Over the last ten years, Paul Kingsnorth has become recognised as one of the most extraordinary of contemporary writers. After The Wake, which was listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2014, and its follow-up, Beast, Kingsnorth was hailed as "a furiously gifted writer," his prose suggesting "Beckett doing Beowulf." In his outstanding new novel, Alexandria, just published by Graywolf Press in the US and forthcoming in the UK from Faber, Kingsnorth completes his Buccmaster trilogy, conjuring our world one thousand years into its future, in which the last surviving humans come to terms with some very ancient fears - and hopes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Det, Chang and Lek are young university students living in Thailand during the 1970s. It is a turbulent time for the country’s politics: student-led protests in 1973 succeeded in (briefly) overthrowing the country’s military dictatorship. Det, Chang and Lek — three students from very different backgrounds — navigate the country’s changing politics from the streets of Bangkok to the jungles of northern Thailand. This is the premise behind A Good True Thai (Epigram Books: 2020), the debut novel by Sunisa Manning, and a finalist for the Epigram Books Fiction Prize for Southeast Asian writers. In this interview, Sunisa and I discuss the historical setting of her book, and how much her characters represent the dynamics and emotions of Thailand’s student activists. We also discuss the process of writing historical fiction, and some of the parallels one might draw with today’s protest, with reference to Sunisa's recent piece for Nikkei Asia, "Thailand's punctured monarchy". Sunisa Manning was born and raised in Bangkok by Thai and American parents. She went to Brown University and now lives in California. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus and other places. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of A Good True Thai. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

No Entry (Stormbird Press, 2020) is Gila Green’s first young adult Eco-Fiction novel. It is the first in an environmental series focused on elephant poaching and the international trade that leads to their illegal slaughter. Seventeen-year-old Yael Amar is in South Africa, signed up for a summer course in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. A rising senior, she plans to join her parents in Johannesburg, where her father will spend his sabbatical year from a Canadian University. Yael’s parents originally emigrated to Canada from South Africa years before and have returned while mourning the tragic death of Yael’s brother. Yael, also in mourning, but busy learning everything from medic training to driving on the left side of the road, uncovers a deadly elephant poaching ring. After witnessing some horrible violence, she just isn’t sure what to do about it. In addition to No Entry, Canadian author Gila Green is the author of three novels: King of the Class (Non-Publishing 2013), Passport Control (S&H Publishing, 2018), and White Zion (Cervena Barva Press, 2019). Her short fiction appears in dozens of literary magazines in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, Israel, Ireland, and Hong Kong including: The Fiddlehead , Terrain.org, Akashic Books, Sephardic Horizons, Jewish Literary Journal, Fiction Magazine, The Saranac Review, Arc Magazine, Many Mountains Moving, Noir Nation, Quality Women's Fiction, The Dalhousie Review, The Bookends Review, and Boston Literary Review. Green’s work has been short-listed for the Doris Bakwin Literary Award (Carolina Wren Press), WordSmitten's TenTen Fiction Contest, the Walrus Literary Award, and the Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Award. She also wrote the introduction to Doikayt, an anthology of short tabletop roleplaying (November 2020). When She’s not teaching or writing, Green is busy raising five children, cooking, and baking her own bread. She loves music, daily walks through the Judean Hills by her home, hiking, pilates, and really good coffee. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Writer David Moloney speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Counsel,” which appears in Issue 19 of The Common magazine. “Counsel” is an excerpt from Moloney’s novel-in-stories, Barker House, set in a correctional facility in New Hampshire. The book follows nine correctional officers over the course of one year on the job. Moloney discusses his own experiences as a correctional officer in a New Hampshire facility, and the work of turning those complex experiences into stories for the novel. Barker House was published by Bloomsbury in April 2020, so this conversation also includes discussion of what it’s like to publish during a pandemic. David Moloney worked in the Hillsborough County Department of Corrections in New Hampshire, from 2007 to 2011. He received a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he now teaches. Read “Counsel” by David Moloney at thecommononline.org/counsel. Find out more about David Moloney at davidrmoloney.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talented siblings who grew to adulthood: Anne, author of the novel Agnes Grey, and the only male heir, Branwell—whose early promise evaporated in a haze of alcohol and opiates. Still, it seems likely that Branwell’s affair with his employer—Lydia Robinson, a wealthy, married woman eighteen years older than he—has received far less attention. This affair, the exact parameters of which have not been determined, is the subject of Finola Austin’s lovely debut novel, Brontë’s Mistress (Atria Books, 2020). Although advantaged in many ways, Lydia has many reasons for complaint when we meet her. Her mother has just died, and her father suffers from senility. At forty-three, she fears the effects of approaching middle age on her beauty and her ability to bear children, the things that have defined and given value to her life. She worries about her daughters’ futures while fending off the encroachments of her mother-in-law. She still mourns the unexpected death of her fifth child, two years before the novel begins. And the loss of that youngest daughter has irreparably damaged Lydia’s long and once-satisfying relationship with her husband, Edmund, who neither offers comfort to nor accepts overtures from her. So when the Robinsons’ governess, Anne Brontë, recommends her brother, Branwell, for the position of tutor to Lydia’s only son, it is perhaps not surprising that Lydia’s initial attempts to keep a proper distance soon evaporate in the face of the attraction she feels for this Byronic young man who pays her compliments, shares his poetry and his art, and listens to her woes. As Finola Austin notes in our interview, Branwell “sees” Lydia, and the consequences of that instinctive emotional connection drive the action of this psychologically sophisticated and always engrossing novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this"relentlessly gripping, brilliant" epic fantasy series from a breakout author (James Islington). Tau and his Queen, desperate to delay the impending attack on the capital by the indigenous people of Xidda, craft a dangerous plan. If Tau succeeds, the Queen will have the time she needs to assemble her forces and launch an all out assault on her own capital city, where her sister is being propped up as the 'true' Queen of the Omehi. If the city can be taken, if Tsiora can reclaim her throne, and if she can reunite her people then the Omehi have a chance to survive the onslaught. Listen in as I talked to Evan Winter, the author of The Fires of Vengeance (Orbit, 2020). Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Roy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) is a stunning debut collection of poetry that immerses the reader in rich, vibrant language. Described as being “part immigration narrative, part elegy, and part queer coming-of-age story,” this powerful collection blends pop culture, humor, with Guzmán’s cultural experience to explore life, death, and borders both real and imaginary. “This isn’t supposed to be a history book, and yet it is,” says Guzmán in discussing Catrachos. It’s not supposed to be anthropology, sociology, or a testimonial either, and yet it is. “Those are the contradictions, especially when you’re a marginalized writer, your words are always operating on so many different frequencies at once.” “It is not a fallacy that the pulpería owner who wakes up dressed in a tunic of warriors’ pelos, or the milkman pressing his rough hands against the cow’s tectonic body, remembers the skirted boy with an ovarian lipstick for a tongue, the boy who offered a tenth of his knees to the teeth of a country with dentures.” — from “Finding Logic in a Crushed Head” Roy G. Guzmán received a 2019 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship. Raised in Miami, Florida, Guzmán currently lives in Minneapolis. Catrachos is their first book of poetry, published by Graywolf Press in May 2020. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Maverick (Broken Arrow Books, 2020), author Jennifer Valenti plugs into the current zeitgeist of young women who struggle to defy the casual sexism of men in power. Jane Valiante is elated when the hottest tech company in the world offers to fly her from Florida to New York for the job of her dreams. After a long day of interviews, Jane feels insecure about her chances, but then she receives an invitation to the holiday party from the CEO and Founder, Peter Wright. She happily accepts, and has a lovely, if perhaps overly boozy time. Unfortunately, Peter ends up in her hotel room, where he overpowers and rapes her. Then he leaves. Although she’s traumatized, she doesn’t let it stop her from accepting a position in Peter’s company. What is it going to take to propel Jane on a journey of self-discovery that will allow her to learn who she is and what she is capable of? Jennifer Valenti was born in New Hampshire, grew up in Florida, hailed from Boston, and is mostly a New Yorker. Moving around meant learning to adapt quickly, which came in handy as a single mother raising two amazing young men (and a dog with separation anxiety.) For every failure, she enjoyed equal success with careers in film and television, technology, and consulting, the latter two of which were against much of her will. She earned a BA and MBA, and is currently a senior executive in business consulting. When Jennifer is not working, writing, cooking, or baking, she is an avid world traveler, and has so far visited 110 countries. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“It turns out there are things that cannot be left. The very nature of secrets, for instance, insists that they be kept.” On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews Dr. Rachel Hall (s) about her collection of stories about a Jewish family crossing worlds amidst wars. Heirlooms (BkMk Press, 2016) begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1939, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generations of a Jewish family. Inspired by the author's family stories as well as extensive research, Heirlooms explores assumptions about love, duty, memory and truth. Montaigne Medal Finalist and Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Marge Piercy. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Mary Cappello about her new book, Lecture (Transit Books, 2020). Although I almost hesitate to call it a book. It’s much more—like all great lectures are—a performance, one full of erudition and insight, humor and humanity, profound diversions and wry musings, one asking for your most acute attention and simultaneously inviting you to drift and dream. It’s like a lecture in that it resists summing up and instead leaves you throwing up your hands and saying, “You had to be there.” Fortunately, because it is a book, you can be there. And fortunately for us, the incomparable Mary Cappello is here right now. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lot Six (Harper 2020) is a moving and hilarious memoir from playwright David Adjmi. The book traces Adjmi’s search for his identity, during which he becomes an observant yeshiva student, a club kid, a fashionista, a film nerd, a teenage Nietzschean, and finally a playwright. It is a memoir about feeling like the world is against you, yet simultaneously yearning to fit in. Adjmi’s memoir also traces his evolving relationship with his family and his community, from whom he desires to escape even as he finds himself drawn continually back to them. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary (University of Iowa Press, 2020) divulges the clandestine inner workings of the seminary, providing an intimate and unapologetic look into the psychosexual and spiritual dynamics of celibacy and lays bare the “formation” system that perpetuates the cycle of abuse and cover-up that continues today. Under the guidance of a charismatic college campus minister, Rastrelli sought to reconcile his homosexuality and childhood sexual abuse. When he felt called to the priesthood, Rastrelli began the process of “priestly discernment.” Priests welcomed him into a confusing clerical culture where public displays of piety, celibacy, and homophobia masked a closeted underworld in which elder priests preyed upon young recruits. From there he ventured deeper into the seminary system seeking healing, hoping to help others, and striving not to live a double life. Trained to treat sexuality like an addiction, he and his brother seminarians lived in a world of cliques, competition, self-loathing, alcohol, hidden crushes, and closeted sex. Ultimately, the “formation” intended to make Rastrelli a compliant priest helped to liberate him. Tom Rastrelli is director of digital communications at Willamette University. He lives in Salem, Oregon. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com. Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chronicled the New York Knicks’ early-70s title teams). It’s a book about friendship, aging and of course, basketball. Harvey Araton is one of New York's--and the nation's--best-known sports journalists, having covered thousands of Knicks games over the course of a long and distinguished career. But the person at the heart of Our Last Season, Michelle Musler, is largely anonymous--except, that is, to the players, coaches, and writers who have passed through Madison Square Garden, where she held season tickets behind the Knicks bench for 45 years. In that time, as she juggled a successful career as a corporate executive and single parenthood of five children, she missed only a handful of home games. The Garden was her second home--and the place where an extraordinary friendship between fan and sportswriter was forged. That relationship soon grew into something much bigger than basketball, with Michelle serving as a cherished mentor and friend to Harvey as he weathered life's inevitable storms: illness, aging, and professional challenges and transitions. During the 2017-18 NBA season, as Michelle faces serious illness that prevents her from attending more than a few Knicks games, Harvey finally has the chance to give back to Michelle everything she has given him: reminders of all she's accomplished, the blessings she's enjoyed, and the devoted friend she has been to him. Paul Knepper was born and raised in New York and currently resides in Austin. His first book, The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers Who Almost Won It All, is available on Amazon and other sites. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her family, and research her great-great grandfather with hopes of creating a family history. But Sharifa’s cousins, with whom she was once close, are at odds. Fatema is involved in a campaign to ban the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) while Zainab sees it as a time-honored tradition that must be respected. Sharifa thinks it’s a cruel and harmful injustice, but isn’t at all sure it is still practiced in the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect they all belong to – and if it is, she wonders who is insisting on such an outdated practice? Today I talked to writer, activist, and psychotherapist Farzana Doctor, author of Seven (Dundurn Press, 2020). She was born in Zambia to Indian parents, lived there for five years and then in 1971, immigrated with her family to Canada. As a teenager, Doctor because interested in community organizing around issues of gender violence, gender rights, and environmental protection. She currently volunteers with WeSpeakOut, a global group that is working to ban female genital cutting in her Dawoodi Bohra community. Her first novel was Stealing Nasreen 2007, and her second, Six Metres of Pavement 2012, won a Lambda Literary Award and was short-listed for the 2012 Toronto Book Award. Her third novel, All Inclusive, was a Kobo 2015 and National Post Best Book of the Year. Named one of CBC Books’ “100 Writers in Canada You Need To Know Now,” she has also recently published a poetry collection. In her spare time, Farzana Doctor poses Maggie, her dog, with books she loves under the hashtag #MaggieWithBooks. And in previous times, she loved going to restaurants and travelling. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (Redhook, 2020) begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairytale. Yes, there are witches. But there are also suffragists. Yes, there are spells. But there are also women who fall in love with each other. While Harrow loves fairytales “because they give us this shared language,” she hates them for the limits they impose. Through her main characters, the Eastwood sisters, she turns the familiar archetypes of Maiden, Mother, and Crone on their heads. “The Maiden-Mother-Crone triptych is something that I have always hated. It's pretty gross to define a woman's existence by her reproductive state at that moment,” Harrow says. “I wanted to be embodying and subverting it at the same time.” As the story unfolds, women’s demands to rediscover and use magic parallel their demands for political power and social freedom. In the guise of a fairytale, The Once and Future Witches explores the long afterlife of family trauma, the evils of demagoguery, and the blind spots of the American suffragists when it came to overcoming divisions of race and class. Harrow’s debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist for the 2020 Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. The Once and Future Witches is her second novel. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter : The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear: disaster stories, finishing a book project, poetry, and what resilience is and isn’t. Our guest is: Jennifer Strube, a writer, educator, and licensed therapist who loves chronicling life's stories. After three master's degrees and a decade of teaching, she relocated west from New York City in search of open sky. An avid believer in the wild places, her work highlights the spaces that wake one up—the byroads of travel, the subtlety of everyday grace, and that impetuous ache called love. She is the author of the poetry book Wild Everything, discussed in this episode. Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender. She specializes in decoding diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. She credits her ability to read nearly-illegible things to a childhood spent trying read her dad’s handwriting. She reinterprets traditional narratives through her blogs, podcasts, essays, photography, and poetry. She met Jen at a community supper c.2014 and they’ve been friends ever since. Their county has faced three disasters—the Thomas Fire, a deadly debris flow, and the Covid-19 outbreak—in the last three years. Somehow, Jen and Christina are both still here. Christina supports her resilience by taking photos in nature, which you can find here. Listeners to this episode might be interested in:

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

The Blessing of a B-Minus by Dr. Wendy Mogel

Why I Wake Early by Mary Oliver

Wild Everything by Jennifer Strube

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Californian Claire Easton, who writes a magazine column called “The Anglophile’s Notebook,” travels to England to do research for a book about Charlotte Brontë. She’s already in love with England, where her late mother grew up and where she plans to find some healing now that her marriage of twenty years is imploding. Claire is specifically interested in Charlotte Bronte, but she wants to read up on the people who are obsessed with the world’s most famous literary family, the Brontës. The three precocious Bronte sisters and their alcoholic brother lived in a chilly parsonage surrounded by a cemetery and the mysterious Yorkshire moors, and the novels they wrote between 1844-49 changed the course of English literature. Clair, while connecting with people who can help her research, manages to solve some mysterious goings on, connect her new friends to each other, rebuild her life, and fall in love with the man who might publish her as yet unwritten book. Today I talked to author Sunday Taylor about The Anglophile's Notebook (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Taylor grew up in Pennsylvania and Connecticut and attended Bates College in Maine. A graduate of the Master of Arts program in English Literature at UCLA, she spent the last four decades in California and currently lives in Los Angeles. Taylor is married with two grown daughters and two granddaughters. She journeys to England every year and identifies as an Anglophile. This is her first novel. When not reading or writing, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, grows old English Roses in her Los Angeles garden, and is currently searching for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe for her granddaughters. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Terry Baum’s book One Dyke’s Theater: Selected Plays 1975-2014 (Exit Press, 2019) collects plays and solo scripts from throughout the career of a “slightly world-renowned lesbian playwright.” The plays range from outlandish comedies like Bride of Lesbostein to the historical drama Hick: A Love Story. This book will be of interest to anyone interested in the history of queer theatre, solo performance, and feminism. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Home is the place many of us have spent our days for the last eight months. During the pandemic, our homes have become our workplaces, our classrooms, and our social spaces through apps like Zoom. But no matter what we do in our homes, for many of us, the notion of a home is fixed, tied just as much to a specific place as it is to our identities—both how we understand who we are, and the ways we communicate that self to the world. Whether our country, our region, or our city, when asked where we come from, most of us will respond with a definitive answer: This is the place I call my home. But for some, the concept of home is anything but stable, or fixed. For author Megan Harlan, a nomadic family lifestyle led her to live in seventeen homes across four continents by the time she was seventeen years old. In Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, Harlan recounts her experiences living in some of the world’s most historically rich, remote places, and how these many homes afforded her an appreciation and a keen eye for architecture, anthropology, history, literature, the natural world, and so much more. In this meticulously researched debut collection, Harlan explores questions about how we become ourselves through fascinating stories of the many places she has called home. Today on New Books in Literature, please welcome Megan Harlan for a conversation about her new book, Mobile Home, available now from the University of Georgia Press (2020). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A rich and complex world of sword-wielding fighters and seductive sorceresses, written in percussive, lyrical prose. The 19th Bladesman (Dark Blade, 2018) first introduces us to Kaell, the eponymous hero of the novel, when he runs away from the mountain castle where Lord Vraymorg tutors him in swordcraft. We learn the eight-year old Kaell is bonded to the battle god Khir and has been blessed with exceptional strength. In a pattern that’s often to be repeated, Kaell’s defiance of Vraymorg after a verbal tussle propels him into an unsanctioned adventure—and exposure to danger. For Kaell is a target of those who know of the prophecy of the 19th Bladesman. It is said that if he breaks, disaster will strike the lands. Vraymorg is soon informed of this prophecy as well, by a beautiful queen who then beds him, but though he appears stern with Kaell, he loves the boy like his own son. Vraymorg hopes to protects him—well, as much as a child sworn to serve a battle god can ever be protected. As the tale winds on, introducing us to Island priestesses, dead warriors called Nightriders and naturally, a deliciously sadistic usurper king who delights in torture, Kaell amasses more and more enemies, and some unlikely friends. In a testament to his endearing qualities, even the noble who tries to kill him eventually becomes an ally. But those who are loyal to Kaell will be tested when he faces the biggest challenge of them all—being taken captive by an ancient, seductive, and cunning God who is as deadly as he is beautiful. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Botticelli Caper (Wings ePress, 2019) is set at the Uffizi Galleries during a period, not long ago, when workmen were constantly coming in and out during massive amounts of reconstruction. Flora, an art conservator, is working to clean Sondro Botticelli’s world-famous Birth of Venus. She realizes that there are no notes from the previous cleaning and begins to get suspicious as she removes the frame and looks at the paint’s sheen. Then she sees a smiley-face. She’d seen it before in a forgery of another famous painting. In this light-hearted caper, Wisseman asks how some very skilled painter could make a nearly perfect copy of one of the world’s great paintings. But, how would the original have been removed from the museum with guards all around, night and day? Now a few more forgeries are discovered along with two bodies. Against the advice of all, Flora continues to meander through the beautiful old building, wondering where the original copies might be stored. What about all the doors, the unused corridors, the bridge and tunnel that lead to other palaces? Sadly, the real-life incidents of art forgery and theft have sometimes been even stranger, but there was no Flora Garibaldi to solve those crimes. Retired archaeologist Sarah Wisseman (aka Sally Underhill) completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph. D in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. During her years working as an Archaeological scientist at the University of Illinois, she wrote non-fiction books and numerous articles on mummies, Greek vases, and archaeological science. Nowadays, Sarah splits her time between writing and painting. Starting in 2004, when she was a finalist for Best First Traditional Mystery Novel in the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic Contest, she has based her fiction on thirty years of working in academia, museums, and on excavations in Italy, Israel, and the U.S. She writes two series, the Lisa Donahue Archaeological Mysteries (set in Boston and the Middle East) and the Flora Garibaldi Art Conservation Mysteries (set in Italy). Her paintings include mixed media landscapes, starscapes, and still lifes. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter. Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East--from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine--Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people. Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her. Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much (Catapult, 2020) is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings--for love, and a place to call home. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body (HarperOne, 2020) challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sarah Mullins, an American woman, arrives at the Kingdom: a fading luxury apartment complex in Bangkok. She is there to lay low, after passing over forged collectors’ items in Hong Kong. She meets the other residents of the Kingdom, including the energetic, yet mysterious Mali. This starts an unfolding story set amidst the fictional backdrop of growing protests, as both the Kingdom’s expatriate tenants and the local Thai staff evaluate what will happen next. Novelist Lawrence Osborne tells this story in his new novel The Glass Kingdom (Hogarth, 2020). In this interview, we discuss his novel, the flawed nature of his characters, and how the choice of a Bangkok apartment complex in a fictional period of Thai social unrest has some uncanny similarities to our present day. We also talk about his research process when it comes to writing a new book. Lawrence is a writer and novelist, currently residing in Bangkok, whose works like The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player and Hunters in the Dark were published to rave reviews and featured on numerous “best-of” lists. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, where you can find its review of The Glass Kingdom. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. In his day job, he’s a researcher and writer for a think tank in economic and sustainable development. He is also a print and broadcast commentator on local and regional politics. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

After Henry Sinclair’s supervisor steals his research, he tries to rejuvenate his career by turning his girlfriend into a drug experiment. Astrid is a rising young singer. From her New York City apartment to a rehabilitation facility in Paris and a nudist camp on the Greek island of Antiparos, she struggles between her passion for Henry and her need to make her own decisions. Throughout this non-linear story, Astrid and Henry watch the box set of Sopranos, each affected differently by the ongoing violence and Tony Soprano’s bullying. Ultimately, What You Could Have Won (And Other Stories, 2020) is a novel about resilience and self-discovery in the face of control. Rachel Genn is a senior lecturer at the Manchester Writing School/School of Digital Arts and is currently creating a course on the neuroscience of Reverie. She earned a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Durham, worked some years as a neuroscientist, and completed an MA in Writing at the Sheffield Hallam University, after which she completed her first novel, The Cure<, 2011. In 2016, Genn was a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence, and she has written for Granta, 3AM, and Hotel Magazine. She lives in Sheffield after spending a good deal of her academic career in North America/Canada with a Royal Society Fellowship to the University of British Columbia, where she studied the neuroanatomy and neurochemistry of motivated behaviors. On her return to the UK she worked on the genetic bases of attentional mechanisms at the Institute of Psychiatry of King’s College in London. Genn follows a Sufi path, and her short documentary PING PONG SUFI premiered in 2020 at the Muslim Film Festival in Sydney, Australia. She has two daughters Esther and Ingrid (to whom this novel is dedicated “that they may know their own power”). She enjoys outdoor swimming, hill walking and snowboarding. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The intense interest in the horrors of World War II that has characterized the last few years has tended to overshadow other aspects of the long history of Jewish populations in Europe and the antisemitism that often—although not invariably—complicated that history. Michelle Cameron’s new novel, Beyond the Ghetto Gates (She Writes Press, 2020), explores one little-known episode of that past: the effect of Napoleon’s invasion of 1796–97 on the Italian port city of Ancona. The campaign of French revolutionary troops to conquer the still-disunited land of Italy has unexpected consequences when they free the Jews of Ancona from the ghetto that has confined them at night for as long as Mirelle, the young and mathematically gifted daughter of a local artist who manages a workshop devoted to producing Jewish marriage licenses, can remember. As the troops settle in, liberals who welcome change face off against opponents set on turning back the clock, expressing their fears through brutal attacks. Amid this increasingly chaotic atmosphere, Mirelle faces a choice between what her family wants for her—an arranged marriage to a wealthy Jewish merchant old enough to be her father—and what she wants for herself, a romance with her cousin’s best friend, a handsome French soldier. Meanwhile, Francesca, a devout Catholic, struggles to reconcile the demands of her marriage and her faith when her abusive husband becomes involved in the spiraling conflict. At times disturbingly relevant to the increasing polarization of our time, including the reactivation of white supremacy movements and intensifying fear of the “other,” Beyond the Ghetto Gates is also, as the author herself notes, “a story of hope—a reminder of a time in history when men and women of conflicting faiths were able to reconcile their prejudices in the face of a rapidly changing world.” C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout (Tordotcom, 2020) is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. The story follows three monster hunters: Maryse Boudreaux, who wields a magic sword; Chef, who had previously disguised herself as a man to serve with the Harlem Hellfighters during World War I; and Sadie, a sharpshooter who calls her Winchester rifle Winnie. The monsters are Ku Kluxes—member of the KKK who have transformed into huge, six-eyed, pointy-toothed, flesh-eating demons. The idea to turn hate-filled racists into larger-than-life demons came from Clark’s work as a historian. (In addition to an award-winning writer of speculative fiction, Clark is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.) When reading narratives of formerly enslaved individuals collected by the Federal Writers' Project, he’d been struck by the way they described the KKK. “They often talk about them … wearing simply a pillowcase, sometimes having bells on them, sometimes having horns or tails. And they speak of them as haints, that is as ghosts and spirits,” Clark says. Clark’s two careers—historian and fiction writer—have grown side by side (his first major publication, A Dead Djinn in Cairo, was published the day he defended his PhD.) While he has tried to keep the careers separate (by writing under a pen name), Clark believes they complement each other. Fiction can help restore stories lost to history, he says. “Finding the voices of enslaved people, finding out what they thought is very difficult. There weren't a lot of people going around asking them what they thought during that time. And so what you have to do, for instance, if you're trying to understand an enslaved person, you might read a lot of court records or you might try to read what their owners thought and then you have to speculate and piece together that enslaved person's life.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

A young man visits his half-brother in Vancouver and steals a book that changes his life. An archeology student is befriended and brought to Iraq by a brother and sister who need his help in assessing a family art collection. A man who fought for the British in South Africa’s Boer War enlists as an American to fight in WWI Germany. Spanning decades and continents, the stories in Bechard’s haunting novel A Song from Faraway (Milkweed Editions, 2020) slowly reveal themselves to be connected. In these pages, the lies of one generation are inherited by the next, homes are burnt to the ground, wives are abandoned, and innocent people suffer. With gripping portrayals of fathers and sons, mothers and siblings, passion and pain – this is a moving, non-linear novel about the relationships to family and society upon which all humanity rests. Deni Ellis Bechard is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book); Into the Sun (Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and chosen by CBC/Radio Canada as one of 2017’s Incontournables and one of the most important books of that year to be read by Canada's political leadership); Of Bonobos and Men (Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism and Nautilus Grand Prize winner); Cures for Hunger (an IndieNext pick and one of the best memoirs of 2012 by Amazon.ca); Kuei, my Friend: a Conversation on Racism and Reconciliation, (coauthored with First Nations poet Natasha Kanapé-Fontaine). A traveler by nature, Béchard has a habit of changing homes as often as every three months, and the place he has lived in the longest over the past ten years was a community circus. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When Anne Louise Bannon heard her husband, then archivist for the City of Los Angeles, speak about how early Angelenos dug a large ditch (a zanja) to cull water from the Porciuncula River (now known as the Los Angeles River), her first thought was that the Zanja would be an interesting place to find a dead body. Death of the Zanjero and Death of the City Marshall were the first two in her Old Los Angeles series (both delightful), and now comes Death of the Chinese Field Hands (Healcroft House, 2020). Protagonist Maddie Wilcox is a widowed doctor who owns and manages a ranch and vineyard. When she isn’t supervising her wine production, ranch business, and a sizable staff, Maddie is called upon to treat the injuries and diseases of her neighbors. Solving murders is just a past-time, but luckily, she has a keen eye for details and knows what it means when a boot print with a gaping hole is discovered near the bodies of several Chinese workers. The story is loosely based on the lynching of eighteen Chinese men on October 24, 1871 and reminds us that small-minded bigotry and xenophobia is a shameful part of American history we have yet to overcome. Anne Louise Bannon is an author and journalist who wrote her first novel at age 15. Her journalistic work has appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Wines and Vines, and in newspapers across the country. She was a TV critic for over 10 years, founded the YourFamilyViewer blog, and created the OddBallGrape.com wine education blog with her husband, Michael Holland. She is the co-author of Howdunit: Book of Poisons, with Serita Stevens, and author of the Freddie and Kathy mystery series, set in the 1920s, the Operation Quickline Series, and the Old Los Angeles series, set in the 1870s. Anne and her husband live in Southern California with an assortment of critters. When not reading or writing, she sews, and is currently learning how to make men's pants. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lisa B. Thompson is equally renowned as a scholar of African and African-American studies and as a playwright. Her latest book Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern University Press 2020) collects plays from throughout her two decades as a playwright. "Underground" is a tense two-hander exploring themes of race, class, and masculinity through the story of two friends with very different ideas about how to change the world. Monroe draws on Thompson’s family’s history as part of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to the urban north and west. "The Mamalogues" is the funniest and most personal play in this collection: it is a love letter to unpartnered Black mothers and a spiritual sequel to Thompson’s earlier play "Single Black Female." Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost less than $1,000, she won! But tiny, breathtakingly beautiful Haines—a place accessible from the nearest city, Juneau, only by boat or plane—isn’t the sleepy town that it appears to be: from a bitter debate about the expansion of the fishing boat harbor to the matter of how to stop bears from rifling through garbage on Main Street to the recall campaign that targeted three assembly members, including Lende, we witness the nitty-gritty of passing legislation, the lofty ideals of our republic, and how the polarizing national politics of our era play out in one small town. With an entertaining cast of offbeat but relatable characters, Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics (Algonquin Books, 2020) is an inspirational tale about what living in a community really means, and what we owe one another. Heather Lende has contributed essays and commentary to NPR, the New York Times, and National Geographic Traveler, among other newspapers and magazines, and is a former contributing editor at Woman’s Day. A columnist for the Alaska Dispatch News, she is the obituary writer for the Chilkat Valley News in Haines and the recipient of the Suzan Nightingale McKay Best Columnist Award from the Alaska Press Club. Her previous bestselling books are Find the Good, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, and If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name. Lende was voted Citizen of the Year, Haines Chamber of Commerce, in 2004. Her website is heatherlende.com. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in 19th-century New England. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler also writes poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media—from tales of hope in the South Bronx to the unseen victims of the War on Terror and the first detention camps in the US. Bestselling author Julia Álvarez has called her “one of the most important, respected, and beloved cultural leaders in the Latinx community.” Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America (Atria Books, 2020), Maria shares her intimate experience growing up Mexican American on the South Side of Chicago. She offers a personal and illuminating account of how the rhetoric around immigration has not only long informed American attitudes toward outsiders, but also sanctioned willful negligence and profiteering at the expense of our country’s most vulnerable populations—charging us with the broken system we have today. An urgent call to fellow Americans to open their eyes to the immigration crisis and understand that it affects us all, this honest and heartrending memoir paints a vivid portrait of how we got here and what it means to be a survivor, a feminist, a citizen, and a journalist who owns her voice while striving for the truth. Also available in Spanish as Una vez fui tú. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of migration, urbanization, and social movements in the U.S., and specializes in Latina/o/x politics and social movements. Follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Like a storm waiting to break over a plain, Shakira Croce pulls at tensions and heartstrings in a debut collection filled with longing, wit, and intelligence. Through masterful imagery, Croce floats between the rural and urban with ease, pulling back the veil to see what lies beneath. These poems do not shy away from looking at life in all its beauty, violence, or complexities because within those boundaries we can begin to understand what it means to be human. As she writes in Homecoming, "It’s about finding/the space/to bring out what’s already/inside you." In Leave It Raw (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Croce makes that space and empties out the heart for all to see. Shakira Croce’s poetry translations have appeared in Babel magazine, and her poetry has been featured in several literary magazines and journals, including the New Ohio Review, Pilgrimage Press, HIV Here & Now, Transactions, Ducts, pioneertown, Permafrost Magazine, and Shark Reef. She was a featured reader in the Boundless Tales Reading Series, and she was a finalist in the Linda Flowers Literary Award competition. Croce holds a Bachelor of Arts from Sarah Lawrence College and a Master’s in Public Administration from Pace University. Born in Geneva, New York in 1987, she grew up in Gainesville, Georgia and later studied in Florence, Italy. She currently works in New York City as Assistant Director of Communications and Public Relations at New York’s largest Medicaid Special Needs Health Plan, Amida Care. She lives with her husband, son, and two cats in Brooklyn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find creative ways to stay cool and out of trouble. When they were not doing their chores—handling a colorful cast of customers, scrubbing motel-room toilets, plucking chicken bones and used condoms from under the beds—they played canasta, an old ladies’ game that provided them with a refuge from the sun and helped them avoid their violent, troubled father. Morris was successful at occupying his time with his siblings and the children of families staying in the motel’s kitchenette apartments but was not so successful at keeping clear of his father, a man unable to shake the horrors he had experienced as a child and, later, as a soldier. The preteen would learn as he matured that his father had reserved his most ferocious attacks for him because of an inability to accept a gay or, to his mind, broken, son. It became his dad’s mission to “fix” his son, and Morris’s mission to resist—and survive intact. He was aided in his struggle immeasurably by the love and encouragement of a selfless and generous grandmother, who provides his story with much of its warmth, wisdom, and humor. In Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (UP of Mississippi, 2020), the reader will also find suspense, awkward romance, naughty French lessons, and an insider’s take on a truly remarkable, not-yet-homogenized pocket of American culture. Morris Ardoin earned a bachelor’s in journalism from Louisiana State University and a master’s in communication from the University of Louisiana. A public relations practitioner, his work has appeared in regional, national, and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, Parenthetically Speaking, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Eshkol Novo's The Last Interview was published in Hebrew in 2018 and was at the top of Israel’s bestseller list for 30 weeks. It is currently on the short list for the Lattes Grinzano Prize in Italy and is longlisted for the prestigious Femina Prize in France. In The Last Interview, a famous but stressed Israeli writer finds that the only way he can write is by answering a set of interview questions sent from a website. As he answers the questions, the author slowly lets go of his calculated answers and begins to honestly confront his life, his lies, and his mistakes. He digs deeply into his past and recalls serious missteps and faulty decisions. Now, his marriage is falling apart, his eldest child wants nothing to do with him, and his best friend is dying. The only time he thinks clearly is while he sits at his computer answering the interview questions that force him to confront himself, no matter where he is in the world. Born in Jerusalem in 1951, Eshkol Nevo studied advertising at the Tirza Granot School and psychology at Tel Aviv University. He owns the largest creative writing school in Israel and is considered the mentor of many upcoming young Israeli writers. His books have been translated into 12 languages, have won several literary prizes, and have sold over a million copies all over the world. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Inspired by Leona Woods, the only woman who worked on the Manhattan Project, Atomic Love (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) tells the story of Rosalind Porter, a physicist recruited by Enrico Fermi to join his team at the University of Chicago. During the war, Rosalind had fallen in love with Weaver, a fellow scientist working on the project. After the bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he suddenly drops her, and she’s fired from the project based on a false report claiming that she’d become unstable. Now she works at the antique jewelry counter in Marshall Fields’ Department Store and struggles to pay her Michigan Avenue rent. It’s 1950, five years after the war ends, and suddenly Weaver is trying to get back in her life. He broke her heart, and probably got her fired, so she never wants to see him again. But the FBI gives her a chance to make it up to all those who died because of her work on the atomic bomb. All she needs to do is go back to Weaver. Jennie Fields received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the novels Lily Beach, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, The Middle Ages, and The Age of Desire. A Chicago native who loved Marshall Fields and used to live in the same neighborhood as her protagonist, Fields was inspired by her own mother’s work as a University of Chicago-trained biochemist in the 1950s. Fields now lives with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is working on her next novel. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Menna Van Praag about her new book The Sisters Grimm (Harper Voyager, 2020)... In a set up reminiscent of the show Orphan Black, four feisty young women struggle to make their way in the world, unaware that they are related. Rather than having genetically identical material from a cloned person in common, these women all have the same father, a demon called Wilhelm Grimm. They differ from each other not only in their culture of origin, and their appearance, but in their element affiliation. Each sister is magically aligned with one of the four elements, though not all of them are aware of their powers. Like many a villain, the incestuous Wilhelm wants only the strongest to survive and become his lovers and fellow fighters, so he will test his daughters, before inviting them to join the dark side. Unbeknownst to them, assassins wearing the forms of appealing young men are drawing closer, to study their victims and assess their weaknesses, in preparation for combat on their eighteenth birthdays. The sisters met as children in a strange otherworld named Everwhere, but when they reached thirteen, they forgot their time there. Now they must remember, so they can find and support each other before it becomes too late. Some of the sisters have had childhoods marred by sexual abuse or the mental illness of a mother. Will they all choose the light, or will Wilhelm Grimm find himself a new favorite daughter who will turn against the others? Assuming any of them survive their assassins… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss. Melissa Valentine and her older brother Junior grow up running around the disparate neighborhoods of 1990s Oakland, two of six children to a white Quaker father and a black Southern mother. But as Junior approaches adolescence, a bullying incident and later a violent attack in school leave him searching for power and a sense of self in all the wrong places; he develops a hard front and falls into drug dealing. Right before Junior’s twentieth birthday, the family is torn apart when he is murdered as a result of gun violence. The Names of All the Flowers: A Memoir (The Feminist Press, 2020) connects one tragic death to a collective grief for all black people who die too young. A lyrical recounting of a life lost, Melissa Valentine’s debut memoir is an intimate portrait of a family fractured by the school-to-prison pipeline and an enduring love letter to an adored older brother. It is a call for justice amid endless cycles of violence, grief, and trauma, declaring: “We are all witness and therefore no one is spared from this loss.” Melissa Valentine is a writer from Oakland, CA. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA in creative writing from Mills College. She has been a fellow at the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, and her work has appeared in Jezebel, Guernica, Apogee Journal, and others. Her writing has received honorable mention from Glimmer Train and the Ardella Mills Non-fiction Award. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in American women’s history, and literature. She specializes in the diaries written by rural women in the 19th century. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, and poems about small relatable moments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They in live harmony with the environment (embracing sustainable practices like veganism, for instance). They have a strong sense of social responsibility. They’re also smart: The average rabbit IQ is about 20 percent higher than the average human IQ. Yet despite their upstanding qualities, the haters keep hating. Fforde is an accomplished satirist and uses humor to spotlight some of our ugliest impulses, including racism and xenophobia. In The Constant Rabbit, a populist party known as TwoLegsGood has parlayed leporiphobia (fear of rabbits) into a successful political movement. In control of the government, TwoLegsGood is planning to segregate the nation’s more than 1 million rabbits in a “MegaWarren” where they will be under round-the-clock surveillance and their freedoms curtailed. TwoLegsGood’s treatment of rabbit has echoes of all caste-based and hate-filled societies, from Jim Crow to apartheid to the Nazis. “When it comes to the sort of demonizing of the minority other, there's just so much to draw on. You don't need to go to any specific place in the world or a specific time. You can just pick and choose from here, there and everywhere,” Fforde says. “The rabbits are being got rid of because they're not human. But, of course, one of the first things that any discriminatory group will do against another group of humans will be to dehumanize them, to make them non-human. And this is often done through language. We had a politician recently in the in the U.K. who started referring to immigrants a plague.” The novel’s first-person human protagonist, Peter Knox, denies having animus toward rabbits—in fact, he finds himself falling in love with one—and yet he’s forced to come to terms with the fact that he, too, has played a significant role in their oppression. “I think the book is hoping to say to people, ‘Look, you cannot look at the hate groups and say “These people are the hate groups. I'm nothing like them.” In fact, perhaps what you should be thinking is “Maybe I am complicit, and in what ways could I possibly be so?” ’ Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press) is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live close to the land in the shadow of a lone mountain. They possess a few remnants of civilization: some books, a pane of glass, a set of flint and steel, a comb. The father teaches the girl how to fish and hunt, the secrets of the seasons and the stars. He is preparing her for an adulthood in harmony with nature, for they are the last of humankind. But when the girl finds herself alone in an unknown landscape, it is a bear that will lead her back home through a vast wilderness that offers the greatest lessons of all, if she can only learn to listen. Andrew Krivak is the author of two previous novels: The Signal Flame, a Chautauqua Prize finalist, and The Sojourn, a National Book Award finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020) is a collection of linked short stories, which Luis Alberto Urrea called “a world-class collection.” The book won the Kay Cattarulla Award for Best Short Story and the International Latino book Award for Best Collection of Short Stories. Troncoso fills these 13 linked stories with the struggles and triumphs of Mexican/American immigrants or their children who’ve settled in the United States. In a nod to philosophical perspectivism, the view that perception changes according o the viewer’s interpretation, Troncoso presents characters who return again and again, in different situations, from different perspectives. Sergio Troncoso is an American author of short stories, essays, and novels. He often writes about the United States-Mexico border, immigration, philosophy in literature, families, fatherhood, and crossing cultural, religious, and psychological borders. Currently president of the Texas Institute of Letters, Tronosco is a Fulbright scholar and has served as a judge for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the New Letters Prize for Essays. His work has recently appeared in CNN Opinion, New Letters, The Yale Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Texas Monthly. Previous books include From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which won the Southwest Book Award, and Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, winner of the Bronze Award for Essays from Foreword Reviews. He is also the author of The Nature of Truth and The Last Tortilla and Other Stories. When he is not reading or writing, Troncoso loves to bike and hike in the Litchfield hills (Connecticut). He is always on the lookout for great mozzarella and asadero cheese. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Most novels about the sixteenth century written in English take place in Italy, France, or England—with the occasional foray into Spain or Portugal. P. K. Adams’ Jagiellonian Mystery series is a welcome exception. Set at the glittering Italianate court of King Zygmunt I of Poland/Lithuania and his son, Zygmunt August, these books map fictional plots onto real historical incidents to create fast-paced, fluid stories that are as much about the tensions of a culture in transition as what drives a person to commit murder. In Midnight Fire (Iron Knight Press, 2020), the heroine, Caterina Konarska (formerly Sanseverino) returns to Zygmunt I’s court twenty-five years after the events of Silent Water, the first book in the series. Caterina and her husband undertake the long journey from Italy in search of a cure for their young son, Giulio, who suffers from mysterious fevers that have stumped the doctors in Bari. In Kraków Caterina discovers a court far different from the one she left a quarter-century before. The old king is dying; his wife, Bona Sforza of Milan and Bari, struggles to hold on to power; and their son, Zygmunt August, threatens to cause an international scandal by marrying his beautiful but disreputable Lithuanian mistress, Barbara Radziwiłł. Queen Bona offers Caterina a deal: persuade Zygmunt August to give up Barbara, and Bona will arrange an appointment for Giulio with Poland’s premier physician. Seeing no alternative, Caterina accepts. But as she sets off for Vilnius with her son, she has no idea of the danger she faces or the layers of treachery she will encounter in Zygmunt August’s Renaissance palace. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Freedom Knows My Name (Xavier Review Press, 2020), Kelly Harris-DeBerry creates the world anew from scraps of memories and rhythm. She bounces between the pages, as well as the accompanying audio version of the poems, with confidence. Kalamu Ya Salaam writes in the introduction “The poet’s task is to turn words into song, utter incantations that heal, inspire, be more than ordinary talk” and Harris-DeBerry has a voice that encompasses each other those tasks. It is strong and it is unwavering. Whether she is on the page or in readers’ ears, Harris-DeBerry’s poetry is a bounty of culture, womanhood, home, and possibility. In an age where everything can be, and is, commodified for profit and the cool factor yet the actual Black artists producing the work can be undervalued, Harris-DeBerry’s poetry honors and respects the legacies of Southern migration, the Midwest, and Blackness. Kelly Harris-DeBerry received her MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. She has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and Cave Canem. Some of her publishing credits include: 400yrs: The story of Black people in poems written from love 1619–2019, Words Beats & Life The Global Journal of Hip Hop, Angles in the Wilderness: Young and Black in New Orleans and Beyond, Torch Literary Magazine, The National Parks Service Centennial Commemoration publication with Sonia Sanchez, Yale University's Caduceus Journal, Southern Review, Say it Loud: Poems for James Brown and many more. Her podcast episode for About Place Journal called Congo Square: Sustaining the Sacred Post-Katrina highlights her talents as a producer and researcher. Kelly is a former guest poetry editor for Bayou Magazine at the University of New Orleans. She serves her literary community as the New Orleans Poets & Writers’ Literary Coordinator and on various community boards. Kelly is a cultural leader with business savvy. Learn more at www.kellyhd.com. Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Freedom Knows My Name

At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all his energy into being a successful high school linebacker. Now it’s the early 2000’s, and Miles earns a full football scholarship to King College, which is known as having the worst Division One football program and one of the best academic programs In the country. When he arrives for the recruiting visit, Miles is shocked to hear one of the country’s top recruits, the brilliant Reshawn McCoy, taking what looks like an illegal bribe. Nobody knows why he chose King, but Reshawn, who is assigned as Miles’s roommate, refuses to talk about it. Turns out he’s also struggling to be something he’s not and focuses on his research about the school’s slave-owning founders. The decisions they make will change both their lives. Corey Sobel is a graduate of Duke University, where he was a scholarship football player and received the Anne Flexner Award for Fiction and the Reynolds Price Award for Scriptwriting. He has reported on human rights abuses in Burma, served as an HIV/AIDS researcher in Kenya, and consulted for the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations. The Red Shirt (UP of Kentucky, 2020), his debut novel, was longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has written for numerous publications, including HuffPost, Esquire.com, and Chapel Hill News. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, his cat, and his dog, and works at writing research reports for humanitarian organizations. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wrestles with God. And wrestling is all I know.” And that description gives us a sense of Israel’s book. It’s not a mere recollection, but a reckoning, one in which Israel wrestles not only with her own life, but also with the past she inherited, one full of intergenerational trauma as well as intergenerational gifts. Israel also wrestles for a future she hopes to make for herself and her young sons, one full of grace and gratitude. “You have to find a gift in every hard thing.” That’s advice that Israel once received. And her book, in which she wrestles with the pain and grief and beauty of life, is her gift to us. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream.” Freud (1907) Jessica Gross is a valuable ally. An intuitive reader of Freud her debut novel--Hysteria (Unnamed Press, 2020)--embraces Oedipal conflict, unconscious fantasy, and voracious sexuality. The narrator, a young woman living in current day Brooklyn, discovers Freud tending bar at a neighborhood haunt “perfect for making trouble” which she does and which Freud sees. He also sees her for a session on the couch. An analysand herself, Gross renders the treatment with such emotional precision that “delusion and dream” slip away and we eavesdrop on a highly relatable woman confronting overlapping desires. Throughout the novel, Gross’ generosity with her narrator is a sensitive illustration of “say everything” the fundamental request of analysis. It is a gift for anyone who has never had the experience nor been given the space to do so. It celebrates what it means to meet oneself as sexual being. Jessica Gross is a writer whose nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, and The Paris Review Daily. She's received fellowships in fiction from the Yiddish Book Center and the 14th Street Y, and teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School. jessicargross.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Most people think of Edgar Degas as a French painter of ballerinas. But few have heard that his mother came from New Orleans or that he spent five months in that city between October 1872 and February 1873. That five-month period proved crucial to Degas’s career, moving him from the status of a relative unknown dabbling in the not-quite-respectable world of the Paris Opera into an artist of renown. And although he went back to painting ballerinas—many of his most famous works date from 1873 and later—it was his study of his brothers, A Cotton Office in New Orleans, that won him the critical acclaim that pushed him into the next stage of his career. In Estelle (She Writes Press, 2020), Linda Stewart Henley takes this vital transition as her starting point for a dual-time story in which a young woman named Anne Gautier, twenty-two years old and fresh out of college, inherits an old house on Esplanade Avenue in New Orleans in 1970. While overseeing renovations and dealing with protestors opposed to urban renewal that displaces the poor, Anne discovers an old journal that sheds light on Degas, his friends and family and sojourn in the city—in a house just down the street from hers. Her attempts to uncover more information reveal mysteries both personal and artistic, and soon Anne must tackle some very basic questions regarding what she wants from life. Interspersed with Anne’s story is the narrative of Degas’s sister-in-law, the Estelle of the title, as she welcomes her visiting brother-in-law and observes his adjustment to family life. Estelle has troubles of her own: she’s pregnant with her third child, she’s losing her eyesight, and her marriage suffers as the family cotton business struggles to stay afloat in the aftermath of the US Civil War. Yet she perseveres, and these relatively quiet domestic scenes contrast well with Anne’s more dramatic conflicts and with the occasional diary entries reproduced from the journal Anne has discovered. The end result is a thoroughly enjoyable tale of the changing fortunes of a great city and the life of an artist, told through the perspectives of three women governed by expectations that are in some ways quite similar, although the options available to them are not similar at all. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her next book, Song of the Sisters, will appear in January 2021. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theatre. Through her involvement with Teatro Libertad, Teatro Chicano, and El Teatro Nacional de Atzlán she has created plays where working class Chicanos are center stage. Despite her insistence that she is “a storyteller, not an activist,” her plays reflect her deep connection to the Movimiento Chicano. They are also funny, imaginative, and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene. Her book Barrio Dreams (University of Arizona Press 2016) collects five of her plays. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency. When her old CPD friend and partner, Ben Mickerson asks Cass to join him for a side gig, she’s happy to do it. Then she meets the client – the wealthy, powerful owner of a fast-growing media empire. Vonda Allen is loved by the public but hated by her employees and also by whoever is sending her death threats. Cass isn’t thrilled about babysitting a heartless diva, but when two of Vonda’s staff members are murdered, the case gets serious. Then, at one of Vonda’s book signings, a mysterious fan stabs Ben. Although Vonda fires her, Cass is worried that Ben won’t pull through. Now, there’s no way she’s going to sit this one out even though that same morally bankrupt cop and his friend are trying to trip her up. She’s hell bent on figuring out Vonda’s secrets and determined to get answers before anyone else, including Vonda, dies. Tracy Clark is the author of the highly acclaimed Chicago Mystery Series featuring ex-homicide cop turned PI Cassandra Raines, a hard-driving, African-American protagonist who works the mean streets of the Windy City dodging cops, cons, killers, and thugs. She received Anthony Award and Lefty Award nominations for her series debut, Broken Places, which was also shortlisted for the American Library Association’s RUSA Reading List, named a CrimeReads Best New PI Book of 2018, a Midwest Connections Pick, and a Library Journal Best Books of the Year. In addition to her Cass Raines novels, Tracy’s short story “For Services Rendered,” appears in the anthology Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African‑American Authors. A native of Chicago, she works as an editor in the newspaper industry and roots for the Cubs, Sox, Bulls, Bears, and Blackhawks equally. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, PI Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and a Mystery Writers of America Midwest board member. When she isn’t working, reading or writing, Tracy loves watching old movies, especially those involving monsters. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ann Dávila Cardinal writes stories that thrill you. She writes about lives that face challenge and find a way through, despite the horror that chases them. She writes about Puerto Rico and trauma and belonging somewhere. I can honestly say I have enjoyed every word in Five Midnights (Tor Teen, 2019) and Category Five (Tor Teen, 2020), her two recently released young adult novels that follow Lupe and Javier as they face apparitions, ghosts, and shape-shifting monsters—as well as their own flesh and blood—until they eventually find themselves. Listen in as we chat about these two magnificent books, about her own life as a self-proclaimed Gringa-Rican, and about what’s next for her as a novelist. Ellee Achten is a writer and editor exploring issues of home, health, memory, and attachment. She writes everything from magazine features to lyrical memoir to sci-fi novels. She is currently working on many projects, including a collection of essays about the traumatic connection between the body and mind. She can be reached at: elleeachten@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s last undeveloped tract. It’s also one of the unusual works of speculative fiction that’s been embraced by the world of high literature by (just this week) reaching the final round of the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Cook has lived mostly in cities, she loves spending time in nature and wrote some of The New Wilderness while trekking across the high desert of Oregon. “There is something about the expansiveness of lands that are empty that make my imagination feel a lot freer than it usually does in a city,” she says. For Cook’s protagonist Bea, the Wilderness State offers the only hope for saving the life of her 5-year-old daughter, Agnes. But as Agnes’ lungs heal from the city’s smog, her relationship with her mother grows strained, suffering rifts that might be typical for a mother and daughter but are magnified by the strain of having to invent a nomadic way of life in a remorseless expanse. “The Wilderness State is this very extreme place and this very extreme situation so it pushes everyone to a very extreme version of how they would normally be,” Cook says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

While Arthur Nakai is attending a wake for a man he considered a brother with whom he served in the U.S. Marines, he receives a call from an old friend whose sons have just been murdered. Arthur soon finds himself involved in the multi-billion-dollar world of the oil and gas industry. He faces an old adversary from when he was a member of the Shadow Wolves, an elite tactical unit within US Customs and Border Protection. Now that same adversary runs a heavily armed group of sociopathic men who are paid to keep the oil rigs and gas wells secure from protesters. Can’t let anything stop big business from getting access to all that reservation land – so what if fracking poisons Native Americans’ water supply and further fractures their community? Death Waits in the Dark (Blackstone Publishing) is Book 2 in The Arthur Nakai Mysteries. Mark Edward Langley was instilled with a love for the American West by his father. After many visits, his connection to the land and its people became irrevocable, but he was appalled at the way he saw Native Americans being treated. After spending almost thirty years working in the corporate world, he retired at the end of 2016 and began to focus on realizing his goal of becoming an author. He created a strong, competent Navajo protagonist, a U.S. veteran who fights for his people and their land. Langley’s first novel, Path of the Dead, was released in August of 2018. He and his wife, Barbara, live in Indiana and split their time between there and the American southwest where he loves to ride horses. He is currently working on the next novel in the Arthur Nakai series. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Premee Mohamed's Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) is simultaneously a far-flung horror story and an exploration of an intimate relationship. At the heart of this novel, full of threatening monsters and ancient terrors, is the accommodation one makes with the exploitation of others, when it serves a higher goal. Scientist and child prodigy, Joanna (Johnnie) Chambers, embarks on a quest to save the world with her loyal best friend Nick. The story is told through Nick’s perspective—he is at totally devoted to Johnnie and yet, resentful of her. Nick yearns for Johnnie, not just romantically, but also because she is a symbol of privilege. He is angry that he, as an economically struggling Indo-Caribbean, is not granted the same respect that wealthy, white Johnnie gets. Her life of privilege, like her love, seem unattainable for someone like Nick. However, when all hell breaks loose after one of Johnnie’s experiments unleashes horror on this world, Nick finds himself on a long strange journey with Johnnie to save the world. That’s when he finds out that Johnnie, the golden child he’s always envied, has her burdens too. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Her best friend, Layla, has always tried to protect Ruby from Lebanon even though her own father and Ruby’s father have been close friends since childhood. And their mothers were friends before them. In this moving debut novel, Saving Ruby King (Park Row Books), Catherine Adel West gives each character a voice, but the voice that binds all of their lives together is that of the Calvary Hope Christian Church, objective witness to the complex ties between Ruby’s grandmother and her two friends, between Ruby’s father and Layla’s father, and between Ruby and Layla. In precise, lyrical writing, West delves into each of their secrets while exploring intergenerational trauma, racial injustice in Chicago, and the power of friendship. Catherine Adel West was born and raised in Chicago, IL where she currently resides. She graduated with both her Bachelors and Masters of Science in Journalism from the University of Illinois - Urbana. Her work is published in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Five2One, Better than Starbucks, Doors Ajar, 805 Lit + Art, The Helix Magazine, Lunch Ticket and Gay Magazine. In between writing and traveling, Catherine works as an editor and is currently obsessed with watching old episodes of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, especially the ones with Vincent D’Onofrio. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mordantly funny and deeply moving, The Hilltop about life in a West Bank settlement has been hailed as “brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and “The Great Israeli Novel [in which] Gavron stakes his claim to be Israel’s Jonathan Franzen” (Tablet). On a rocky hilltop stands Ma’aleh Hermesh C, a fledgling outpost of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. According to government records it doesn’t exist; according to the military it must be defended. On this contested land, Othniel Assis—under the wary gaze of the Palestinians in the neighboring village—lives on his farm with his ever-expanding family. As Othniel cheerfully manipulates government agencies, more settlers arrive, and a hodge-podge of shipping containers and mobile homes takes root. One steadfast resident is Gabi Kupper, a former kibbutz dweller who savors the delicate routines of life on the settlement. When Gabi’s prodigal brother, Roni, arrives penniless on his doorstep with a bizarre plan to sell the “artisanal” olive oil from the Palestinian village to Tel Aviv yuppies, Gabi worries his life won’t stay quiet for long. Then a nosy American journalist stumbles into Ma’aleh Hermesh C, and Gabi’s worst fears are confirmed. The settlement becomes the focus of an international diplomatic scandal, facing its greatest threat yet. This “indispensable novel” (The Wall Street Journal) skewers the complex, often absurd reality of life in Israel. Grappling with one of the most charged geo-political issues of our time, “Gavron’s story gains a foothold in our hearts and minds and stubbornly refuses to leave” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Yehoshua November's second poetry collection, Two Worlds Exist (Orison Books), movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary America. November's beautiful and profound meditations on work and family life, and the intersections of the sacred and the secular, invite the reader--regardless of background--to imaginatively inhabit a life of religious devotion in the midst of our society's commotion. Yehoshua November's first poetry collection, God's Optimism, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He is a Fulbright scholar and was a visiting professor of Religion at Northwestern University, the Shalom Hartman Institute and Harvard Divinity School. His books are Sexuality and the Body in New Religious Zionist Discourse (English/Hebrew and The Male Body in Jewish Lithuanian Ultra-Orthodoxy (Hebrew). He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Over the past ten years, Chantal Bilodeau has made a name for herself a playwright singularly dedicated to writing plays about the issue of climate change. These are not dry docu-dramas, but deeply human depictions of life in the far north, where climate change is a daily reality. Forward (Tanlonbooks 2018) is the latest work in her Artic Cycle, and it follows the story of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in two temporalities: a story moving forward through Nansen’s life, and a counter-narrative moving backwards from the present until Nansen’s time. This play both depicts the life of this larger-than-life figure and explores the ripple effects of his story through 120 years of Norwegian history. This play will be of interest to anyone looking for emotional, human-scale approaches to the overwhelming reality of climate change. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this well-written mystery, The Black Cage: A Milo Rigg Mystery (Severn House Publishers), it’s bitter winter in Chicago, and disgraced crime reporter Milo Rigg wakes up every night dreaming that his wife is calling to him from a black cage. He can’t reach or save her - she was killed by a random bullet two years before. Consumed with grief, he tried to expose a botched murder investigation, but the case nearly destroyed Milo's reputation along with his career. He was sent by paper’s struggling editor to the far suburbs, to write human interest stories. But now there are more murders, and he thinks the cases might be linked, so Milo is back asking questions. Everywhere he turns, it seems like someone is lying or covering up the truth. And he’s not sleeping well, because of the black cage. He just has to figure out what it’s trying to tell him. Jack Fredrickson lives with his wife, Susan, west of Chicago. He is the author of seven Dek Elstrom PI mysteries, the first of which, A Safe Place for Dying, was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Novel, and one standalone, Silence the Dead. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Writers and readers of science fiction love stories about artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical beings whose sentience mirrors, matches or exceeds that of humans. The stories stay fresh for the reasons stories about humans do—sentience confers individuality, which provides endless permutations for character and plot. Madeline Ashby’s trilogy, The Machine Dynasty, explores the limits of sentience, the meaning of free will, and what it means to look, act, and feel like a human but be denied basic human rights. Published in July, the third book, ReV (Angry Robot, 2020), shows readers the results of a final face-off between self-replicating humanoid robots and humans. That the robots, known as vN, want their freedom, is natural. What isn’t natural is the failsafe programmed into their consciousnesses that requires them to aid humans in distress or danger—or self-destruct. With the failsafe in place, humans use and abuse the vN as they please—as mates, sex objects, laborers. “The failsafe became a way to talk about free will and consent,” Ashby says. Robot stories are usually written from a human perspective, but Ashby tells the story from the perspectives of the vN. “There's a ton of science fiction stories about humans who can't tell robots apart from other humans. But there are very few stories about robots who can't tell humans apart from each other, or robots who are the ones judging what a human being actually is.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Most modern Americans can identify the names Wallace Simpson and Gloria Vanderbilt. But Simpson was not the first divorced American to win the heart of Great Britain’s future if short-reigned King Edward VIII, known to his family as David. This debut novel explores the life and loves of Thelma Morgan, whose twin sister Gloria married Reggie Vanderbilt and became the mother of the well-known fashion designer. After the ending of what these days we would call a “starter marriage,” Thelma accepts a proposal of Viscount Duke Furness, who takes her to his country estate and introduces her to his children. He also, in due course, introduces her to David and, when she and the prince fall for each other, steps aside and chooses not to contest their affair. The reality that Lord Furness has not himself practiced fidelity is one of the factors driving Thelma away from him. Meanwhile, Gloria and Reggie have taken refuge from the twins’ mother in France, where they are raising their daughter, Little Gloria. Reggie dies prematurely, and Gloria becomes involved in the kind of knock-down, drag-out contest over his inheritance that only dysfunctional families can produce. Desperate to support her sister, Thelma abandons the UK for New York City, David’s assurances of love ringing in her ears. Unfortunately, not long before she leaves England, she introduces David to Wallace Simpson … In The Woman before Wallis (Mira Books, 2020), Bryn Turnbull, does a wonderful job of portraying this history, which is in some ways more dramatic than any made-up story could be. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A trainer of beauty pageant contestants is disappointed after spending a fortune to prepare a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant, only to learn that she harbors a disqualifying secret. A nurse volunteers to help after Puerto Rico has been devastated by hurricane Maria, only to face a lackadaisical government response. An EPA employee whose parents died from exposure to a pesticide that was later banned, is forced to justify reversing the regulations that would have saved her parents. And a future department of education employee discovers the ultimate cost of federal overreach in primary education. These compelling stories are based on recent headlines from before the pandemic crisis, when environmental regulations were overturned at breakneck speed and society had already started to become numb in the face of moral depravity and a lack of objective truth. The thought-provoking tales in Yxta Maya Murray’s short story collection The World Doesn't Work that Way, But it Could: Stories (University of Nevada Press, 2020) are inspired by recent headlines and court cases in America. Regular people negotiate tentative paths through wildfires, mass shootings, bureaucratic incompetence, and heedless government policies. Characters grapple with the consequences of frightening attitudes pervasive in the United States today, or they struggle to make a living, raise their children, and do a little good in the world. In these brilliantly written stories, Murray explores the human capacity for moral numbness and its opposite, the human desire to be kind and compassionate. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The World Doesn't Work That Way, but It Could: Stories (Volume 1)

Writers often evoke the famous que sais-je (“What do I know?”) of Michel de Montaigne, father of the literary essay. Montaigne was known for his deeply exploratory writing about the many overlapping and often conflicting aspects of selfhood. His Essais in the 16th century laid the foundation for the genre by focusing on questions—some ephemeral, some perennial—about things such as disability, death, education, friendship, religion, and thumbs. Today, essayists continue to write from this ancient tradition, but for a new century. The big topics in today’s discourse about who we are include questions about gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, citizenship, political affiliation, and more. Enter the inimitable Melissa Faliveno. In her debut essay collection, Tomboyland: Essays (Topple Books & Little A), author Melissa Faliveno examines a vast array of intersecting (and intersectional!) human experiences. These thoughtful essays explore Faliveno’s relationship to scores of personal identities, including her midwestern roots, an obsession with tornados, the complexities of her gender presentation, a competitive roller derby spirit, an inclination toward kink and BDSM, an ambivalence about motherhood, and so, so much more, all coalescing to construct one cohesive portrait of self. Faliveno’s bold and often beautiful writing embodies the ways all of us make meaning of our lives, and develop an understanding of ourselves in the world around us. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tomboyland: Essays

There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have chosen a truly unique, creative and charming way to acquaint readers with some of the unsolved problems of mathematics. Some are classic, such as the Goldbach Conjecture, some are fairly well known, such as the Collatz Conjecture. Others are less well known but no less fascinating – and all are intriguing and both enjoyable and tantalizing to contemplate. The authors have woven the problems into a coherent story, and I think you’ll enjoy hearing – and reading – both the story and the associated problems. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries

In John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while growers get increasingly violent in trying to prevent unionization. Teenager Jack Duncan learns that his father’s death did not happen the way he’d been told. His best friend Adrian joins his own father in fighting for workers rights with Chavez. Jack and Adrian hope baseball will be their ticket to college scholarships and a way out of Delano, California, but Jack’s widowed mother is about to lose her house to a greedy grower, and because of his father’s activities, school officials threaten Adrian’s hope of graduation. Turns out the growers own the town, including the police department and the school officials. The plight of pesticide-poisoning and other injustices to immigrant workers (which we are sadly still fighting today) pulls the two best friends away from their goal of getting out of Delano and pushes them into a deadly game of survival. John DeSimone is a published writer, novelist, and teacher. He's been an adjunct professor and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University. His recent co-authored books include Broken Circle: A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan (Little A Publishers) with Enjeela Ahmadi, and Courage to Say No with Dr. Raana Mahmood, about her struggles against sexual exploitation as a female physician in Karachi. His novels Leonardo's Chair and No Ordinary Man have received critical recognition, and in 2012, he won a prestigious Norman Mailer Fellowship to complete Road to Delano. He works with aspiring writers with stories of inspiration and determination or with those who have a vital message. When he isn’t reading or writing, John loves traveling and tasting different foods and cultures, but he is currently a caregiver for his wife. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Road to Delano

Francesca and Toni are brought to the orphanage when their mother suffers a breakdown and dies, and their father gets involved with a new woman. Their story, set in Chicago of the 1940s, unfolds during the course of the novel. There’s another girl too though, whose voice intersperses herself into the everyday happenings. This is the ghost, Pearl, who would much rather observe other people’s stories then think about her own unhappy one. It takes the friendship and confrontational questions of another traumatized ghost, for her to come to terms with the painful memories of her strict mother and hateful brothers. In meantime, Frankie goes through her teen years and experiences her first love—and loss. Pearl, witnessing Fran’s emotions, is brought closer to her own lost life. The setting of the orphanage is well researched—more about that in the interview with Laura Ruby—and Pearl’s afterlife is original and poignant. The ghost girl reads the Hobbit over the shoulders of a library visitor, goes to a bar where she drinks not-bourbon served by a ghost barkeeper, and keeps revisiting a certain blue house, to watch a young woman and her lover inside. The themes of forbidden love, racism, and dispossession will draw in many young readers. Listen in as I speak with Laura about Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All (Balzer and Bray, 2019) Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines finna as: fin·na /ˈfinə/ contraction: (1) going to; intending to [rooted in African American Vernacular English] (2) eye dialect spelling of “fixing to” (3) Black possibility; Black futurity; Blackness as tomorrow. His poems focus on the language of hope when Black lives and Black bodies are confronted with white supremacy, racism, and violence in our present culture. Finna uses Black vernacular to explore the erasure of peoples in the American narrative, ask how gendered language can provoke violence; and how it expands notions of possibility and hope. Timely and lyrical, Marshall’s work is what is needed in language during this time in our history. Sharp, lyrical poems celebrating the Black vernacular—its influence on pop culture, its necessity for familial survival, its rite in storytelling and in creating the safety found only within its intimacy These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope: nothing about our people is romantic & it shouldn’t be. our people deserve poetry without meter. we deserve our own jagged rhythm & our own uneven walk towards sun. you make happening happen. we happen to love. this is our greatest action. Nate Marshall is an award-winning writer, rapper, educator, and editor. Rebekah Buchanan is an Assistant Professor of English at Western Illinois University. Her work examines the role of narrative–both analog and digital–in people’s lives. She is interested in how personal narratives produced in alternative spaces create sites that challenge traditionally accepted public narratives. She researches zines, zine writers and the influence of music subcultures and fandom on writers and narratives. You can find more about her on her website, follow her on Twitter @rj_buchanan or email her at rj-buchanan@wiu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Finna: Poems

It’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country. Since his election in 2016, questions have been raised about president Trump’s too-close-for-comfort ties to Russian leadership and intelligence. Lately, his antagonism toward infectious disease science and CDC guidelines in addition to his deployment of federal troops into American cities to silence protestors have led many to compare the current regime to authoritarian governments of long ago wars. But the truth is, very little about these tactics are new. In other parts of the world, such as in Ukraine, citizens know them, resist them, and subvert them in a way Americans are just learning how to. In her striking debut, On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine (Mad Creek Books), author Sonya Bilocerkowycz speculates on the possibility of future revolutions built on the lessons of revolutions past—both big, and small. Her essays expertly weave personal narrative as a member of the Ukrainian-American diaspora into research about Ukrainian myth, politics, history, art, and more, in one great cultural examination of Ukraine that is as timely as it is thoughtful. Bilocerkowcyz’s unique perspective as a Ukrainian-American sheds necessary light onto the darkness of America’s current political moment, her voice a guide to finding our way home. Today on New Books in Literature, please join us as we sit down with Sonya Bilocerkowcyz to learn more about On Our Way Home from the Revolution, available now. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine (21st Century Essays)

Lady Cecily Kay has just returned to England when she encounters Sir Barnaby Mayne. It’s 1703, Queen Anne is on the throne, and London’s coffee houses are buzzing with discussions of everything from science and philosophy to monsters and magic. Of course, Cecily has no plans to join the ongoing conversations; coffee houses bar the door to female visitors, however intelligent and learned. But she has secured something better: an entrée to the house of the city’s most influential collector, where she can compare her list of previously unknown plants to his rooms filled with specimens and, with luck, identify them. On Cecily’s first day in the Mayne house, however, Sir Barnaby is stabbed to death. His meek curator confesses to the crime, and even the victim’s widow seems willing to ignore any discrepancies in the evidence. With assistance from her childhood friend Meacan Barlow, an illustrator also living in Sir Barnaby’s house, Cecily sets out to tie up the loose ends on a murder that far too many people would prefer to remain unsolved. Her quest leads her into the shadowy world of London’s collectors, who will stop at nothing to cut out the competition and have no qualms about silencing a pair of nosy women who are coming too close to the truth. In The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne (Minotaur Books, 2020), Elsa Hart the author of the famed Li Du novels, here brings her talent for spinning a great yarn and crafting a compelling mystery to a new place, which—as you will learn in the interview—is in fact her original literary destination, attained at last. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne: A Mystery

It’s 1966, and Bernice’s husband has either died or abandoned her. Her brother Floyd invites her to join him as a servant working for white owners of an old plantation house in Mississippi. Floyd warns Bernice about the housekeeper, Silva, who lives there with her two young sons. The owner and his wife don’t speak much and there seem to be secrets hidden in every corner. The Mister works, fishes, reads the paper, and eats. When the Missus, a sickly, vindictive woman, sets her plan in motion, Bernice tries to mitigate the pain that will reverberate through everyone involved. In his novel Pale (Blackstone, 2020), Farmer tells a slowly bubbling, heartbreaking story that shows a household infected by the scourges of jealousy and vengeance. Edward A. Farmer is a native of Memphis, Tennessee where he journaled and cultivated stories his entire childhood. He is a graduate of Amherst College with a degree in English and Psychology, and recipient of the MacArthur-Leithauser Travel Award for creative writing. He currently lives and writes in sunny Pasadena, California, where he is able to hike whenever he’s not reading or writing. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Pale: A Novel

Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) came out in March, but don’t call her a new writer. “I find it funny that people refer to people who have just started to get published as new writers. I finished my first novel when I was 12. I'm not a new writer. What I am is new to publishing, and it's so weird to me that people conflate the two, as if you just started writing at the moment you started getting published,” Mohamed says. She’d completed the first draft of Beneath the Rising in 2002, around the time she’d received her undergraduate degree in molecular genetics, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she decided to try and publish it. Until then, writing was “very much my private little hobby.” Beneath the Rising combines horror, science fiction and fantasy in its portrayal of the complicated friendship of Nick and Joanna (Johnny). They’d been close since they were young children despite many differences (she’s a rich, white, world-famous scientist; he’s a poor, brown, ordinary guy). But their relationship gets tested when Johnny’s latest invention—a clean reactor the size of a shoebox—unleashes Lovecraftian monsters, and, in the process of helping Johnny battle this cosmic evil, Nick uncovers secrets that change his view of Johnny. The monsters pose the ultimate foil for Johnny, who, like many scientists, wants to both understand the world and control it. “As a scientist,” Mohamed explains, “she wants [the monsters] to be understandable, to be comprehensible. And, of course, they can't be reduced down to something you can study in the lab and that just drives her berserk.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Beneath the Rising

The Italian Renaissance introduced—or reintroduced—many valuable concepts to society and culture, giving rise eventually to our modern world. But it was also a time of fierce political infighting, social inequality, the subjugation of women, religious intolerance, belief in witchcraft, and many other elements that are more fun to read about than to experience. In The Road to Gesualdo, Erika Rummel draws on her years as a historian of the sixteenth century to bring this captivating story to life. When Leonora d’Este, the daughter of the powerful family running the Italian city-state of Ferrara, receives orders from her brother to marry Prince Carlo of Gesualdo, she accepts the arranged match without protest. Her lady-in-waiting, Livia Prevera, does not. Prince Carlo, Livia argues, must have a secret, because the courtiers of Ferrara get quiet whenever his name comes up. Only after the wedding ceremony does Leonora discover that Livia is right. Prince Carlo murdered his first wife and her lover after finding them in bed together, his legal right at the time but an act committed with sufficient savagery to cast doubt on his mental health. At first, Carlo and Leonora establish a bond through their love of music, but as time goes on, Livia becomes ever more concerned about a series of threats to her own health and, by extension, the future of those she cares about. Meanwhile, Pietro, the man she loves but cannot marry due to poverty on both sides, has been sent to Rome on a mission for Leonora’s brother: to discover whether the Gesualdo family really holds the power the d’Este clan expects and requires. Part of Pietro’s mission involves an arranged marriage with the daughter of a wealthy diplomat. Surrounded by plots and treachery, Livia and Pietro struggle to balance the demands of love, loyalty, and practicality—always hoping that fate will bring them together once more. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Road to Gesualdo

In Bill LeFurgy's Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore (High Kicker Books), Sarah Kennecott is a brilliant young doctor who cares deeply about justice for murder victims after her own family is murdered. She’s not like other people; she doesn’t like noises and smells, she doesn’t understand chit chat, and she cannot interpret inflection or nuance. It’s 1909, and the city of Baltimore is filled with gilded mansions and a seedy corrupt, underworld. Sarah struggles to be accepted as a doctor. After getting fired for looking too closely into the killing of a showgirl, she refuses to back down from the investigation and joins forces with a street-smart private detective who is able to access saloons, brothels, and burlesque theaters where Sarah isn’t allowed. Together, they unravel a few secrets that could cost them their lives. Bill LeFurgy is a professional historian who has studied the seamy underbelly of urban life, including drugs, crime, and prostitution, as well as more workaday matters such as streets, buildings, wires, and wharves. He has put his many years of experience into writing gritty historical fiction about Baltimore, his favorite city. Bill has graduate degrees from the University of Maryland and has worked at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore City Archives, National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress. He has learned much from his children and grandchildren, including grace, patience, emotional connection, and the need to welcome different perspectives from those on the autism spectrum or with other personality traits that are undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or unexplained. Bill has published many books and articles about U.S. history and history sources, including for the Library of Congress, Maryland Historical Magazine, and the U.S. Department of Energy. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore (Sarah Kennecott and Jack Harden Mysteries)

In The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019), Chelsea Wagenaar explores the power of language—in terms of its possibilities and what it fails to express. As a being with a body in the world, there are so many experiences that are inexpressible. These poems attempt to touch upon those experiences, relating what it means to have a body, one that carries so many things, from children in the womb to the emotional weight of our relationship to others and the world around us. As Wagenaar lyrically examines everyday moments, her words reach for an ecstatic experience of the sacred. Moon-sliced star-pocked streetlit bleat, coal train moving like its own ghost along the tracks. 2:00, 3:00, my shadow sways as I catch myself, hand on the wall, pulled from bed by your nocturnal haunt, you at your crib rail, blanket clutched, more sound than body. — from “Night Shift” Chelsea Wagenaar is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently The Spinning Place was winner of the 2018 Michael Waters Prize. Her first collection, Mercy Spurs the Bone, was selected by Philip Levine to win the 2013 Philip Levine Prize. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of North Texas, and currently teaches at Valparaiso University. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Image and The Southern Review. Andrea Blythe is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. She is the author of three chapbooks, Twelve: Poems Inspired by the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale (Interstellar Flight Press), Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (Kickstarter funded, 2018), and the collaboratively written Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), authored alongside Laura Madeline Wiseman. She cohosts the New Books in Poetry podcast and is the founder of Once Upon the Weird. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Spinning Place

Christina Gessler talks with her friend Nancy Thayer about Girls of Summer: A Novel (Ballantine Books), which was just chosen for O Magazine’s Summer Reading List. Girls of Summer is set during one life-changing summer on Nantucket, which brings about exhilarating revelations for a single mother and her two grown children in this sensational novel from New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer. Lisa Hawley is perfectly satisfied living on her own. Having fully recovered from a brutal divorce nearly two decades earlier, she has successfully raised her kids, Juliet and Theo, seeing them off to college and beyond. As the owner of a popular boutique on Nantucket, she’s built a fulfilling life for herself on the island where she grew up. With her beloved house in desperate need of repair, Lisa calls on Mack Whitney, a friendly—and very handsome—local contractor and fellow single parent, to do the work. The two begin to grow close, and Lisa is stunned to realize that she might be willing to open up again after all . . . despite the fact that Mack is ten years her junior. Juliet and Theo worry that Mack will only break their mother’s heart—and they can’t bear to see her hurt again. Both stuck in ruts of their own, they each hope that a summer on Nantucket will provide them with the clarity they’ve been searching for. When handsome entrepreneur Ryder Hastings moves to the island to expand his environmental nonprofit, Juliet, an MIT-educated web designer, feels an immediate attraction, one her rocky love life history pushes her to deny at first. Meanwhile, free spirit Theo finds his California bliss comes to a brutal halt when a surfing injury forces him back to the East Coast. Upon his return, he has eyes only for Mack’s daughter, Beth, to whom he is bound by an unspeakable tragedy from high school. Can they overcome their past? As the season unfolds, a storm threatens to shatter the peace of the golden island, forcing Lisa, Juliet, and Theo to decide whether their summer romances are destined for something more profound. Nancy Thayer dazzles again in this delightful tale of family, a reminder that sometimes, finding our way back home can bring us unexpected gifts. Nancy Thayer is the New York Times bestselling author of over thirty books. Girls of Summer was chosen for O Magazine’s Summer 2020 Reading List. She lives on Nantucket. Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. She lived on Nantucket from 2000 to 2005 and longs to return, at least for the summer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Girls of Summer: A Novel

A decrepit house in Greendale, Mississippi once belonged to Billie James’s father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when she was four years old. Her mother dies of cancer. Then years later, her paternal grandmother dies and leaves Billie the old Mississippi Delta house. At age 34, Billie returns to the house, encounters the locals, and learns that on the day her father died, she went missing. She doesn’t want to leave Mississippi until she finds out what happened, but someone doesn’t want Billie to know the truth. Told from several perspectives, The Gone Dead (Ecco, 2019) is a story about family and memory, justice for those who were never given a chance, and some of the wounds caused by racism in America. Chanelle Benz has published work in Guernica, Granta.com, The New York Times, Electric Literature, The American Reader, Fence and others, and is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize. Her story collection The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead was named a Best Book of 2017 by The San Francisco Chronicle and one of Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Saroyan Prize and longlisted for the 2018 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Story Prize. The Gone Dead was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a Tonight Show Summer Reads Finalist. It was long-listed for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It was also named a best new book of the summer by O, The Oprah Magazine, Time, Southern Living, and Nylon. Benz currently lives in Memphis where she teaches at Rhodes College. Whenever possible, she loves to listen to true crime and history podcasts. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Gone Dead: A Novel

How Do We Write Our Personal History at the Same Time That It’s Written for Us? Today I talked to Suri Hustvedt about this question and others as we discuss her book Memories of the Future (Simon and Schuster, 2019). The Literary Review (UK) has called Hustvedt “a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf.” She’s the author of seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction. She has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and lectures in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. Hustvedt is the recipient of numerous awards, including the European Essay Prize. Topics covered in this episode include:

What it can mean to be a heroine instead of a hero, including in regards to which emotions might conventionally be considered “off-limits.”

The role that the author’s over-a-dozen drawings play in this novel.

Musings on what the roots of ambition might be, and how ambition and shame as well as memory and imagination are often so intertwined.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of eight books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). To check out his “Faces of the Week” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Memories of the Future

After an injury to her hand derails her promising concert career, Camille retreats to her mother’s house and teaches piano to mostly desultory students. The years pass, and she finds Graciela, the talented daughter of her mother’s Mexican housekeeper, and Camille focuses on preparing her to live the life she herself was unable to live. Graciela has just won a prestigious piano competition and the chance to jump start her career, but two weeks before she’s supposed to perform with the LA Philharmonic, she disappears. Camille is determined to find her and bring her back before she squanders the opportunity of a lifetime, but a bus accident on route to Graciela’s family village outside of Oaxaca leaves her alone, unable to speak the indigenous language, and without a passport, money, or clothes. Camille, who grew up privileged, finally starts to learn just what it really means to be hungry. Born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, Jessica Winters Mireles holds a degree in piano performance from USC. After graduating, she began her career as a piano teacher and performer. Four children and a studio of over forty piano students later, Jessica’s life changed drastically when her youngest daughter was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of two; she soon decided that life was too short to give up on her dreams of becoming a writer, and after five years of carving out some time each day from her busy schedule, she finished Lost in Oaxaca (She Writes Press, 2020). Jessica’s work has been published in GreenPrints and Mothering magazines. She also knows quite a bit about Oaxaca, as her husband is an indigenous Zapotec man from the highlands of Oaxaca and is a great source of inspiration. She lives with her husband and family in Santa Barbara and has transformed her front yard into an English Garden. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A frustrated prince out to make a name for himself, a mysterious young woman who goes by the name of the Sunshield Bandit, and a prisoner named Tamsin — Emily B. Martin's Sunshield: A Novel (Harper Voyager, 2020) lets us get to know each character in alternating POVs, while still keeping the eventual connections hidden. Martin makes you empathize with her characters, creating the rare plot-driven book where you still feel like you’re following the travails of people who could be your friends. The Sunshield bandit is fiercely protective of her cobbled-together family, a group of escaped bond servants and slaves like herself. Along with her loyal coydog, Rat, and her friends, she subsists in the harsh desert from the gleanings of her stagecoach robberies. Since she’s constantly rescuing more enslaved children, some of them sick, her supplies don’t go far. She’s often hungry, feels guilty about not being able to help more, and has a huge chip on her shoulder. Tamsin’s problem is obvious. She’s been thrown into a stone cell, had her tongue mutilated and her hair shorn, and is looking for a way to let rescuers know where she is. It turns out Tamsin is very dear to someone in a high-placed position. Veran, the Prince of the Silverwood Mountains, seems to have fewer challenges than the other two. On duty as a translator for the ambassador of a neighboring country, Veran has come to the nation of Moquoia as part of the Eastern countries’ effort to stop indentured servitude. At first, his biggest problem is the blisters the shoes of Moquoian court leave on his feet. Soon though, Veran and his companions from the East, the Ambassador and his daughter, encounter suspicion in the Moquoian court, and become the target of serious accusations. When the Ambassador’s daughter gets sick with a mosquito-borne disease, it looks like their diplomatic mission might be over. Unless Veran takes a big chance and reaches out to the Sunshield bandit for help with the one thing that might convince the Moquoian prince to cooperate. Emily B. Martin is a park ranger during the summer and an author/illustrator the rest of the year. An avid hiker and explorer, her experiences as a ranger help inform the characters and worlds of The Outlaw Road duology and the Creatures of Light trilogy. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sunshield: A Novel (Outlaw Road, 1)

In P. W. Singer and August Cole's groundbreaking book, Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), an FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washington, DC, of the future - at once a gripping technothriller and a fact-based tour of tomorrow. America is on the brink of a revolution, one both technological and political. The science fiction of AI and robotics has finally come true, but millions are angry and fearful that the future has left them behind. After narrowly stopping a bombing at Washington’s Union Station, FBI Special Agent Lara Keegan receives a new assignment: to field-test an advanced police robot. As a series of shocking catastrophes unfolds, the two find themselves investigating a conspiracy whose mastermind is using cutting-edge tech to rip the nation apart. To stop this new breed of terrorist, their only hope is to forge a new type of partnership. Burn-In is especially chilling because it is something more than a pulse-pounding read: every tech, trend, and scene is drawn from real world research on the ways that our politics, our economy, and even our family lives will soon be transformed. Blending a techno-thriller’s excitement with nonfiction’s insight, Singer and Cole illuminate the darkest corners of the world soon to come. P.W. Singer is an expert on twenty-first-century warfare. His award-winning nonfiction books include the New York Times bestseller Wired for War. August Cole is a writer and analyst specializing in national security issues and a former defense industry reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Beth Windisch is a national security practitioner. You can tweet her @bethwindisch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution

Few science fiction writers have their vision of the future tested upon publication. But that’s what happened to Ilze Hugo, whose novel about a mysterious epidemic, The Down Days (Skybound Books, 2020), debuted in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. “For it to be published right in the middle of all this is the most surreal experience,” Hugo says. Many of the book’s details are spot on: masks, online funerals, elbow bumps in lieu of handshakes. But the South African writer is frustrated that she missed a few nuances like “the way that your glasses fog up when you're wearing a mask … or the fact that you get acne.” “Something that you can't really understand until you’ve experienced it is how at the beginning of [the Covid-19 pandemic], everyone was taking it fairly seriously, and they were quarantining and self-isolating. Now if you go to the shop, you have people acting as if we're not in a pandemic at all. It's as if people can only emotionally stress about it or think about it for a certain period of time and then they go back to their lives.” While contagious, the illness in The Down Days is unusual: people laugh themselves to death. As surreal as this sounds, Hugo was inspired by a real event—the Tanganyika laughter epidemic, which in 1962 reportedly affected nearly 1,000 individuals. Although the story doesn’t explicitly mention the devastating—and ongoing—impact of apartheid, Hugo says it’s woven into the fabric of the story. “I think every single South African novel ever written is about apartheid in some way even though it doesn't necessarily mention it because it's such a fresh issue for us that we are all constantly aware of it. Just the way that the characters interact with each other and through small comments, it's always on the surface.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Down Days: A Novel

Youthful arrogance. Hipster alienation. A lot of reading. A lot of drinking. Struggles to adjust to a land radically different from the one that one has left in youth. Intense wrestling with nearly every major intellectual trend of the last few decades (from hardcore Marxism to intersectionality) to a searing admission of one’s own seeming worthlessness, and, finally, redemption in the Catholic faith via fateful encounters in London and New York with the aesthetic and spiritual power of the Catholic Mass. That is the outline of the story told by the noted journalist and public intellectual, Sohrab Ahmari in his 2019 memoir, From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith (Ignatius Press). You don’t have to be a Catholic to be moved by this book. The unrest in our streets and even politically-motivated violence by young people who find the very notions of Western Civilization and American ideals and institutions irredeemably oppressive and ripe for toppling render this book invaluable for wannabe-revolutionaries and for those who know and care about such lost souls. Ahmari is deeply versed in nearly every school of political and sociocultural thought. His book will save troubled young people hours of reading in dead-end, left-leaning social theory. Be it Foucault, political Islam, pop culture from Pink Floyd to Star Wars—Ahmari’s got it covered. In this instant classic of the memoir genre, we learn what it’s like to be raised by bohemian parents in the Islamic Republic of Iran and then to be whisked off to Mormon-dominated, small-town Utah and what it’s like to be a deracinated, angry young man assumed by his now fellow Americans to be a devout Muslim but who is actually, in turn, a fervent Nietzschean, a randy, hook-up-seeking, boozy young leftist and, by his own account, an obnoxious, self-centered, louche young professional in careerist global cities. We encounter along the way well-meaning, earnest but vapid evangelical Christians and Jesus of Nazareth mediated for us by Pope Benedict XVI and diversity trainers who urge Ahmari to rail against discrimination he has not experienced. For those of us who are not Catholics, the book provides fascinating insights into the process of conversion to the faith and shows how demanding that process is intellectually and in terms of spiritual self-examination. The book also introduces us to Ahmari, the man. And given his increasing prominence on the public policy stage and his key role in the current intellectual renaissance among conservative Catholic intellectuals and the fierce debate between social conservatives (Catholic and non-Catholic) and others on the right—(not to mention their critiques of the left) about the path forward, this is must reading. It is also beautifully written. Give a listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith

So Are You to My Thoughts (Lightly Held Books, 2020 is the seventh novel in a series about the Mikkelson siblings and loosely based loosely on the author’s family. Kronlokken’s earlier novels in the series began with stories from the 1950’s and this latest installment brings us into the new century. As the book opens, sometime in the nineties, widowed Marty (Margaret) is happily living with a wonderful divorced winemaker and his four children in the hills above Santa Cruz. Line (Caroline) and her husband have returned home to Santa Cruz after several years abroad. And Paul, still in Minnesota, is grappling with his wife’s cancer. As the decade unfolds, children grow up and move on, problems are confronted, spirituality is explored, and the loving bonds of this large family continue to pull them all together. Connie Kronlokken grew up in a large Norwegian/Dutch family and spent her childhood in small towns across Minnesota, North Dakota, and Iowa. She went to a Lutheran College and completed her master’s in library science at the University of Michigan. In 1969 she and her husband moved to San Francisco, where she worked as an office manager in large architectural firms and a database manager at a wine brokerage. She studied filmmaking in Denmark, and writes two blogs. Kronlokhen published two novels and a book of essays before embarking on the So Are You to My Thoughts series. Now living in Los Angeles, she enjoys cooking and gardening, and has studied yang style tai chi for over thirty years. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

So Are You to My Thoughts

Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity—the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter with an infant? In Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History (Sarah Crichton Books, 2020), Sarah Knott creates a genre all her own in order to craft a new kind of historical interpretation. Blending memoir and history and building from anecdote, her book brings the past and the present viscerally alive. As a history, Mother: An Unconventional History draws on the terrain of Britain and North America from the seventeenth century to the close of the twentieth. Knott searches among a range of past societies, from those of Cree and Ojibwe women to tenant farmers in Appalachia; from enslaved people on South Carolina rice plantations to tenement dwellers in New York City and London’s East End. She pores over diaries, letters, court records, medical manuals, items of clothing. And she explores and documents her own experiences. Dr. Julia M. Gossard is assistant professor of history and distinguished assistant professor of honor’s education at Utah State University. A historian of 18th-century France, Julia’s manuscript, Young Subjects: Childhood, State-Building, & Social Reform in the 18th-century French World (forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s UP), examines children as important actors in social reform, state-building, and imperial projects across the early modern French world. Dr. Gossard is active on Twitter. To learn more about her teaching, research, and experience in digital humanities, visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mother Is a Verb: An Unconventional History

Jennifer J. Davis speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, about The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020), Jeffers’s latest collection of poems centered on the remarkable life of America’s first poet of African descent, Phillis Wheatley Peters. The Society of Early Americanists recently selected The Age of Phillis as the subject for their Common Reading Initiative for 2021. Prof. Jeffers has published four additional volumes of poetry including The Glory Gets and The Gospel of Barbecue, and alongside fiction and critical essays. She lives in Norman, Oklahoma. In The Age of Phillis, Jeffers draws on fifteen years of research in archives and locations across America, Europe and Africa to envision the world of Phillis Wheatley Peters : from the daily rhythms of her childhood in Senegambia, the trauma of her capture and transatlantic transport, to the icy port of Boston where she was enslaved and educated. In our conversation, Jeffers speaks to the origins of this project, reveals how she embarked on the research and writing process, and shares a few powerful poems from the volume. Jennifer J. Davis is Associate Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and the Co-Editor of the Journal of Women’s History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

London, 1892. Private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn have been tasked by the Prime Minister to deliver a satchel to the Vatican. The satchel contains a document desperately desired by the German government, an unnamed first-century gospel. With secret societies, government assassins, political groups, and shadowy figures of all sorts doing everything they can to acquire the satchel and its contents—attacks, murders, counterattacks, even massive street battles, and with a cold war brewing between England and Germany—this small task might be beyond even the prodigious talents of Cyrus Barker. Join us, as we speak with author Will Thomas about his recent book, Lethal Pursuit, the eleventh historical mystery novel in the Barker & Llewelyn series. Will Thomas is the author of the Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn series, which includes Blood is Blood, Old Scores, Hell Bay, and the Shamus and Barry Award-nominated Some Danger Involved. He lives with his family in Oklahoma. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Seminary, and the author of Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?(2015) and Exodus Old and New (2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of the Book of Leviticus (New Studies in Biblical Theology, Volume 37)

Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (Essential Studies in Biblical Theology)

Lethal Pursuit: A Barker & Llewelyn Novel (A Barker & Llewelyn Novel, 11)

During the first few stories, we think the book centers on Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor whose parents converted out of Judaism to save him from centuries of oppression. He and his third wife, Greta, are forced to mourn the accidental death of their youngest child, a trauma that affects them deeply but differently. Only after several stories focused on Manfred’s upbringing and young adulthood do we realize that the protagonist is his wife and then widow, Greta. Starting in Mexico, the stories shift back and forth in time and place, from Europe to Chicago to Door County, Wisconsin. We follow Greta’s emotional journey, spiritual longings, and religious awakening as she survives the complexities of a full life. Today I talked to Maggie Kast about her new book Side by Side but Never Face to Face: A Novella and Stories (Orison Books, 2020) Kast received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Rosebud, Paper Street and others. A chapter of her memoir, published in ACM/Another Chicago Magazine, won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle, and Superstition Review and have been anthologized in Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press) and Gravity Pulls You In: Perspectives on Parenting Children on the Autism Spectrum (Woodbine House). Kast is a Board Member of Links Hall, an incubator and presenter of dance and performance art in Chicago. When not writing, Maggie loves cooking, and although she loves traditional midwestern food, also specialized in Viennese cuisine. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her healthy, awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Side by Side but Never Face to Face: A Novella & Stories

Going back and forth in time, Evangeline (Evie) recalls the challenges of being raised on a lush island off the coast of California. Her mother has left Evie and her father, and her father raises Evie from the age of three. He’s a jack-of-all-trades but survives by selling a specially grown variety of marijuana. And although he provides her with adventure and a deep love of the ocean, Evie’s father doesn’t show up as a consistent adult in her life. The book opens just before her wedding, when a storm is brewing, her fiancé is out at sea, and a dead whale beaches, which causes a pervading smell of decay across the island. Evie’s mostly absent mother suddenly shows up wanting to participate in the joy of her daughter’s wedding. In flashbacks and musings, Evie confronts her abandonment, guilt, anger and ultimately her love for all creatures - including her parents, her husband, her best friend, and her best friend’s child. With sporadic notes from Evie’s research on wales and sea life, this is a novel to savor while either gazing out to sea or imagining it. Crissy Van Meter is a writer based in Los Angeles. Creatures: A Novel (Algonquin Books) is her debut novel. She teaches creative writing at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder of the literary project Five Quarterly and the managing editor for Nouvella Books. She serves on the board of directors for the literary non-profit Novelly. Crissy loves going to Disneyland and has been an annual passholder since she was 5. She’s been to Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, Walt Disney World, and she plans to visit the remaining Disney parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Creatures: A Novel

A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too close. The young, broken-hearted mother devotes herself to searching for her missing daughter. Alternating between Jamaica and Brooklyn, NY, she is disappointed again and again, until seventeen years go by and she happens to see the photo of the man who took her baby. Now he is a priest. In beautiful, wrenching prose, Hemans' Tea by the Sea (Red Hen Press) tells an unforgettably moving story of family love, identity, and betrayal. Jamaican-born Donna Hemans is the author of the novels River Woman, winner of the 2003–4 Towson University Prize for Literature, and Tea by the Sea, for which she won the Lignum Vitae Una Marson Award for Adult Literature. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the The Caribbean Writer, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Electric Literature, Ms. Magazine, among others. She received her undergraduate degree from Fordham University and an MFA from American University. She lives in Greenbelt, Maryland. When she’s not writing, she plays tennis and runs the DC Writers Room, a co-working studio for writers. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tea by the Sea

Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books, 2020), the debut collection by Sarah Sala, is an amalgam of American life. The poems move deftly within a world that is equal parts dangerous, celebratory, subdued, modern, and rural. Sala uses format and form to bring the spotlight to American violence with just as much care as she does queerness. From the gentle retelling of a brutal murder to the capturing of memories beginning to fade from a grandmother's mind, Devil's Lake honors each of its topics. It is through the collection's three sections readers are invited to look not only at themselves, but each other for the threads that hold in that which makes us who we are. Sarah M. Sala is a poet, educator, and native of Michigan with degrees from the University of Michigan and New York University. She is the recipient of fellowships from Poets House, The Ashbery Home School, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her work appears in BOMB, Poetry Ireland Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Southampton Review, among others. The founding director of Office Hours Poetry Workshop, and assistant poetry editor for the Bellevue Literary Review, she teaches expository writing at New York University and lives in Washington Heights with her wusband. Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Devil's Lake

Sitting on the porch swing at her family’s vacation house, Mazie sees an old woman cutting through the orchard across the way and offers her a glass of water. Before long, they are playing cards every morning, and Mazie, triggered by the place that holds many childhood memories, begins sharing stories with her new friend, Lula. As Mazie reveals more about her past, she begins to question how Lula happened to come into view that morning, and how she herself made her way back to the orchard. Today I talked to Barbara Monier about her new novel The Rocky Orchard (Amika Press, 2020). Monier studied writing at Yale University and the University of Michigan, but she has been writing since she could hold a chubby pencil. While at Michigan, she received the Avery and Jule Hopwood Prize. Before The Rocky Orchard’s release, her three previous novels are You, In Your Green Shirt, A Little Birdie Told Me , and Pushing the River. Ms. Monier lives in Chicago, where a breathtaking view of Lake Michigan inspires her writing, except when it distracts her and makes writing anything completely impossible. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up byau going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Rocky Orchard

On this special kids-at-home episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews middle grade reader author Kristin O’Donnell Tubb about The Story Collector (Henry Holt, 2018), the first book in the New York Public Library series. The Story Collector is a middle-grade historical fiction book inspired by the real life of Viviani Fedeler. Joining the interview is a real-life 10 year old reader, Airlyin Washburn, sharing her favorite parts of the story and a book talk originally slated for the presentation at TomeCon 2020. Eleven-year-old Viviani Fedeler has spent her whole life in the New York Public Library. She knows every room by heart, except the ones her father keeps locked. When Viviani becomes convinced that the library is haunted, new girl Merit Mubarak makes fun of her. So Viviani decides to play a harmless little prank, roping her older brothers and best friend Eva to help out. But what begins as a joke quickly gets out of hand, and soon Viviani and her friends have to solve two big mysteries: Is the Library truly haunted? And what happened to the expensive new stamp collection? It's up to Viviani, Eva, and Merit (reluctantly) to find out. Illustrations by Iacopo Bruno. We hope you enjoyed listening as much as we enjoyed chatting about this fascinating book. Connect with your host, Lee Pierce, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for interview previews, the best book selfies, and new episode alerts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Story Collector: A New York Public Library Book (The Story Collector, 1)

This, my first podcast for the New Books Network, was a hard one … but, a good one. Listen in, as I talk cancer, parenting, writing, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet with my former professor and mentor, author Eric LeMay about his new chapbook, Remember Me: An Essay (CutBank 2020). When I first read this beautiful gut-punch of an essay, where LeMay explores his relationship with his young son alongside his experience with a surprise cancer diagnosis, I was prompted by LeMay’s words to remember Hamlet crying out to the image of his father, saying: “Alas, poor ghost!” That father-ghost replying, “Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.” So, listeners, “lend thy serious hearing” as LeMay and I talk intimately about the desire to be remembered while simultaneously letting that remembering take place outside and away from the self that is happening now and now and now and now. Ellee Achten is a writer and editor exploring issues of home, health, memory, and attachment. She writes everything from magazine features to lyrical memoir to sci-fi novels. She is currently working on many projects, including a collection of essays about the traumatic connection between the body and mind. She can be reached at: elleeachten@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Perhaps in anticipation of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice, or just the reality that the last survivors will not be with us much longer, World War II has dominated the genre of historical fiction for some time. But two years before Hitler’s aggression against Poland set off the conflagration in Europe, imperial Japan occupied China, capturing Shanghai and Nanjing before launching bombing forays westward. In The Library of Legends (William Morrow, 2020), Janie Chang draws on family stories and ancient legends to weave a fact-based yet mystical tale about this period in China’s long history. The novel focuses on a group of university students evacuated from Nanjing as the Japanese army approaches. Eager to defend their cultural heritage, the students embrace the task assigned to them: safeguarding an encyclopedia of lore compiled during the early Ming dynasty five hundred years before. Hu Lian, a scholarship recipient from a single-parent family, encounters Liu Shaoming and his enigmatic former servant, Sparrow Chen, just as the students are starting on their long and difficult journey west. Friendship, even romance, blossoms between Lian and Shao—a love she does not trust because he comes from a background far wealthier than her own. But after a communist student agitator is murdered and suspicion falls on another of Lian’s friends, it is Shao and Sparrow who support Lian as she leaves the convoy to search for her mother. Only on the road east does Lian realize that the volume of the Legends entrusted to her includes a tale that may illuminate not only the elusive connection between her traveling companions but the destiny of China itself. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Library of Legends: A Novel

Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020) tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistance to systemic racism earns him a one-way ticket to jail. Onyebuchi’s first novel for adults is as much a tale of the siblings’ bond as it is a portrait of white supremacy, police brutality, and the anger of Black Americans at centuries of injustice. The book’s publication just months before the murder of George Floyd and the Covid-19 pandemic might seem prescient, yet the novel could have been written at any point in the last several decades (or centuries) and still felt timely. Kev is born during the riots in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King. A few years later, the police killing of Sean Bell leads Ella to run away from home, afraid that her anger, harnessed to the supernatural powers she can’t yet control, might cause her to hurt those she loves. “She's changed as a result of having seen [Sean Bell’s murder] in a way that I think a lot of people were changed when they saw footage of Laquan McDonald's death or Philando Castile’s, these immensely traumatic visual experiences,” Onyebuchi says. Onyebuchi rejects the notion that anger must be productive. “When I started writing Riot Baby, I was very angry, and I feel like one of the things that happens during these periods of American unrest, particularly along a racialized vector, is this idea of productivity, that the anger has to be productive,” he says. “And there was a part of me, a very large part of me, that was essentially ‘Screw that. I'm not here for respectability politics.’ Black people have been playing the respectability politics game since time immemorial. And in the history of modern America, what has it gotten us? And that was a lot of what powered the omnipresence of anger in the book, this idea that it doesn't have to be productive.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Riot Baby

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of nostalgia and melancholy offer today’s readers an unusual glimpse into China’s turbulent twentieth century. The translations in Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic. (Stone Bridge Press, 2020)--spanning a period of some thirty years, from 1937 until 1965--bring to life some of Xu Xu’s most representative short fictions from prewar Shanghai and postwar Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Afterword illustrates that Xu Xu’s idealistic tendencies in defiance of the politicization of art exemplify his affinity with European romanticism and link his work to global literary modernity. Frederik H. Green is an associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and culture of the Qing dynasty and the Republican Period, Sino-Japanese cultural relations, post-socialist Chinese cinema, and contemporary Chinese art. He holds a BA in Chinese Studies from Cambridge University and an MPhil and PhD in Chinese literature from Yale University. He is a translator of Chinese and associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic

From the New York Times, best selling author Erica Bauermeister comes House Lessons: Renovating a Life (Sasquatch Books, 2020). This memoir is about the power of home, and the transformative act of restoring one house in particular. In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes readers on a journey to discover the ways our spaces subliminally affect us. A personal, accessible, and literary exploration of the psychology of architecture, as well as a loving tribute to the connections we forge with the homes we care for and live in, this book is designed for anyone who's ever fallen head over heels for a house. It is also a story of a marriage, of family, and of the kind of roots that settle deep into your heart. Discover what happens when a house has its own lessons to teach in this moving and insightful memoir that ultimately shows us how to make our own homes (and lives) better. Erica Bauermeister is the bestselling author of four novels, and the co-author of two works of non-fiction: 500 Great Books by Women: A Reader's Guide and Let's Hear It For the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. She has a PhD in literature from the University of Washington and has taught there and at Antioch University. She is a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers and currently lives in Port Townsend, Washington, in the house she renovated with her family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

House Lessons: Renovating a Life

Abandoned by his parents and raised by a strong-willed grandmother and her live-in friend, Claude McKay Love just wants to have friends and fit in at school or on the playground. He faces all the usual hurdles of growing up, with the additional challenge of being black. And he lives in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, formerly home of both Michelle Obama and Kanye West. It’s packed with beautiful old homes and sits on the lakefront about 9 miles from downtown Chicago, but it was a food desert for a number of years and missed out on much of Chicago’s growth and expansion. Claude has to navigate past gangs, drug wars, and a riot in which seventy neighbors and friends are killed. He also falls in love. In Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), Gabriel Bump has created an unforgettable debut novel that will sometimes make you laugh, and sometimes pull at your gut. Gabriel Bump grew up in South Shore, Chicago. His work has appeared in: McSweeney’s, Guernica, Electric Literature, SLAM, and elsewhere. Everywhere You Don’t Belong is his first novel. His second novel is forthcoming, also from Algonquin. He was awarded the 2016 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction and the 2015 Summer Literary Seminars Montreal Flash Fiction Prize. He received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He currently lives in Buffalo, New York, where he teaches at Just Buffalo Literary Center and University at Buffalo. When he’s not writing or reading, Gabriel enjoys playing video games and starting, sometimes finishing, long boring history books. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Everywhere You Don't Belong

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, and co-founder and chair of the World Science Festival. He is well known for his TV mini-series about string theory and the nature of reality, including the Elegant Universe, which tied in with his best-selling 2000 book of the same name. In this episode, we talk about his latest popular book Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Random House, 2020) Until the End of Time gives the reader a theory of everything, both in the sense of a “state of the academic union”, covering cosmology and evolution, consciousness and computation, and art and religion, and in the sense of showing us a way to apprehend the often existentially challenging subject matter. Greene uses evocative autobiographical vignettes in the book to personalize his famously lucid and accessible explanations, and we discuss these episodes further in the interview. Greene also reiterates his arguments for embedding a form of spiritual reverie within the multiple naturalistic descriptions of reality that different areas of human knowledge have so far produced. John Weston is a University Teacher of English in the Language Centre at Aalto University, Finland. His research focuses on academic communication. He can be reached at john.weston@aalto.fi and @johnwphd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

At the dawn of the new millennium, Els Gordon finds herself adrift – she’s in mourning for her fiancé and her father, she’s lost the inheritance of her Scottish Highlands estate, her mother left when she was two-years-old but it her only living relative, she’s about to be unemployed, and she’s just bought an old plantation house on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. It’s a little haunted by the previous owner, who needs help making amends, and in exchange, helps Els fall in love with a man who has, like Els, survived heartache and loss. Listen in as I speak with Alice C. Early about her book The Moon Always Rising (She Writes Press, 2020). Early ’s career spans academia, commercial real estate, international executive recruiting, and career-transition coaching, and has included many ‘first woman to…’ roles. Her college English/creative writing major and professional roles requiring listening and shaping stories eventually pointed her back to her first love—writing fiction. In her cherished Martha’s Vineyard community, Alice sings in a local group and fosters sustainability and women’s rights and voices. An avid gardener and cook, she nurtures friends and neighbors with local bounty and her experiments in gluten-free baking. Alice and her husband have visited Nevis annually since 1996 and otherwise share a hand-built life in view of the sea. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Moon Always Rising: A Novel

Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sister, Sanda, a gunner who finds herself waking 230 years after her last battle on an empty, enemy spaceship, believing she’s the last human alive. O’Keefe’s characters search for truth in a universe where the secrets are centuries old and where A.I.s depend on humans as much as humans depend on A.I.s. Among the many themes O’Keefe’s space opera explores are the limits of human perception. In Sanda’s case, her reality is controlled by a spaceship. “They are elements of horror when you can’t trust the environment you live in, when the only thing keeping you alive might be dishonest,” O’Keefe says. O’Keefe challenges Tolstoy’s claim that “all happy families are alike” by giving Biran and Sanda an upbringing in their two-dad home that is as happy as it is unique. “I enjoy taking the opportunity to explore a family that is actually united—they have their squabbles, of course—but they love each other and are trying to do the right thing in an impossible situation.” Velocity Weapon, which was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award, is the first book in O’Keefe’s Protectorate trilogy. The second book, Chaos Vector, is scheduled for publication in July. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Velocity Weapon (The Protectorate, 1)

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invites readers into a life unfurling. Through the lenses of natural hair, faith, and microaggressions, she lights a path to what it means to seek self while still honoring the past lives, personal and historical, that connect us all. Black Was Not a Label (Pronto, 2019) is as soft as it is sharp. Ross is a writer of humanness, one who finds more interest in what we feel than theme. Yet, even in this general warmth, she manages to hone in on topics that have rippled throughout generations. Readers are not allowed to look away from the sometimes ingrained expectations of assimilation nor are we allowed to put down the weight of all that came before us. What she gives us in this collection are the means to carry it with grace and the hope it will become a little lighter. Kathryn Ross is a Southern California based writer and editor. Her works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have previously appeared in Sybil Literary Journal, MORIA Literary Magazine, Linden Avenue, and Crack the Spine. She is a columnist at Pasadena Now where she writes about race and culture and a poetry and essay reviewer for Whale Road Review and The Rumpus, respectively. She completed her MA in English and Creative Writing at Azusa Pacific University and loves cats, baths, and rose slushies. Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Black Was Not a Label: A Collection

Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. The original Nick, who starts out working on an ostrich farm, is drawn to the Colorado Street Bridge and manages to meet some of the great personalities of the period: Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair and Adolphus Busch all meet Nick. He parlays an idea for lighting into a job on the bridge and survives the lethal collapse of one of its arches during construction. Eighty years later, on the anniversary of the bridge’s inauguration, the second Nick Chance is pulled into rectifying the mistakes of the past. Pasadena, which had a millionaire’s row even back then, is nothing like the original, romanticized version of the town. There’s some magical realism, lots of fascinating historical detail about Pasadena and southern California, and lots of eating. Today I talked to Chip Jacobs about his new book Arroyo (Rare Birds Books, 2019) Jacobs is a Los Angeles Times bestselling author and journalist. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up byau going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Arroyo: A Novel

Jim, our narrator, experiences a crisis of conscience in the wake of the possible suicide of his girlfriend. He quits his high-paying job seizing assets for a loan company and moves to a small village near the seaside to get away from it all. With no plans to occupy himself, and a golden parachute from his company, Jim finds himself with a lot of time on his hands—time that he hopes will help him heal from his loss. Instead, odd and spooky events immediately begin occurring. After he hears sounds from the empty attic, he finds out from his new friend, handyman Jed, that a little girl died falling down the steps. Soon, Jim begins to doubt that the little girl’s death was an accident. Jed, and a kindly neighbor, Emma, believe in supernatural visitations, and explain that he is receiving warnings from ghosts. Yet, some of the things that happen to Jim, like gas from the stove filling the cottage, seem too real to be ascribed to ghosts. Is Jim going mad, doing things he’s unaware of, or is there a real threat to his own well-being? Even Jed and Emma begin to wonder. Listen in as I talk to S. M. Hardy about The Evil Within (Allison and Busby, 2020). Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Evil Within (Dark Devon Mysteries, 1)

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect Books, 2018) collects four plays by Caridad Svich, a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement playwright. The plays take place in Venezuela, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southwest Detroit, as well as cyberspace and the place of dreams. In these works, Svich interrogates themes of globalization and environmental collapse in language that is poetic, rough, heart-breaking, hip, and relentlessly now. Svich remains one of America’s most exciting playwrights, and this book collects some of her most invigorating work yet. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Playtext)

"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'" On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion. In a memoir by turns insightful and outlandish, Fleming combines meticulous observation with a keen sense of the absurdity of his actions. He describes the intricacies of drug use and acquisition, the impact of drugs on the intellect and emotions, and the chaos that emerges as his tightly managed existence unravels into hospitalisations, arrests and family breakdown. His account is accompanied by searching reflections on his childhood, during which he developed acute obsessive compulsive disorder and became fixated on the rituals of martial arts, music-making and bodybuilding. In confronting the pathos and comedy of his drug use in Sydney, On Drugs also opens out into meditations on the self and its deceptions, religion, masculinity, mental illness, and the tortuous path to recovery. On Drugs is a uniquely Australian experience of a universal quest for oblivion. Dr Matthew Thompson is a literary journalism specialist recently with the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia but now based in the USA. Dr Thompson has a special focus on the conflict areas of the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao in the southern Philippines. He is the author of MAYHEM, Running With The Blood God, and My Colombian Death. For more information visit https://matthewthompsonwriting.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On Drugs

In a sad but loving tribute to his Sicilian-Italian heritage, Marco Rafala’s debut novel How Fires End (Little A, 2019) centers on the haunting legacy of WWII on the people of a small Sicilian village. It’s the summer of 1943 and an unexploded mortar shell kills 9-year-old Salvatore’s twin brothers. His faith is destroyed, and his family unravels, fueling fear that the Vassallo name is cursed. Salvatore and his sister, Nella, accept the help of a fascist Italian soldier, Vincenzo, who accompanies them to a new life in America. But the three of them make the choice to keep their secrets hidden, and years later in America, Salvatore’s son, David, is swept up in the chaotic aftermath of their hidden pasts. This is a story about loyalty, family, and forgiveness. Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American, novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games (e.g. The One Ring). He earned his MFA in fiction from The New School and is a co-curator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and LitHub. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. And when not working, reading or writing, Rafalà loves walking in the cemetery with his partner. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How Fires End: A Novel

Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces (53rd State Press, 2019) is Lana Lesley’s graphic novelization of Lipstick Traces by Austin-based theatre collective Rude Mechs, itself an adaptation of Greil Marcus’ classic book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. The graphic novel vibrantly recreates the experience of watching Rude Mechs perform: light and sound cues, costume choices, and actors’ facial expressions are preserved much more faithfully here than they could ever be in a traditional script. From 16th-century mystic John of Leyden to 20th-century punk Johnny Rotten (born John Lydon – coincidence?), this imaginative and immersive work traces the secret history of a tradition of revolt that is perhaps more needed now than it has ever been. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA program at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. His plays have been produced, developed, or presented at IRT, Pipeline Theatre Company, The Gingold Group, Dixon Place, Roundabout Theatre, Epic Theatre Company, Out Loud Theatre, Naked Theatre Company, Contemporary Theatre of Rhode Island, and The Trunk Space. He is currently working on a series of 50 plays about the 50 U.S. states. His website is AndyJBoyd.com, and he can be reached at andyjamesboyd@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces

Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship. The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home and family. “As a little girl, I thought sexism was on the way out. And in the last few years, I’ve realized, ‘Oh no, it’s definitely not,’” Lam says, discussing her motivations to write the book. When NASA confiscates the spacecraft of Valerie Black, a billionaire entrepreneur who Lam describes as a “cross between Elon Musk and Sigourney Weaver,” Black steals it back. She and her crew “know they’re the best people with the skills and training to find this new planet, which is humanity’s last hope because Earth has only 30 years left of habitability due to climate change,” Lam says. Lam found inspiration in the unsung women who’ve played a role in the history of spaceflight, including the Mercury 13, a group of women who’d passed the same physiological tests as the seven men of the Mercury project in the late 1950s. “The Mercury 13 really helped me focus the book. … There are all these women who have been influential in space flight, but we still haven’t had a woman on the Moon,” Lam says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Goldilocks

It is well known that the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), which enjoyed at best a modest success during her lifetime, have become ever more popular in the last fifty years or so. They support a small industry of remakes, spinoffs, and retellings. As Janice Hadlow notes while discussing The Other Bennet Sister (Henry Holt, 2020), one reason for that interest lies with Austen herself. A genius at characterization, Austen drops tiny pearls of insight into one secondary character or another throughout her novels, and these seeds, when properly nurtured, can develop in unexpected ways. The Other Bennet Sister focuses on the life of the middle sister in Pride and Prejudice. Stuck between an older pair—beautiful, gentle Jane and pretty, sprightly Lizzie—and a younger duo whose good looks and sheer love of life compensate for a certain lack of decorum, Mary is bookish, awkward, and plain. In a family where the daughters’ only future requires them to marry well without the plump dowries that would make them attractive to men of their own gentry class, Mary’s traits doom her (at least in her mother’s eyes) to an unhappy and lonely spinsterhood. Even her scholarly father underestimates Mary, because she lacks the wit and self-confidence that so distinguishes Lizzie, his favorite. Hadlow has given deep thought to what it would mean to grow up as Mary—what she wants, how she feels, which twists of fate and family turn her into the character we meet so briefly in Austen’s novel. But then The Other Bennet Sister goes beyond Pride and Prejudice to imagine how the Marys of the world might find happiness, even in the early nineteenth century. It is a captivating and heartening story, and you need not be an Austen fan to appreciate the journey. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Other Bennet Sister: A Novel

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear them. Shaw shows us what it might mean to listen deeply and profoundly, with our minds, yes, but also with our souls, our spirits, our very bones. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Courting the Wild Twin

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as Princeton University, Harvard University, Oberlin College, Emory University, and the University of Alabama. Though the roots of Slavery and the University stem from a 2011 conference at Emory University, the collection extends outward to incorporate recent findings. As such, it offers a roadmap to one of the most exciting developments in the field of U.S. slavery studies and to ways of thinking about racial diversity in the history and current practices of higher education. Today I spoke with Leslie Harris about the book. Dr. Harris is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia). Adam McNeil is a History PhD student at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies

In this interview we discuss Fight Fight (Braveship Books, 2018), book 3 of the Raven One series. In Fight Fight, former aviator Kevin Miller explores the next big fight in the South China Sea when errors and miscalculations on the grandest scale drive the world’s greatest maritime powers into conflict. From aboard a nuclear powered super-carrier in the center of the maelstrom readers get a front row seat to the action as well as the planning and deliberation that goes into waging war. In Fight Fight the reader experiences the angst of a pilot about to catapult into the night sky and the frustration of being at the end of a long decision-making whip. Captain Miller also successfully paints the fog of modern war where near instant communications and extremely effective sensors give the decision-makers the illusion of knowledge. As an avid fan of military fiction, I have had an itch for this particular type of book since the Late Tom Clancy left the literary field. Consider the itch scratched. In the interview we also discuss the wider strategic and tactical realities that would face US Naval forces in any campaign in the South China Sea, and the policy decisions that effect that environment. Captain Kevin Miller, a 24-year veteran of the U.S. Navy, is a former tactical naval aviator and has flown the A-7E Corsair II and FA-18C Hornet operationally. He commanded a carrier-based strike-fighter squadron, and, during his career, logged over 1,000 carrier-arrested landings, made possible as he served alongside outstanding men and women as part of a winning team. Captain Miller lives and writes in Pensacola, Florida. Fight Fight is the third novel in his Flip Wilson series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fight Fight

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with the translator’s own transformative journey rending into English the meaning, emotion, cadence and kaleidoscopic brilliance proper to this Tamil masterpiece. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Endless Song

After a decade spent protecting public officials, Nick Averose has the unique ability to think like an assassin. Now he works as a red-teamer, who tests security systems to find vulnerabilities. His latest assignment, to assess the security of a former CIA director’s home, goes horribly wrong, and Nick gets entangled in a vicious crime that rocks Washington D.C. He knows he’s been framed, and now they’re out to kill him. But who are they, and what do they want? Today I spoke with Matthew Quirk about his new book Hour of the Assassin (William Morrow, 2020). Quirk is the New York Times bestselling author of The 500, The Directive, Cold Barrel Zero, and Dead Man Switch. He studied history and literature at Harvard College and spent five years at The Atlantic reporting on crime, private military contractors, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. His first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award, and he lives in San Diego, California. When he is not writing, he spends his time hiking, skiing, and surfing. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books Network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hour of the Assassin: A Novel

Margaret Randall’s new memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was published by Duke University Press in March 2020. Randall, born in New York City in 1936, lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua as an adult, where she was involved in both creative movements and political activism. Known as a writer and oral historian, Randall focuses in this memoir on recreating the communities and historical moments in which she lived. Randall especially emphasizes how her encounter with feminist thinking reshaped how she understood not only her own life, but also the Latin American revolutions she saw up from up close. In the interview, she speaks about her work founding and editing the bilingual literary journal El Corno Emplumado in 1960s Mexico, her experiences connecting with artists and revolutionaries in 1970s Cuba, and her perspective on the 1979 Sandinista revolution from her years living in Nicaragua. Randall talks about the nature of memory and shares some details of her everyday life in extraordinary times and places. Rachel Grace Newman is Lecturer in the History of the Global South at Smith College. She has a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University, and she writes about elite migration, education, transnationalism, and youth in twentieth-century Mexico. She is also the author of a book on a binational program for Mexican migrant children. She is on Twitter (@rachelgnew). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary

The Houston Chronicle’s review of Sarah Adleman’s The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun 2019) praises that the book “dissects the feelings that have been a part of her since her mother's death with the precision and brutality of a poet and all the awful beauty of a perfectly performed major surgery...It's one of the most beautiful things you're likely to read.” Adleman’s collection, a gorgeous hybrid of poetry and memoir, is a journey through grief and forgiveness. The author’s debut book uses both the personal and the informative to examine and preserve the loss, grief, and cleansing set in motion by her mother’s death. She honors her mother not only in the crafting of these shared memories, but also in the actual formatting of the text itself. Adleman gives her mother voice by including her own work interwoven throughout the retelling. The author does not shy away from the heaviness of absence, her personal reaction to the events, and especially not the profound changes to her father. She unfurls these emotions in the light and scrubs away the haze. She leaves us with the “bliss at the core of our beings” and challenges us to walk beside her to the other side. Sarah Adleman was born and raised between the bayous of Houston, the swamps of Louisiana, and the desert of El Paso. She was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bangladesh, studied yoga in India, and taught English in China. Sarah earned her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso and works as a Certified Yoga Therapist specializing in Traumatic Brain Injury survivors. Her work has been published, acknowledged, or is forthcoming in Kindred Magazine, Terrene, Glimmer Train, and America Writers Review. Sarah’s first book The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes is a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction and for the Eric Hoffer/da Vinci Eye Award. She lives in Denver with her husband, almost two year old son, and their thirteen year old dog. Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes

Mina completed a doctorate in Classics but can’t find a tenure track position. She earns money by teaching adjunct classes and tutoring in Latin. Mina’s husband, Oscar, who works for his distant father importing Japanese beer, hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will help with Mina’s depression. While they’re in London, she plans to work on a paper studying mythological women, only a few of whom survived. Mina wonders if she is one of the ones who is going to win the battle. Today I talked to Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Staring Days (The Overlook Press, 2020). She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel, Harmless Like You, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and NPR Great Read. She is the editor of the GO HOME! Anthology, and her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, the Guardian, and the Paris Review. When not writing or teaching, she spends her time painting, snacking on nut-butter or dried seaweed, and walking her dog. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Starling Days: A Novel

dReed Katz is in many ways an ordinary guy. He shares an apartment in Tel Aviv with his best friend, Daphne, works in a coffee shop, crushes on Lee, a green-eyed man from abroad, and dreads family dinners with his nosy mother. Yet when Reed gets on a bus he has to stand in the white marked section, and he loses his job when the coffee shop gets bombed because of “people like him.” Not only is Reed a person who feels emotions strongly, he’s actually an empath, who can manipulate other people’s emotions, preferably at their invitation, and project feelings into books. His circle of friends includes a seer, Daphne, and his ex, a pyro. They’re all considered sorcerers and feared by most norms. A secretive group, the Sons of Simeon, disrupt the peaceful marches that Reed and his friends participate in, targeting sorcerers for murder in a bid to take power for themselves. Daphne fears that Reed’s continuing presence in the movement will put him in harm’s way. Her visions tell her that Reed may die soon. But Reed, understanding that his survival may create a future in which someone else dies in his place, seems set upon his path. Not even a scorching love affair with Lee can convince him to step aside and let that happen. Join me as I talk to Keren Landsman about her new novel The Heart of the Circle (Angry Robot, 2019) Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, and the historical fantasy Falcon series. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Heart of the Circle

One summer, Joni Griffith Wexler realizes that she hasn’t paid enough attention to her life. While her sons are at sleepaway camp and her husband immersed in his work, she rushes from one impulsive decision to the next, striving unsuccessfully for clarity. It takes her two closest friends, an unexpected girls' weekend, and the surprising wisdom of a psychic medium to give her the confidence to take control of her life. Until a shocking event threatens to undo everything. Joni's story as recounted in Then She Woke Up will resonate with anyone who's ever thought, "How did I get here?" A life long writer, Jaime Baum’s background is in journalism and her prior work has appeared in magazines and newspapers such as Better, Living Without and the Sun-Times news group. She studied Journalism and History at Indiana University and spent the majority of her career in public relations. When she’s not reading or writing, Jaime loves to be outdoors walking, hiking, biking and gardening. She is a wife, mother, stepmom, daughter, sister, cat owner, dog lover and grateful friend. She loves chocolate, Paris, laughter, crimson fall leaves against a blue sky, and every woman who fights to make life better for others. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up byau going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Then She Woke Up

Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few). So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his roommate (a disembodied hand), or the hotelier (a towering eagle in a stars-and-stripes apron) whose inn serves as a rest stop for new arrivals. The Imaginary Corpse is a mashup of fairytale, comic book, noir and science fiction, making it thoroughly unclassifiable. “I set out from the beginning knowing this was a book for adults,” Hayes says. And yet it’s a noir with fuzzy edges. “The choice to make the book kind was one of my biggest driving goals… This is a kinder world than a lot of fictional worlds, than often our world is. I stuck hard on that, on the idea of community, the idea of compassion, the idea of empathizing and accepting people where they are.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Imaginary Corpse

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she takes it out of her chest sits it beside the other: two hearts on a writing desk. The vibrations send the papers flying. Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She's sold nearly 50 short stories to markets like Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and Strange Horizons. Several novellas and a collection of essays on food and horror have sold to various small presses. She is the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University, and Mary Shelley Makes A Monster is her second poetry collection. The first, Chemical Letters, was written while studying for her PhD (in science communication) and is about a woman who spends her afterlife in the periodic table. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter/Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Conversation Pieces Book 70)

Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton and O’Keeffe took art classes from the same teacher and had parallel careers in several ways, yet Pelton is relatively unknown despite a number of major exhibitions during her lifetime and one traveling the United States even as this interview airs. But Pelton’s time in the California desert is only a small part of the captivating story traced in The Pelton Papers (She Writes Press, 2020). Born in Germany, where her ex-pat parents connected while escaping family scandals and tragedies, Pelton came to New York at the age of seven. A sickly girl in a dark and brooding house, she survived her childhood with a deeply religious grandmother, an absent father, a strong-minded mother who supported the family by giving music lessons, and no social life to speak of by losing herself in colors and paint. That set her on a path that led, through training in modernism and more traditional instruction in Italy, to a deeply spiritual, intensely personal understanding of her own artistic mission. In this beautifully written novel, Mari Coates—whose own family had a long and productive friendship with Pelton—draws on stories she heard growing up and numerous other sources to portray an emotionally complex, sometimes troubled, but always gifted heroine whose resilience and eventual triumph will warm your heart. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Pelton Papers: A Novel

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong sufferer from clinical depression. In How To Be Depressed (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Scialabba presents an edited selection of his mental health records spanning decades of treatment, framed by an introduction and an interview with renowned podcaster Christopher Lydon. The book also includes a wry and ruminative collection of "tips for the depressed," organized into something like a glossary of terms—among which are the names of numerous medications he has tried or researched over the years. Together, these texts form an unusual, searching, and poignant hybrid of essay and memoir, inviting readers into the hospital and the therapy office as Scialabba and his caregivers try to make sense of this baffling disease. In Scialabba's view, clinical depression amounts to an "utter waste." Unlike heart surgery or a broken leg, there is no relaxing convalescence and nothing to be learned (except, perhaps, who your friends are). It leaves you weakened and bewildered, unsure why you got sick or how you got well, praying that it never happens again but certain that it will. Scialabba documents his own struggles and draws from them insights that may prove useful to fellow-sufferers and general readers alike. In the place of dispensable banalities—"Hold on," "You will feel better," and so on—he offers an account of how it's been for him, in the hope that doing so might prove helpful to others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How To Be Depressed

Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in the face of a devastating disease. Cora, an enslaved child during the Civil War, flees the Yarbrough plantation after her family is murdered and finds refuge at the home of a big-hearted woman. Amadahy, a Cherokee of the Wolf Clan in 1663, loses her child and husband, leaving her with a surviving child and a psychotic mother. A sacred, maternal talisman connects the three women as they search for lasting peace. It’s an emotional journey for these three women, who meet at the river. U.S. Navy veteran Shelly Hoover is the author of Timeless Sisters: Peace at the River. She earned an Ed.D. in Education from Cal State, Sacramento and retired as a public-school administrator in 2013 after being diagnosed with ALS, a terminal motor neuron disease. But physical limitations have not stopped Shelly from educating and advocating. ALS has paralyzed her body, so she types with her eyes using a Microsoft surface tablet whose camera is able to follow her eyes. Despite her physical challenges, Shelly lives in gratitude and encourages other to do the same, regardless of circumstance. She is a mother of two, a grandmother of four, and lives with her husband, Steve, in the mountains of Northern California. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Timeless Sisters: Peace at the River

The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In addition to these classical Jātaka, a number of other non-canonical Jātaka tales emerged in Southeast Asia and were widely circulated throughout the region. Collections of these tales are conventionally referred to as the Paññāsa Jātaka, or the “Fifty Jātaka”. Once considered minor and apocryphal, the Paññāsa Jātaka are now recognized as the lifeblood of the region’s literature and an important source of traditional culture. Chris Baker and Pasuk Pongpaichit have translated twenty-one of the best-known tales from the Thai collection of the Paññāsa Jātaka in their recently published book From the Fifty Jātaka: Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka (Silkworm Books, 2019). In addition to the elegant and approachable translations, Baker and Phongpaichit have included an insightful introduction on the Paññāsa Jātaka and have also provided synopses of all sixty-one tales. Both an entertaining and informative book, “From the Fifty Jātaka” will be appreciated both by the layman as well as the scholar. Please join us as we explore these fascinating tales and the origins of some risqué Thai tree names on today’s podcast. Alex Carroll studies Buddhist Studies at the University of South Wales and is primarily interested in Theravāda and early Buddhism. He lives in Oslo, Norway and can be reached via his website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

From the Fifty Jātaka: Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka

Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Carried in circles through the jungle on a stretcher, the narrator recalls how Reinhardt fueled himself with copious amounts of cocaine, built himself an outrageous castle with fake walls and trap doors, and cared nothing for the safety of those those around him, including Ulrich the dog killer, Sonja the one-legged former prostitute, and the unnamed narrator himself. The only thing that really mattered to Reinhardt, according to his amanuensis, was his search for the essence of melancholy. Mark Haber is the author of Reinhardt's Garden (Coffee House Press, 2019). He was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel and was listed as one of the Texas Observer’s Best Texas Books of the Decade. He lives in Houston, Texas, loves reading and Vietnamese soup, and is operations manager and a bookseller at Brazos Bookstore in Houston. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Reinhardt's Garden

In his novel The Shadow Wolves (Page Publishing, 2019), Jake Kaminski tells the story of Ethan Crowe, a Lakota Sioux tracker who spent a career with the Delta Forces and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Crowe's story begins in the hellish nightmare of Bosnia, where as a young scout for a Ranger company, he and two other Native Americans help track down the Skorpions, a Serbian militia committing genocide on the local populace. The action shifts to the present and the southern border of the United States. Powerful Mexican cartels are utilizing vast stretches of the border to send billions of dollars in illegal drugs into the US. Powerful drug lords preside like kings over their empires, secluded and untouchable in their remote mountain fortresses. Killing fields are being found on both sides of the border. Homeland Security needs a solution. General Darren Evans has been asked to form a special team of Native American trackers to combat the cartels where they are most vulnerable in the Arizona borderlands. The group is to be called the Shadow Wolves, and General Evans knows exactly the man to lead them. Crowe is lured out of retirement to the Arizona desert. An elite team is born, comprised of tough, dedicated Native Americans from tribes across the United States. Within the new team are two remarkable Apache women--fierce warriors who will become the soul of the Shadow Wolves. They will battle the vicious Zetas, moving through the desert landscape like ghosts. A mysterious figure sits on the throne of the Zeta cartel. Known only as Yaotl, he claims pure Aztec blood. He lives by his own rules in complete disdain for the laws of the West. A gruesome series of murders and the discovery of twenty young girls being sold in the desert set the stage for a confrontation between the feared Zetas and the Shadow Wolves. The Shadow Wolves will follow a blood trail that takes them all the way to the corridors of power in Washington, DC. Kaminski puts you inside the world of the dreaded Zeta Cartel and the heroic indian Trackers know as Shadow Wolves Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children. Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—they struggle with the age-old task of forging identities that set them apart from the definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents. “We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu says. On the episode, he discusses several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) and talks about the art of translation and the role Liu has played in introducing English-speaking readers to some of today’s great Chinese science fiction writers. Liu was on New Books in Science Fiction in 2015 to discuss the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

In military thrillers, many authors attempt to create plausible conflicts and many come up short, but James Rosone and Miranda Watson's Rigged (Front Line ,2019), Book one of "The Falling Empire Series," is a chilling what if scenario that is all too plausible. Rigged paints a tale that appears to be ripped from tomorrow's headline. A former military interrogator and military intelligence specialist, Rosone’s experience is evident in every page of the book, from portraying the interrogation of high value threats to situation room sequences full of suspense. In Rigged, an international shadow organization’s plot to unseat a controversial American President unfolds with disastrous consequences. Rosone and Watson weave a tale across years to assemble a world on the edge of the next great conflict. Invoking striking imagery and heart pounding action, Rigged is full of accounts that paint with accuracy the events of a plausible global crisis. As the truth of foreign involvement in American elections lands on headlines everywhere, Rigged is a timely thriller that places the world dead center of our worst nightmares. Coupled with a United Nations suddenly in the grips of global conspirators and insidiously emboldened with a military of its own, Rosone and Watson brew up a master-class in military thrillers unmatched since Tom Clancy’s The Bear and the Dragon. The rest of "The Falling Empire Series" pushes America deeper into that nightmare. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rigged (The Falling Empires Series)

Today I interviewed Stephen Jenkinson. He’s not only an author, an activist, a musician, and the founder of a school, but also an inspired etymologist, a spiritual trickster, and a mythopoetic storyteller cracking sticks and tossing them into a low fire as the spirits in the embers rise with his words. He’s a sorcerer of sorts who disenchants us from some of our most habitual and destructive beliefs about what it means to live and to die, to age and—in the title of his latest book—to Come of Age (North Atlantic Books, 2018). The subtitle of his book is The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, and I spoke to Stephen at a moment when our most imminent trouble seems to be the global pandemic of the coronavirus, one that—on the date of our interview, March 18, 2020—appears as though it will only grow worse and more deadly here in North America and around the globe. Yet Stephen puts this acute trouble into a larger, longer, and ultimately more troubling perspective. He leads us, as he does in his book, into the act of what he calls wondering, “without recourse to certainty or comfort” but with, perhaps the possibility of emerging more clear-eyed and attentive to the world in front of us and what it asks of our living and our dying and our time together. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead, Ricardo found the end of his mortal life, and a new one, as a renegade vampire. For over five hundred years, Ricardo has upset the established order. He has protected his found family from marauding demons, teamed up with a legendary gunslinger, appointed himself the Master of Denver, and called upon a church buried under the Vatican. He has tended bar and fended off evil werewolves. Carrie Vaughn's new book The Immortal Conquistador (Tachyon Publications, 2020) is a series of interrelated vignettes, as told to the abbot of Saint Lazarus of the Shadows by the vampire Rick d’ Avila. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Immortal Conquistador

As Maya Rodale notes early in this interview, romance novels tend not to get the same respect as other categories of fiction, historical or otherwise. Here, and in her Dangerous Books for Girls, she argues persuasively that this bad reputation is an attempt by life’s insiders to undermine the central message of most romance novels: that outsiders, too, have the right to love, success, and happiness. But the message is nowhere more evident than in her Gilded Age Girls Club series, in which a small group of wealthy women make it their goal in life to support female-run businesses and their staffs. In An Heiress to Remember (Avon Books, 2020), the heroine, Beatrice Goodwin, suffers from no lack of money; her family has plenty of it—enough to insist that their beautiful daughter wed a duke to bring them prestige in society, even though Beatrice has fallen in love with Wes Dalton, one of her father’s employees. At twenty, Beatrice gives in to her parents’ demands, but sixteen years later, she is back in New York, having scandalously divorced her duke. It is 1895, and wives are not supposed to take that kind of initiative. Beatrice finds her family situation much changed. The man she loved has gone on to build a wildly popular department store directly opposite her own, and the combination of his desire for revenge and her brother’s mismanagement has placed the family fortune in jeopardy. But Beatrice has no intention of standing by while Dalton buys her father’s cherished store out from under her and destroys it. She sets out to beat Dalton at his own game, because if anyone knows what women want from a department store, she does. And before long, Dalton has to worry that she may be right. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions, a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An Heiress to Remember: The Gilded Age Girls Club (The Gilded Age Girls Club, 3)

In Docile (Tor.com, 2020), the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy. Tor describes the book as a “science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power.” Szpara describes the book as "really gay." As it turns out, both descriptions are true. Szpara could have kept the story relatively simply by making Docile a tale of exploitation and rebellion, but he isn’t content to portray the wealthy Alex simply as an abusive patron who brainwashes his compliant docile, Elisha. Instead, their relationship is complicated by society’s efforts to make servitude more palatable by providing dociles with rights (like the right to adequate food and medical care, the right to vote, etc.) and a drug (which Elisha scandalously refuses) that helps dociles forget their suffering. Szpara also dares to have Alex and Elisha fall—or at least think they are falling—in love. This raises a host of questions. Who is Alex falling in love with—the real Elisha or the man he’s created through his harsh “training”? Does Elisha have the agency to love after being dominated and manipulated into becoming Alex’s perfect companion? “People say to Elisha ‘maybe you just like this kind of sex because it's the kind of sex you were taught to have. Maybe you just like Alex because he taught you to like him. Maybe you only like playing the piano, or these clothes because Alex gave them to you.’ And then he has to ask himself: ‘But they're the things that I like. Do I have to not like the things that I like because they were thrust upon me?’” Szpara continues: “So many things are thrust upon us by people, by capitalism, by people who are making decisions above us and handing them to us and telling us to like them. At a certain point you just say, ‘Oh hey, I like this, and I accept it. You know, I like this new song by Lady Gaga even though I hear it a thousand times a day, and that's probably why I like it, but I just do. I enjoy listening to it.’ …We don't exist in worlds where we can always make pure and good decisions all the time.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Docile

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At the same time, Grass tries to reckon with what it meant for them to grow up, as Grass puts it, “queer and trans in such a toxic environment.” The result is a book that’s dazzling in its variety and steadfast in its vision: to see clearly how the white dominant culture of the Midwest obscures the land to which it laid claim and the nature of who and what it is, all in the hope of a clearer and truer vision of who we are and how we might, in the end, be accountable to ourselves and one another. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hall of Waters

Eliza Griswold writes in Snow in Rome, "we hate being human,/depleted by absence." In her latest poetry collection, If Men, Then (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), Griswold grapples with a world that is fracturing at its foundation. In this series of poems, all at once dark. humorous and questioning, the author moves from the familiar to the unjust to hope with a keen eye. She guides readers through a world that at times strips the humanness from our bones with embedded violence and disconnection, but also calls for us to reconnect by reminding us to be a bridge out among the flames. Eliza Griswold is the author of an acclaimed first book of poems, Wideawake Field, as well as The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, which won the 2011 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. Her translations of Afghan women’s folk poems, I Am the Beggar of the World, was awarded the 2015 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She has held fellowships from the New America Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Harvard University, and in 2010 the American Academy in Rome awarded her the Rome Prize for her poems. Griswold, currently a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University, is also the author of Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America, which was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2018, one of The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2018, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 2019. Athena Dixon is a NE Ohio native, poet, essayist, and editor. Her essay collection, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press (2020). Athena is also the author of No God in This Room, a poetry chapbook (Argus House Press). Her poetry is included in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). Learn more at www.athenadixon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

If Men, Then: Poems

In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one Sephardic family, with roots in the city of Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, now Thessaloniki in Greece. The story begins with one of the prominent Jewish citizens of that thriving port city, then follows the family in its dispersion through nine countries across three continents during the most tumultuous and violent years of the twentieth century. This fascinating book is not only a masterful work of archival research but of storytelling. Professor Stein deftly portrays the vivid personalities that comprise the family, even as she teaches valuable lessons about the Sephardic culture in which they were firmly implanted. Professor Stein also ponders important questions about the nature of personal, family, and cultural memories, and the importance of the vanishing art of written correspondence -- and the way history, properly told, can restore and revive buried narratives, and the relationships that gave them life. The result is a masterwork of historical narrative, and a story beautifully told. David Gottlieb, a member of the teaching faculty at Spertus Institute in Chicago, received his PhD in the History of Judaism from the University of Chicago Divinity School in 2018. He is the author of Second Slayings: The Binding of Isaac and the Formation of Jewish Memory (Gorgias Press, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century

Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attempted to survive impossible conditions. Waterman is a climber, conservationist, and author who has written many books with her husband Guy Waterman about mountain history, climbing and environmental ethics. Her memoir Losing the Garden tells the story of her marriage to Guy and his decision in 2000 to end his life on the summit of Mt Lafayette. In the summer of 1881, the twenty-five men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition watched their ship sail for home from Discovery Harbor, just 500 miles from the North Pole. Commanded by the ambitious yet underqualified Adolphus W. Greely, this crew represented the first U.S. attempt to engage in scientific study of the Arctic. The frigid landscape offered the promise of great adventure—and unknown dangers. It was an expedition Greely eagerly anticipated long before it began. Standing there on that sunny summer afternoon, no one could have known how much would go wrong. Drawing upon historic records, diaries, and letters of the men who inhabited the makeshift shelter they called Camp Clay, Laura Waterman reimagines the true story of polar explorers fighting for their lives and their sanity under dehumanizing conditions. This gripping, tragic tale of hunger, fear, and hope is told through the eyes of men at their worst—and most desperate—moments. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Starvation Shore

To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games. But Sura Neelin soon discovers that the LARPs are more than games. They’re also an underground economy that meets players’ needs for food, shelter, services and everything else the non-virtual world also provides. Among the concepts she encounters is the idea that software can provide inanimate objects with self-sovereignty, allowing them to take charge of their own destinies. Sura discovers that self-sovereignty can apply to things like a river or a forest, giving them the ability to advocate for their own health and well-being—essentially putting them on an equal footing with humans who might try to exploit them. For Schroeder, who is both a writer and professional futurist, science fiction can be both entertainment and a laboratory to explore ideas like self-sovereignty. He’s been hired by governments and companies to write fictional scenarios to test the implications of new concepts and technologies. “What stories allow you to do is bring together immense numbers of different ideas and get them all spinning and interacting at the same time without people losing track of what’s going on,” he says in his New Books interview. “You can pile immense amounts of complexity into a narrative and people will understand it intuitively and seamlessly in a way that they will not understand a 400-page report.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Stealing Worlds

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

An orphaned young woman disguises herself as a boy in order to escape the dangers of being alone in 1870’s San Francisco. A group of castoffs destroy the bird population of the Farallon Island by stealing and selling their eggs. A young woman raped in the 1980’s struggles to raise her daughter on her own while her unattached best friend becomes a field researcher for the government, counting and monitoring bird populations across the west. The daughter runs away to seek her own path and learns something about her mother, and a wanderer escapes his privileged life to seek his destiny. Everything in this novel is connected to wild birds, the geography of the west, and friendship. And the characters are all tied together by a rare collection of bird eggs. Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, has lived all over the West, and is back living in Portland. For the last decade she’s combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs, she’s camped and written in remote areas of the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, a writer, and cultivator of sourdough cultures with which she loves baking. The Wild Birds (Rare Bird Books, 2018), her first novel, was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Award for Best Fiction and for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. It is now available in all formats, and a second book is in the works. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Wild Birds

In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integrating memoir with cultural critique, Dark describes her experience navigating the world as a fat, queer, white-privileged, gender-conforming, eventually disabled, and inevitably aging “girl with a pretty face.” Her essays take on self-improvement, self-acceptance, sexual attraction, language, aging, queer visibility, fashion, family, femininity, feminism, yoga culture, airplane seats, and the vilifying of fatness in the name of good health, among other compelling topics. Along the way, Dark edges readers toward a deeper understanding of how privileged (and stigmatized) appearances function in everyday life, and how the architecture of the social world constrains us all. Carrie Lane is a Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton and author of A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment. Her research concerns the changing nature of work in the contemporary U.S. She is currently writing a book on the professional organizing industry. To contact her or to suggest a recent title, email clane@fullerton.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fat, Pretty, and Soon to be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society

Franny Choi’s book-length collection of poetry, Soft Science (Alice James Books 2019), explores queer, Asian American femininity through the lens of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. As she notes in this interview, “this book is a study of softness,” exploring feeling, vulnerability, and desire. How can you be tender and still survive in a hard and violent world? What does it mean to have desire when you yourself are made into an object of desire? What does it mean to have a body that bears the weight of history? Choi’s poetry contemplates such questions through the technology of poetic form. “Once, an animal with hands like mine learned to break a seed with two stones – one hard and one soft. Once, a scientist in Britain asked: Can machines think? He built a machine, taught it to read ghosts, and a new kind of ghost was born. At Disneyland, I watched a robot dance the macarena. Everyone clapped, and the clapping, too, was a technology. I once made my mouth a technology of softness. I listened carefully as I drank. I made the tools fuck in my mouth – okay, we can say pickle if it’s easier to hear – until they birthed new ones. What I mean is, I learned.” — from “A Brief History of Cyborgs” by Franny Choi Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (from Alice James Books) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press). She is a Kundiman Fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, and a graduate of the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program. She is a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College and co-hosts the podcast VS alongside fellow Dark Noise Collective member Danez Smith. Andrea Blythe is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Find her online at andreablythe.com or on Twitter and Instagram @AndreaBlythe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books, the ethics and etiquette of negative reviews and ‘punching up’, along with professional identities and the future of criticism. The book is packed with interview material, coupled with accessible and easy to follow theoretical interventions, creating a text that will be of interest to social sciences, humanities, and general readers alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology)

What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (and what it will become) is nothing new. As Phil Christman writes in Midwest Futures (Belt Publishing, 2020), ambiguity might be the region's defining characteristic. Taking a cue from Jefferson’s grid, the famous rectangular survey of the Old Northwest Territory that turned everything from Ohio to Wisconsin into square-mile lots, Christman breaks his exploration of Midwestern identity, past and present, into 36 brief, interconnected essays. The result is a sometimes sardonic, often uproarious, and consistently thought-provoking look at a misunderstood place and the people who call it home. A former substitute teacher, shelter worker, and home health aide, Phil Christman currently lectures in the English department at University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Commonweal, The Christian Century, The Outline, and other places. He holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He is the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, a journal sponsored by the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project. Stephen Dozeman is a freelance writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Midwest Futures

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the rise—especially among young people—resources for addressing them remain scarce and stigmatized, and the conditions themselves remain poorly understood. Even doctors and scientists don’t have all the answers. For example, is the development of a mood disorder the product of nature or nurture? Why are more women diagnosed with anxiety and depression than men? And in an industry that pathologizes everything from anger to arrogance, what actually constitutes “normal” human behavior? In her debut book of nonfiction, Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (Mad Creek Books, 2018), author Sarah Fawn Montgomery explores these questions using both her own experiences and research as dual lenses to understanding mental illness, especially generalized anxiety disorder. From the fraught history of mental illness, to the fascinating science of how anti-depressants work, to a sharp examination of dubious practices within the American pharmaceutical industry, Montgomery takes the reader on a journey into the reality of mental health in the United States from a patient’s perspective, shining a much-needed light on a topic so often shrouded in stigma. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (Machete)

In the fantasy medieval land of Trea—a conservative society that despite its worship of the goddess Amur respects her human daughters only as wives and mothers—eighteen-year-old Berona has limited expectations for her future. Securing a handsome husband who will win her heart and teach her to dance seems like enough of a challenge, given that her father keeps presenting her with candidates who can neither appeal to nor appreciate her fiery nature. But Berona remains hopeful until a nighttime encounter at the stream that runs near her house brings her face-to-face with humanity’s ancient enemy, the Water Demon, desperate for revenge after six hundred years locked deep in the world’s oceans. The Demon threatens Berona and her family, and to protect her parents and younger sister, Berona accepts help from a magician, member of an outlawed sect with a philosophy of life very different from that of the Intercessors of Trea. The magician has been searching for the Girl of Fire, who according to ancient prophecy is the only person who can defeat the Water Demon, and he becomes convinced that Berona is the one he seeks. But Berona is untrained, and the Demon already on the move. As the Elemental forces of Nature awaken and treachery splits those committed to help her, Berona struggles to reconcile her own essential strengths, the demands placed on her, and the lessons she must master against a foe who destroys from within, by manipulating her victims’ deepest fears and appealing to their hidden desires. Gabrielle Mathieu, the author of the Falcon Trilogy and host of New Books in Fantasy and Adventure, kicks off her new series, Berona’s Quest, with Girl of Fire (Five Directions Press, 2019), a deeply researched and endlessly inventive exploration of a world in which disrespecting the environment can, quite literally, get you killed. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Girl of Fire (Berona's Quest)

Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction (Red Hen Press, 2020), provides a lyrical exploration of cultural encounters in the Pacific Northwest. After a Latina anthropologist, Claudia, flees a fractured marriage in Seattle, she throws herself in her fieldwork on the Makah Indian Reservation. There she meets Peter, the community’s prodigal son, who has returned home in search of answers and meaning. When their worlds collide, two vulnerable people in search of clarity, find themselves immersed in ambiguity. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in United States history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern U.S. history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Subduction

In 1916, Adana Moreau’s parents are killed by American Marines. She flees to Santo Domingo and then to New Orleans. There, she marries a pirate, Titus Moreau, and gives birth to their son, Maxwell. While Maxwell wonders the streets, Adana spends hours at the library. She writes a book, Lost City, and it becomes a science fiction hit. Then she writes a follow-up book, which she and Maxwell definitely destroy, just before she dies. The story of how that book ends up decades later in Chicago is interwoven with train-jumping, alternate universes, and the heartbreaking tales of displaced people. Michael Zapata is the author of The Lost Book of Adana Moreau (Hanover Square Press, 2020). He is also a founding editor of MAKE Literary Magazine. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction, the City of Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Program award, and a Pushcart nomination. As an educator, he taught literature and writing in high schools servicing dropout students. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa and, as an ardent wanderer, he's lived and traveled extensively through the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. The place he reveres most on the Earth is the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve in Ecuador. Currently, he's catching up on the extraordinary sci-fi show 'The Expanse' and lives with his family in his hometown Chicago. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau: A Novel

When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Cipri was scrambling for a literary agent, negotiating a contract, and reaching a wider audience. “I wasn't really planning on writing a short story collection for probably another decade,” Cipri says. “I don't have the kind of output that a lot of other short story writers do. I was publishing maybe one or two stories a year.” Cipri’s modestly belies the maturity of their writing. The stories in Homesick: Stories (Dzanc Books, 2019) combines science fiction and horror to create complex tales about everything from ghosts and alien seedpods to difficult mothers and falling in love. Structurally, the stories vary. In addition to using third-person narration, there’s a story built on letters, a multiple-choice quiz, and a transcript of a series of recordings. What all the stories have in common is an interest in the meaning of home, and the presence of queer and trans characters. “For me personally, as a trans person, I'm always thinking about what does home mean when I literally don't feel at home in my body, or didn't for a long time. I do now. And what does home mean for a lot of trans and queer people when home is not a safe place for us,” Cipri says. Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas in 2019. Homesick is their first book. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Homesick: Stories

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Today I interview Martín Prechtel, whose work ranges from painting and drawing to overlooked histories and living languages to farming and blacksmithing and cooking to the six books he’s written, which cover topics so vast in genres so varied that all the short descriptions I’ve tried to give of them feel like an injustice. Let me just say that the vision in his books reaches out toward the very nature of the cosmos while it also attends to nature’s smallest spirits, to what’s holy and alive in the stones and the seeds. And running throughout this work is Prechtel’s powerful and lush talent for storytelling. In The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun (North Atlantic Books, 2005), Prechtel introduces the unique stories he heard when he lived among the Tzutujil Mayan people in the village of Santiago Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands. He writes that these stories “are alive, and being alive they are not just told at any time, but only in the dark. Though everyone by a certain age knows a version of these living stories, only certain people, those accepted storytellers, can tell them and will admit to knowledge of them, for it is in the telling only that these stories live, and being ancient, big and hungry, they must be brought to life as well.” And that, perhaps, is the best way I can introduce Martín Prechtel: he brings to life stories that live and, through them, he reveals the rich, beautiful, abundant possibilities of what it might mean for us to live the stories of our lives. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: A Mayan Tale of Ecstasy, Time, and Finding One's True Form

Last summer, massive fires in the Amazon rain forest provoked environmental concerns around the world. But the history of exploitation—of the natural world of the rain forest and the people living in it—goes back at least to the rubber boom of the early twentieth century. This setting forms the backdrop for Joan Schweighardt’s compelling and well-written Rivers trilogy, which starts with Before We Died and continues with Gifts for the Dead (Five Directions Press, 2019) and the forthcoming River Aria. As Gifts for the Dead opens, it is 1911 and the heroine, Nora Sweeney, is waiting for bad news in Hoboken, NJ. A fortuneteller has prophesied that any day two dock workers will appear on the doorstep to report that both the man Nora loves, Baxter Hopper, and his brother, Jack, have died during their work as rubber tappers in Brazil. But when the dock workers arrive, it’s to deliver the comatose body of Jack, on the brink of death. Nora and Jack’s mother, Maggie, nurse him back to health, and life goes on. With help from Maggie, Nora and Jack restore the family that was broken when the brothers left on their grand adventure. Through World War I, the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, and the Roaring Twenties, the trio perseveres. Everyone assumes Baxter died in the rain forest. Only Jack knows that his brother’s fate is less certain than he’s given the women reason to believe. And that one day he must go and find out the truth. C. P. Lesley is the author of ten novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Her latest book, Song of the Shaman, appeared in 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Gifts for the Dead (Rivers)

Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which simultaneously follows the personal story of a Muslim reformer and trader and the court struggles between the rulers of Central Asia, gives us a glimpse into early Soviet Central Asia, as well as the world of Central Asia on the eve of 19th-century Russian Imperial conquest. Yet, Qodiriy’s Bygone Days is much more than that; it addresses universal themes of cultural and political change, the place of tradition in societies, questions of reform and revolution, to name a few. Reese’s wonderful translation offers an opportunity to learn more about Uzbekistan past and present and offers something for anyone interested in Central Asia, literature, or the triumphs and tragedies of modernizing societies. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bygone Days: O'tkan Kunlar

Today we are joined by Brad Balukjian, author of the book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (University of Nebraska, 2020). A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawrence Ritter, Balukjian’s work examines 14 baseball players pulled from a pack of 1986 Topps baseball cards. Balukjian takes the reader on a cross-country tour to meet these now-retired players, who have dealt with being out of the spotlight in different ways. Some stories have a melancholy tone, while others demonstrate that life does not end when a player hangs up his uniform for the last time. Balukjian is a savvy observer of people, and his interactions with the former players are sprinkled with personal observations and the author’s own personal issues. There is a chapter devoted to each player, plus a narrative of Balukjian’s visit with former employees at the Topps factory in Duryea, Pennsylvania. Balukjian owns a Ph.D. in entomology from the University of California at Berkeley, and he spent a year in Tahiti working on his doctorate. He currently is director of the Natural History and Sustainability Program and teaches biology at Merritt College in Oakland, California. Regardless of his academic standing, Balukjian remains a baseball fan at heart and still remembers the excitement of opening cards during the wax pack era. Not only did Balukjian thumb through a pack of cards; he met most of the men pictured on them and shared their compelling stories. Bob D’Angelo earned his master’s degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in May 2018. He earned his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and spent more than three decades as a sportswriter and sports copy editor, including 28 years on the sports copy desk at The Tampa (Fla.) Tribune. He is currently a digital news producer for Cox Media Group. Bob can be reached at bdangelo57@gmail.com. For more information, visit Bob D’Angelo’s Books and Blogs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball's Afterlife

Sarah Kozloff does her world building gradually and carefully, introducing you to a few characters you get to know and care for, before moving on to other lands and cultures. The land of Weirandale is ruled by a line of queens with unique magical talents which is granted to them by Nargis, the spirit of the water. We first meet the future queen in hiding when she is a child, granted a menagerie of pets by her fond mother, Cressa, who tries to spend as much time her as she can while ruling Weirandale. Cressa is perhaps not temperamentally suited to be queen. A somewhat retiring and innocent person by nature, she is unprepared for the machinations of her chief counsellor, who wishes power for himself. After an assassination attempt, Cressa conceals her daughter’s identity through magic, sending her to live with a family who is unaware of her true identity. Her daughter, Cérulia, likewise is not ambitious nor does she show much desire to lead. She does however have a kind heart and will fight for her friends, if not for herself. But the world at large has even more serious problems than the fate of Cérulia, who is orphaned halfway through the first book, and must rely on her magical gift to see her through some tight spots. In another country, ruled by eight terrible magi, food shortages have led to their army invading a peaceful democracy, the Free States. Thalen, a student, must use his analytical and curious mind to come up with a plan to rescue his plundered country from the ruthless invaders. How the story of these two, Cérulia, the queen in hiding, and Thalen, the son of a pottery maker, connects, is not yet revealed. But with the four books of the series being released monthly, you won’t have to wait long to find out. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the YA fantasy, Girl of Fire, the first in the Berona’s Quest series, as well as a historical fantasy series set in the 60s. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Some war stories emphasize heroism and a higher purpose; others emphasize brutality and disillusionment. The first kind of story got Dietz, the narrator of Kameron Hurley’s military science fiction novel The Light Brigade (Saga Press, 2019), to enlist in a war against aliens from Mars. The second is the story that emerges from their experience as they learn that truth—and reality itself—are two of the war’s biggest casualties. Hurley is the author of nine books. She has received numerous awards, including two Hugo Awards, a British Science Fiction Award, and a Locus Award. On this episode of New Books in Science Fiction, she discusses using a mathematician’s help to map her time-jumping plot, working with a hands-on literary agent, and making ends meet as a writer, among other things. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Light Brigade

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

After her parents' divorce, Jackie Stalnaker is sent to her grandmother’s dilapidated house in a tiny town in West Virginia. It’s a hot, mid 1970’s summer in Burnt House, where the only thing to look forward to is a weekly old movie shown at the library. But Jackie is grateful to be away from her squabbling parents and delighted with the crazy characters she meets in Burnt House (Buffalo Times Press, 2018). In these charming short stories, White creates a world of complex characters, some lazy, cranky or perfectly satisfied, others lonely and lost, but all connected by history and their shared geography. Lowell Mick White is the author of six books and his work has been published in many literary journals, including Callaloo, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Short Story. A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, White lived in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, at various times making his living working as a cab driver, a shade tree salesman, and an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is Editor of Alamo Bay Press and has been the National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White is an Instructional Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where he earned his PhD. When not reading or writing, White enjoys drinking beer, eating turkey legs, and taking long drives in the Texas countryside. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books Network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Burnt House

Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra. Adams’ muse is surprising, because she lives, like many of us, in North America—Orange County, California, to be exact. That’s not the place where you’d expect someone to develop a deep fascination and a deep respect for camels. And yet this improbability makes Adams’ new book Camel Crazy (New World Library, 2019) all the more intriguing, as she becomes, by turns, a smuggler, an activist, a scientist, a world traveler, and, in the end, an advocate, not just for camels, but for our public health, our environment, and for her son. He’s a child on the autistic spectrum, and Adam’s love for him becomes a beautiful and passionate engine that ultimately leads her to start a movement that may just transform how we see camels and how we see and treat autism. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Camel Crazy: A Quest for Miracles in the Mysterious World of Camels

Gene is newly widowed and haunted by his memories. As he bumbles through long days, he questions his wife Maida’s sudden death, his daughter’s motives, and the enduring and meaningful friendship of best friends Ed and Gayle Donnelly. He tries to resurrect the good memories of the two couples raising children in a New Hampshire town and vacationing together every summer at a lake house owned by the Donnellys. He tried to come to terms about his relationship with his only daughter, Dary, who has chosen to raise a fatherless child, has made her home on the other side of the country, and who challenges Gene’s happy memories of everything that happened in their lives. She even challenges his view of her mother. Moving between Gene’s fraught current life and memories of his childhood, coming of age, courtship, marriage, and career, The Dependents (Back Bay Books, 2019) is a sensitive novel about love, parenthood, friendship, and finding contentment. Katharine Dion is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She is also a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. In her early twenties, Dion founded a nonprofit organization called Peer Health Exchange that (still) trains college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools. And she has spent two summers living in a Zen monastery working as a cook. Dion’s introduction to Buddhism came from living several summers at Tassajara, a monastery in the Ventana Wilderness; she is lay ordained in the Soto Zen lineage and helps people meet the grief of ecological destruction as a Buddhist Ecochaplain. She was born in Oakland and lives in Emeryville, California. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Dependents

A slim volume you can swallow in one melancholy winter afternoon, best with sips of a mellow amber whisky with undertones of peat, Priya Sharm's Ormeshadow (Tor.com, 2019) is about more about human beasts than the actual dragon that slumbers under the earth. The fraternal archetypes; the civilized and the wild brother, are seen through the eyes of a bewildered child, Gideon, who becomes a man during the course of the story. The two brothers in question are Gideon’s father and uncle. Gideon’s father, John, is a scholar, happy with books, but also bound to the land (and what lies under it.) Uncle Thomas, first described in a sentence that can be read several ways, is a dark man. When Gideon’s father, John, is forced to bring his family back to the farm where he and Thomas grew up, familial competition raises its ugly head. From a lone mysterious carved chair to John’s beautiful wife, everything seems to be contested ground. John often yields both to his demanding wife and his volatile brother, Thomas. It seems Gideon, who has inherited John’s gentle nature, is fated to be an underdog as well. But Gideon’s kindness and gentleness have won him protection among forces more powerful than men. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the epic fantasy Berona’s Quest series, beginning with Girl of Fire (watch the trailer: http://bit.ly/2KFOQhb). She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ormeshadow

Becca Klaver writes in the poem 'Hooliganism Was the Charge,' It offered reassurance which said, “You are not alone; I can hear you.” Her forthcoming collection, Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press 2020), reminds us that no matter the digital distance between us we are never quite alone. A collection that both casts and dispels the bindings ever present via social media, patriarchy, and our own paths to growth, this collection allows readers to blur the lines between our sometimes carefully curated online lives and the magical beings we truly are. Part spell book and a rumination on technology, Klaver explores womanhood and feminism from a distance and up close. These poems ask for us to find a remembrance and a reconnecting. She asks in the poem Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie, what is burning in our little hearts?, and dares us to tear down what we think we know to find what we feel. Becca Klaver is the author of two books of poetry—LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016)—and several chapbooks. Becca was a founding editor of Switchback Books and is currently coediting, with Arielle Greenberg, the anthology Electric Gurlesque. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, and in Poem-A-Day and Verse Daily. She was also the editor of Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants and is cohost, with Lauren Besser, of the podcast The Real Housewives of Bohemia. Born and raised in Milwaukee, WI, she is a graduate of the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD). She is the Robert P. Dana Director of the Center for the Literary Arts at Cornell College and currently lives in Iowa City, IA. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal, which she launched in 2012. Athena’s work has appeared in various publications both online and in print. She is the author of No God In This Room, a poetry chapbook, published by Argus House Press. Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). She writes, edits, and resides in Philadelphia. Learn more about Athena here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ready for the World

The end of the world is no excuse for eating French fries. That’s a lesson 7-year-old Sunny Donelly learns from her father, Rob, who tries to give her as normal a childhood as possible in the post-pandemic landscape of Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End (MIRA, 2020). Trying to be a good dad, Rob showers Sunny with attention and gives her fatherly advice, telling her, for instance, that lying is bad and that French fries aren’t healthy. But there’s an all-important thing he hasn’t told her: that her mom is dead, the victim of an accident during the outbreak that killed billions. Rob isn’t the only one trying to outrun his past with a lie. The other main characters—Moira Gorman, a former pop star, and Krista Deal, an event planner—are also hiding secrets. Set six years after the pandemic, Chen’s second novel imbues a San Francisco that feels almost like our own with a haunting sense of loss. But while trauma hovers over his characters’ lives, resiliency, loyalty and love ultimately prevail. What if “something absolutely catastrophic happened and you try to pick up after that?” Chen says, explaining the question that inspired the book. “The story I wanted to tell was… what if infrastructure and all the things that we’ve come to rely on are still existent in some form, but 70 percent of the people in the world are just gone? What you’re left with is not a survival tale but a trauma tale.” Chen appeared on New Books in Science Fiction last year to discuss his first book, Here and Now and Then. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

A Beginning at the End: a novel

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, a young mother of two, realizes her marriage is over when she wakes up with a sexually transmitted disease brought home by her husband. Nathan is an engineer with a shameful secret who changes his name to get work at the dam. Everyone in this colorful cast of dog-fighting neighbors, beer-guzzling ex-husbands, and power-hungry employers is trying to survive in the mosquito-infested heat of a southern summer. Mark Barr has been awarded fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, his debut novel, Watershed (Hub City, 2019), was featured in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s fall Okra list and Deep South Magazine's Fall/Winter Reading List, and named as one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's "12 Southern Books You'll Want to Read This Fall" and one of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine’s "Four Fall Reads." Mark holds undergraduate degrees from Hendrix College and University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from Texas State University. He lives with his wife and sons in Arkansas, where he develops software and bakes bread. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books Network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Watershed (Cold Mountain Fund Series)

Effie Tildon loves her older sister, Luella. Sixteen to Effie’s thirteen, Luella has long taken the leading role in deciding what the two sisters do, even when it leads them in directions their parents would not approve of. Those three extra years are one reason that Luella directs Effie rather than the reverse, but another important reason is that Luella is strong and healthy and rebellious, whereas Effie has lived in the shadows since her birth—the result of a congenital heart defect that, although entirely curable in our own century, in 1900 has left everyone in the family certain that Effie may die any minute. So when Luella leads Effie to a Roma camp on the outskirts of New York City, then disappears one day without letting her sister know where she’s headed, Effie is determined to find her, even if it means confronting her fear that their father has had Luella committed to New York’s notorious House of Mercy, a home for wayward women and girls. Effie comes up with a plan to abandon her privileged Gilded Age life and check herself into the House of Mercy. Her plan succeeds admirably—until the moment she discovers her sister is not there. That’s when Effie realizes that getting out of the House of Mercy is a lot more difficult than getting in. In The Girls with No Names (Park Row Books, 2020), Serena Burdick, whose previous novel Girl in the Afternoon won the International Book Award for Historical Fiction in 2017, turns a spotlight on the world of “Magdalene laundries” and the many nameless women who passed through them between their founding in the Victorian era and their abolition in the 1990s. In so doing, she paints an absorbing portrait of relationships within families and the ways they can go awry, as well as the hidden strength on which even the seemingly weakest and most damaged among us can draw in times of need. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Her tenth novel, Song of the Shaman, will appear in mid-January 2020. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Girls with No Names: A Novel

Usually on the New Books Network we do exactly what our name says: we talk about new books. Today, however, we’re doing something a little different. I’m interviewing Donald Morrill about his very not-new book of essays Impetuous Sleeper (Mid-List Press, 2009). It was published a decade ago. However, it offers us an interesting opportunity to talk about a part of publishing world that we often don’t talk about: what happens when your publisher closes and your book goes out of print? How does that alter your perception of a book, of its purpose and its potential audience? And yet Morrill’s essays offer us so much more than a look at the publishing lifespan of a book. He’s crafted beautiful work that reimagines what the essay can do and be. His is a collection of startling insights and careful observations that gather to a lyrical abundance. It’s a generous gift of a book, one that masterfully demonstrates an essay needn’t be new to be apt, to be beautiful, to be, in the largest sense, newsworthy. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Impetuous Sleeper

The ten linked stories in Jason Brown's A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review, 2019) follow John Howland and his descendants as they struggle with their New England legacy as one of the country's founding families and the decaying trappings of that esteemed past. Set on the Maine coast, where the Howland family has lived for almost 400 years, the grandfather, John Howland, lives in a fantasy that still places him at the center of the world. The next generation resides in the confused ruins of the 1960s rebellion, while many in the third generation feel they have no choice but to scatter in search of a new identity. Jason Brown earned his MFA from Cornell University, and was a Stegner Fellow and Truman Capote Fellow at Stanford University, where he taught as a Jones Lecturer. He has received fellowships from the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies and from the Saltonsall Foundation. He taught for many years in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Oregon. He has published two books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Other Stories (Norton/Random House) and Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work (Open City/Grove Atlantic). His stories have won several awards and appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Harper’s, TriQuarterly and other magazines and anthologies. Several of his stories have been performed as part of NPR’s Selected Shorts, and his collection Why The Devil Chose New England For His Work was chosen as a summer reading pick by National Public Radio. Stories from the new collection have appeared or will appear in Southern Review, Prairie Schooner (winning their editor’s prize and receiving special mention in the back of Best American Short Stories), Electric Literature, Bellevue Review, Dalhousie Review and the Editor’s Prize from the Missouri Review. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the "Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series" and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed

Christopher Fort’s new translation of Abdulhamid Sulaymon o’g’li Cho’lpon’s Night and Day: A Novel (Academic Studies Press, 2019) (Kecha va Kunduz) gives readers a chance to dive into the world of early 20th century Uzbek literature and understand the complex social problems of late Russian imperial Turkestan. This book will be interesting for a wide range of readers, including those interested in the history of Russia and Central Asia, as well as the nature of colonial and post-colonialism in those contexts. Finally, Fort’s translation brings attention to Cho’lpon, an important figure in Uzbek literary life who tragically became a victim of Stalinist terror. Nicholas Seay is a PhD candidate at The Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Night and Day: A Novel (Central Asian Literatures in Translation)

Science fiction and fantasy often feature characters who seek absolute control (over a kingdom, country, world, galaxy or universe), but few break down the secret to power as elegantly as Seanan McGuire in Middlegame (Tor.com, 2019), where her sibling protagonists subdue the forces of nature through the union of two fundamental arts: language and mathematics. McGuire sees elements of a “modern Frankenstein” in her novel about a brother and sister created by a ruthless alchemist. Instead of a hideous monster, her alchemist produces two brilliant siblings, whose rhyming names (Roger, a genius at languages, and Dodger, a math prodigy) belie their potential to control time and space. Life is easier for Roger, whose facility with words opens doors. Dodger, on the other hand, has had a harder time socializing; as a result, she is less trusting and keeps to herself. “Dodger is a math prodigy and a smart girl. And those are two things that tend to get you kicked in the teeth by the world over and over again,” McGuire says. Raised in separate homes, the siblings are at first unaware of each other. Middlegame is as much a story about their on-again off-again relationship as it is about the discovery of their power to manipulate time and their own alchemical origins. “It took me 10 years to write because I had to get good enough to write it first. The flow charts for Middlegame were kind of a nightmare in and of themselves,” McGuire says. Like Roger, McGuire (who also writes under the name Mira Grant) was a prodigy in English. She is also an all star among writers. The author of 36 books, she’s received numerous awards, including the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010 and Nebula and Hugo awards in 2016 for best novella. She's twice won Hugo's for best fancast and in 2013 received a record five Hugo nominations. She says her prolific output is partly a result of a conscious choice. “If you’re somebody that wants to have more of a social life than I do or wants to have more of a family life than I do, you need to make different choices,” she says. “At this point I am functionally … an Olympic athlete. It's just that my sport is novel writing, so I'm in training every single day to be able to start and finish the next book in a timely fashion.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, 1)

After Jim Rossi began writing his M.A. thesis in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the project took an unexpected turn. His research on the solar industry in the Mojave desert brought him into close contact with a number of entrepreneurs in clean technology, and start-ups in the renewable energy sector. He soon stumbled upon several alleged “scams” and “long cons” in the industry, and his book, Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper, tells the real life story of his effort to get to the bottom of confidence men in the modern American West. Ryan Driskell Tate is a Ph.D. candidate in American history at Rutgers University. He is completing a book on fossil-fuels and energy development in the American West. He teaches courses on modern US history, environmental history, and histories of labor and capitalism. @rydriskelltate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper

Donny Kimoe, a wise-cracking lawyer who used to work for the prosecution and has kept his security clearance, believes in the legal system. His work as a defense attorney will change all that. His clients are a new class of criminals—those who dare protest changes in American government, including imposition of martial law in certain areas and the detainment of citizens without legal reasons. To protect his new client, Xelina Rocafuerte, a young journalist, from the fate of his previous one, who just received the death penalty, Donny tries the patience of his former associates, and leans heavily on his prior friendships. Soon he realizes private interests, allied with influential politicians, have a good reason to want Xelina locked up out of sight. Xelina’s video evidence, if made public, will interfere with their secret plan to use condemned land for some lucrative business plans. A crash course in the law as well as a darkly humorous thriller, Christopher Brown’s Rule of Capture (Harper Voyager, 2019) should make you think hard about the importance of law and its implications for citizens. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rule of Capture: A Novel (Dystopian Lawyer, 1)

Joyce Ashuntantang talks about her experiences as a traveler and a poet, from her childhood Cameroon to her years studying in Great Britain and the United States. Ashuntantang is a professor of English at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. She is the author of many works of poetry, including A Basket of Flaming Ashes.

Ashuntantang is an extraordinary weaver of words who showcases vivid pictures that compete with 3D simulation. Her greatest asset is her use of the beautiful traditional Cameroonian anchor that evokes folk tales with its moonlight romance and glory. You feel, laugh, weep, shiver, wonder, and hail the triumphant spirit of the persona as it navigates African postcolonial and global experiences with the melancholy of an exile who is purposeful, strategic, and a lot of fun. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Basket of Flaming Ashes

Leticia Liliuokalani Lang, better known as Letty, has good intentions, but her strong will and quick temper tend to get in her way. Banished from her Hawaiian home due to a conflict with her stepmother, Letty winds up in a California boarding school, where she decides to devote her career to healing animals—even though female veterinarians are scarcer than the proverbial hen’s teeth in 1906. On the ship back to her beloved islands, Letty notices a beautiful racehorse and realizes the horse’s trainer is abusing him. An accident in the harbor sends the stallion into the ocean, and Letty dives in to save him without a second thought. That sets her on a collision course with the horse’s owner and trainer after she insults the former and reports on the latter’s mistreatment. All this before Letty even reaches her home and confronts the stepmother who sent her away. Letty learns that she has a magical gift that challenges her self-control but acts as a source of strength and connection. She is one of nine Gates, bound to the earth, born with the ability to harness its power—represented by the flames of her spirit—to direct her intentions, for good or for ill. But Letty resists her destiny, knowing that her gift comes at a cost: a lifetime alone. In this delightful debut novel Katherine Kayne sweeps us back to a Hawaii still mourning its lost kingdom, where ladies—their ballgowns covered in yards of protective fabric—gallop across the mountains and down the city streets on their way to polo matches and parties, men dance the hula as well as women, and flowers are everywhere. It’s no accident that Bound in Flame (Passionflower Press, 2019) kicks off a brand-new series, aptly called The Hawaiian Ladies Riding Society. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bound in Flame (Hawaiian Ladies' Riding Society)

An intelligent, middle-aged feminist and pitch-perfect musician cannot recuperate from a brief affair with a narcissistic and possibly psychopathic married but famous music critic. By returning to the scene of the affair and listening to the world around her, Eve begins to recover memories of her past, which help her understand, and therefore move on from, her obsession. The Dead Man (Inanna Publications, 2016) a beautiful tale of love, loss, family, and the music of the world around us. Nora Gold is the prize-winning author of three books of fiction along with other widely published and praised articles and essays. Since 2000 when she left full-time academia, Gold has been affiliated (first as an Associate Scholar and then for six years as its Writer-in-Residence) with OISE/University of Toronto’s Centre for Women’s Studies in Education. This center closed in 2018, but Gold continues to coordinate the highly regarded reading series that she established there, the Wonderful Women Writers Series, now housed at the Toronto Public Library (Deer Park Branch). Gold is also involved in activism and community work, currently with the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute in Boston and JSpaceCanada. When she is not writing, editing, or actively trying to make the world a better place, she is listening to music. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Dead Man

Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House, 2019) is set in two Brooklyns. In one, people ride in trams; in the other, they take subways. In one, the swastika is a symbol of luck; in the other, it signifies hate. In one, science fiction is literature; in the other, it’s considered mere genre. Helen (Hel) Nash, the main character in K Chess’s debut novel, comes from the other Brooklyn—the one with trams and innocuous swastikas. She is a refugee from a nuclear war, one of 156,000 Universally Displaced Persons who escape through an experimental gate from her timeline to ours. Like many refugees, she’s having a hard time adjusting. Not only has she lost friends and family—including her son, who she can never see again—but she faces a new world of unfamiliar laws, customs, and culture. It doesn’t help that most people in our timeline eye UDPs with mistrust. Hel’s and our world diverged around 1910. “It was fun to think about all the things that happened since nineteen hundred,” Chess says in her New Books interview. “For instance, light beer wasn’t invented until the 70s, so that might not exist in the other world. There are many things that could have gone very differently, both in large-scale world history and in small-scale inventions.” Instead of trying to assimilate, Hel becomes obsessed with establishing a museum to preserve her vanished timeline’s art and culture. She is fascinated—and frustrated—by the loss of the thinkers, artists and inventors who accomplished great things in her world but died prematurely in ours. “There was something especially poignant,” Hel thinks, “about knowing exactly what these men and women might have accomplished if only history had proceeded the way it ought to have.” In this episode, Chess discusses, among other things, why she doesn't like her book’s title, New York's resonance as a city of immigrants, human beings' attachment to the past, and how she built an alternate world through small but important details. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Famous Men Who Never Lived

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. In Dan Burns’ latest book, Grace: Stories and a Novella (Chicago Arts Press, 2019), unforgettable characters encounter gorgeous landscapes, nasty betrayals, shocking technology, a heartless future, and a decaying city neighborhood. Burns is also the author of the novels A Fine Line and Recalled to Life and the short story collection No Turning Back: Stories. He is an award-winning writer of stories for the screen and stage, resides with his family in Illinois, and enjoys spending time in Wisconsin and Montana, where he stalks endless rivers in pursuit of trout and a career as a fly fisherman. When not writing or spending time outdoors, Burns plays guitar in his pursuit of rock and roll greatness (or to learn how to play all the memorable rock songs of his youth). If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Grace: Stories and a Novella

Trevor McFarquhar was traumatized by the silence following the deaths of his sister and father. He was again traumatized when his mother moved him and his brother to Paris, remarried, and expected him to treat her new husband as his new father. In his late thirties, he’s haphazardly running a struggling bicycle shop, with few friends, little ambition, and an inability to form a lasting relationship. Then, during the chaos of the 1995 Transit Strike in Paris, Trevor does something horrible. Five years later, he gets a chance to redeem himself. Originally from Chicago, Mary Fleming moved to Paris in 1981, as a freelance journalist and consultant. Before turning full time to writing fiction, she was the French representative for the American foundation: The German Marshall Fund. A long-time board member of the French Fulbright Commission, Fleming continues to serve on the board of Bibliothèques sans Frontières. She and her husband have five grown children and split their time between Paris and Berlin. The Art of Regret (She Writes Press, 2019) is Fleming’s second novel. She writes a blog called A Paris-Berlin Diary. She is also an amateur photographer and fights a puzzle addiction; crosswords and Sudoko, specifically. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Art of Regret: A Novel

The phenomenon of the Russian emigre writer is nothing new. Exile seems almost as necessary a commodity as ink to many of Russia's most celebrated writers, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Josef Brodsky, and Sergei Dovlatov. For these titans of Russian literature, leaving was a binary choice, for some imposed upon them, for others a wrenching decision. For each, the idea of being "other" and "apart" was a rich lode of material, to be endlessly mined. A new generation of Russian emigres is blessed — or cursed — with the ease of long-haul flights and frequent flyer miles, Skype and FaceTime, Google translate, and regulations that seem anyway to be more forgiving about former citizens traveling to and fro between their old homes and new. For them, the border has become far more porous than it ever was, and the choices are now more nuanced. However, there are still plenty of cultural minefields to navigate. To this generation that includes writers as disparate as Gary Shteyngart and Irina Reyn comes Olga Zilberbourg with a new collection of short stories, Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press, 2019) Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg and came of age in that cultural well-spring of literary genius. When perestroika offered the option to emigrate, Zilberbourg's Jewish family considered it long and hard, ultimately choosing to remain in place. Zilberbourg decided to go to school in the United States and ended up staying in the country. She currently teaches comparative literature in San Francisco, and somehow finds time to craft her unique and very compelling short stories. Perhaps it is the paucity of time that has turned Zilberbourg into a master of the craft of "flash fiction" honed and made famous by the likes of Lydia Davis and Barbara Henning. Some stories in “Like Water” are mere paragraphs or even sentences. One distills the entire work-life balance for women into one cogent — and heartbreaking — sentence. These stories deal with the same kind of issues that Zilberbourg's Russian predecessors grappled with for centuries: the sense of disconnect at the heart of the emigre experience. But she also explores more universal themes such as the challenges of motherhood, the double-edged sword that is the mother-daughter relationship, the pathos of a missed opportunity, and the perennial hit and miss of trying to meld two cultures into a single whole. Olga Zilberbourg is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently makes her home in San Francisco, California. Her fiction has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Feminist Studies, Confrontation, World Literature Today, Tin House's The Open Bar, Narrative Magazine, and other print and online publications. She won the 2017 San Francisco's Litquake Writing Contest and the Willesden Herald International Short Story Prize. Follow Olga on Twitter, or visit her website, zilberbourg.com. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate food, travel, and culture writer and photographer currently based in Western Massachusetts. Jennifer is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Concise History. She contributes regular feature articles and photos to The Moscow Times, Russian Life, and Reuters and is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander + Roberts, a leading American tour operator. She is currently at work on a historical novel. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Like Water and Other Stories

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day (Berkley, 2019) explores how society changes following two plausible disasters: a surge in terrorism and a deadly epidemic. In the Before, people brush against each other in crowded cities, gather in stadiums to watch baseball games, and hang out in clubs to watch live music. In the After, curfews and bans on public gatherings give rise to mega-corporations that allow people to work, study, shop, and socialize in virtual reality. The two eras come to life through the stories of Pinsker’s main characters: singer-songwriter Luce Cannon, who misses the Before, and Rosemary Laws, who comes of age in the After. The two collide when Rosemary starts recruiting musicians for StageHoloLive, a virtual reality entertainment company. In the After, most musicians would be thrilled to have Rosemary offer them an exclusive contract. But Luce is different. She would rather perform before a small flesh-and-blood audience (even if it’s illegal) than be turned into a holograph projected into millions of headsets. “Having two characters with vastly different worldviews is a great way to get some interesting conflict,” Pinsker says. A prolific short story writer, Pinsker has won Nebula and Sturgeon awards for novelettes. She is also a singer-songwriter, which helps explain the vividness of her portrayal of dedicated musicians like Luce. A Song for a New Day is her first novel. (A special thank you to Sarah Pinsker for allowing us to close the episode with an excerpt from her song Waterwings.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Song for a New Day

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than tobacco fields, a bluegrass bar, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, the author of Holding Onto Nothing (Blair, 2019), grew up reading, writing, and shooting in East Tennessee. After graduating from Amherst College, she became a writer and a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly. Her nonfiction work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Boston Globe, and Globalpost, among others. She worked on this novel in Grub Street’s year-long Novel Incubator course, under Michelle Hoover and Lisa Borders. Her essay on how killing a deer made her a feminist was published in Click! When We Knew We Were Feminists, edited by Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan. She lives outside Boston with her husband and four children. When she’s not kid-wrangling, Elizabeth enjoys doing CrossFit. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Holding On To Nothing

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Emily Skaja’s Brute (Graywolf Press, 2019) is a stunning collection of poetry that navigates the dark corridors of trauma found at the end of an abusive relationship. “Everyone if we’re going to talk about love please we have to talk about violence,” writes Skaja in the poem “remarkable the litter of birds.” She indeed talks about the intersections of both love and violence, evoking a range of emotional experiences ranging from sorrow and loss to rage, guilt, hope, self discovery, and reinvention. These poems reflect the present moment — ripe with cell phones, social media, and technologies that shift the way humans interact with each other — while maintaining a mythic quality, with the speaker feeling like a character struggling to survive in a surreal fairytale world. Skaja recommends: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, My Dark Vanessa by Kate Russel, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden, and Sabrina & Corina: Stories by Kali Fajardo-Anstine. Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. Her first book, BRUTE, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019). She holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Cincinnati. Emily is the recipient of a 2019 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have been published in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. She is also the Poetry Co-Editor of Southern Indiana Review, and she lives in Memphis. You can join New Books in Poetry in a discussion of this episode on Shuffle by joining here. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Brute: Poems

Popular public conception of war has a long and problematic history, with its origins in ancient texts like The Art of War to bestselling books like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Though many stories depicting the brutality of war—and its toll on soldiers and civilians alike—are written in the spirit of anti-war sentiment, these works often inadvertently frame combat as exciting and dramatic while painting individual soldiers as heroes on the battlefield. But the reality of war is much more nuanced than the typical narratives might have you believe. In truth, life in a war zone is often much more frustrating and tedious than most civilians can fathom. So what are the ethics of writing about war? What are the responsibilities of writers depicting war in their work? Winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, writer Steven Moore’s stunning debut, The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Solider (University of Georgia Press, 2019), considers these questions with both a wry sense of humor and a sharp analytical eye. Moore’s narrative deftly weaves his deployment experiences in Afghanistan with commentary from great critical minds like Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, Tim O’Brien, and Tobias Wolff in an attempt to tell the sprawling story of the war in Afghanistan from the perspective of a part-time soldier. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Steven Moore to learn more about The Longer We Were There. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative writing and rhetoric & composition. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, and the co-editor of its upcoming anthology, The Best of Brevity (Rose Metal Press, 2020). For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or visit her online at zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier (Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction Ser.)

In science fiction, “near future” usually refers to settings that are a few years to a few decades off. But Craig DiLouie’s Our War (Orbit, 2019)—about a second U.S. civil war that starts after the president is impeached and convicted but refuses to step down—feels as if it might be only weeks away. Born in the U.S., DiLouie now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He is the author 18 books of science fiction, fantasy, horror and thrillers. Our War came out in August, a month before the U.S. House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry. When he started writing in 2017, “I was looking at the growing polarization in America and political tribalization, which is considered one of the five precursors to civil war,” DiLouie says. “I hope it stays in fiction.” The story is told through the eyes of a young brother and sister who are used as soldiers by opposite sides. He set the book in Indianapolis because “it's a quintessential American city… a very blue city in a sea of red, rural areas.” He says he strove to be even-handed, focusing less on politics and more on the human impact of civil war. “At any given time, there's hundreds of thousands of [children] fighting around the world,” says DiLouie, who read reports from the U.N. as part of his research into the psychology of child solders. A child soldier’s “loyalty is not based on an ideology… They end up staying and fighting because the militia becomes their family.” While the conflict in the book eventually ends, DiLouie makes clear that the children’s scars—physical and psychic—will last a lifetime. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Our War: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to UP editors early and often. And she explains how! Listen in. Marshall Poe is the editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In her new novel Pigs (Red Hen Press, 2019), Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs. Four filthy, starving children wearing rags and living in squalor are responsible for sorting the trash, feeding the pigs and taking care of each other, while the island’s adults indulge in fantasies, gorge themselves, and live in the comfort of a huge mansion. Although this isn’t the first time that pigs are depicted in literature, it is probably the first time their presence forces readers to consider how much trash we create, how difficult it is to dispose of it, and how we are going to cope with a world in which recycling is too expensive, refugees are treated as disposable, and the earth is facing the crisis of climate change. Originally from New York, Johanna Stoberock completed her undergrad education at Wesleyan, earned an MFA in Fiction at the University of Washington, and lived in NYC until moving with her family to Walla Walla in 2005. Author of the novel City of Ghosts, she has received many honors, and in 2016 was named runner-up for the Italo Calvino Prize for Fiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Best of the Net anthology, and Catamaran, among others. When she is not writing, Stoberock teaches academic writing, is an avid duplicate bridge player and loves watching large birds like herons while out walking in her area of rural Eastern Washington. She also loves owls, which can be spotted in her neighborhood only in winter. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Pigs

Tamara J. Madison, both on the page and in voice, is magical. In her most recent collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus (Trio House, 2019), she seamlessly bridges the gap between past and present while remaining grounded in the here and now. Via her use of religion, familial history, and rhythm she is able to give voice to those women who oft times were forced to remain silent in order to survive. It is through her poetry that these women, and those still to come, are allowed to be wholly free. Madison creates a new mythology here. A mythology that begins to lay the groundwork for us to create the worlds in which we want to move. She leaves us with the lingering sense that the makings of the universe are in our hands. All we need to do is mold it and name it. Tamara J. Madison is an internationally traveled author, poet, performer, and editor currently teaching as a professor of English and Creative Writing at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Her critical and creative works have been published in various journals and magazines including Poetry International, Tidal Basin Review, Web del Sol, and Linden Avenue. She has also been published in several anthologies: Temba Tupu, Check the Rhyme, Seattle Poets and Photographers, and SisterFire. Her most recent publication is a full-length poetry collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus. An earlier manuscript of the book was short-listed for the 2015 Willow Books Literature Award. She is the author of Collard County, A Collection of Short Stories. Her collection, Kentucky Curdled (poetry and essay) is available in paperback, on Kindle , and poetry audiobook. A consummate performance poet and spoken word artist, Tamara has performed for numerous stages and television. Her melodic poetry and spoken word are featured in the award winning, Naked Voice currently available on CD Baby. She has also performed and recorded as bilingual vocalist and poet (French/English) with Juba Collective of Chicago under master musician and composer, Kahil El’Zabar. To contact her for readings, workshops, and updates, visit her home on the web at here on Instagram @tamarajmadison. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal, which she launched in 2012. Athena's work has appeared in various publications both online and in print. She is the author of No God In This Room, a poetry chapbook, published by Argus House Press. Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). She writes, edits, and resides in Philadelphia. Learn more about Athena here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Threed, This Road Not Damascus

Writing novels—never mind entire series—takes determination, persistence, imagination, and craft. Charles Todd has added to those natural challenges the joys and complications of creating a single persona from a mother/son team. In A Cruel Deception (William Morrow, 2019), the eleventh in their beloved Bess Crawford series, the strengths of their long collaboration are on full display. Bess, a British nurse, worked with the wounded throughout the First World War. In A Cruel Deception, the war has ended, and Bess faces the future with some trepidation. So it comes almost as a relief when her former matron requests help finding Lawrence Minton, the matron’s son, who has gone missing during the peace talks in Paris. The search goes well, and Bess tracks Minton to a rural farmhouse, where she confronts him with his addiction to laudanum. He wants nothing to do with her efforts to cure him. Despite his refusal to heal, she soldiers on, aided by a young Frenchwoman who loves him. Bess soon realizes that the root of Minton’s troubles lies in the past, but where? Only then does it become clear that Minton has an enemy, one who will stop at nothing to settle old scores. If you like this book as much as I did, check out Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge mysteries (twenty to date), the latest of which, A Divided Loyalty, is due out in February 2020. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Cruel Deception: A Bess Crawford Mystery (Bess Crawford Mysteries, 11)

While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them to the real world. Sutherland’s fantastical ability is at the center of H.G. Parry’s debut novel The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (Redhook, 2019). It is both a mystery (Sutherland and his brother must find and stop a stranger who shares Sutherland’s ability but is using it for nefarious ends) as well as a celebration of literary criticism. While the ability to bring characters to literal life might seem like a wonderful talent, it's been a problem for Sutherland. Ever since he was little, he has tried—with the encouragement of his family—to suppress the urge. “There's a long tradition of characters with magical abilities who are being told to keep it hidden and to stay normal, and it comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up feeling like what makes them special is something that's weird or strange, and they try and keep it in,” Parry says. “The other side of it, though, is that books are incredibly powerful and there's a real danger to stories and storytelling. When you bring something into the world, it's got the power to do extraordinary things, the power to save the world or to harm it. And there's a real responsibility that comes with reading, interpreting and storytelling.” Like Sutherland, Parry has a Ph.D. in English literature (her research focused on children’s fantasy, his on Charles Dickens). She lives in Wellington, New Zealand (where the The Unlikely Escape is set) and teaches English literature, film, and media studies. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Welcome to New Books in fantasy and adventure, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today we’ll be talking with Emily Roberson about her debut YA novel, Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), a mythological retelling. In this modern version of the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, Ariadne is a complacent Daddy‘s girl when we meet her. As her father’s favorite, she’s spared the humiliation her sisters accede to when they star in their own reality TV show, the Paradoxes. Sure, Daddy might have a martini-stocked bar in each room of his fabulous palace, as well as a sacrificial altar for augury in case the mood to sacrifice a dove seizes him. But when your mother is infamous for coupling with a bull, while hidden in wooden cow statue, Father looks like the better bet, even if he does have an agenda for everyone. Ariadne is also the Keeper of the Labyrinth, which means that every year she leads the chosen Athenians into the Labyrinth for their televised demise. Each year, the fourteen Athenians come to Crete to be feted, each one sure that he or she will be the one to defeat the Minotaur, and each year the slaughter is televised to diminishing audience interest. That all changes the year Theseus, the illegitimate son of the King of Athens, arrives in Crete intent on preventing further deaths. Ariadne finds herself attracted to Theseus, a serious and authentic young man, who happens to eb gorgeous as well. However, their developing romance soon becomes more fodder for the reality show her family stars in, and Ariadne must face some hard truths about her life. Emily has been a bookseller in Little Rock, a newspaper reporter in Vicksburg, a marketing manager in Boston, and a writer in Chapel Hill and Dallas. She graduated from Brown University and has a master’s degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin. She now lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her husband, three sons and no pets. You can find her on the web at on instagram @robersonemilym and on twitter @RobersonEmily. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. You can follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor, or visit her website at gabriellemathieu.com

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Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters

Ben Novotny was born with a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused profound mental retardation and seizures. He is severely limited but forms a tight bond with his older brother Hugo, who invents fun distractions and games that become dangerous as Ben gets older and bigger. Ben’s mother, Caroline, a lit professor at Emory, is barely holding herself together with mind-numbing drugs. His father, Percy, a successful contractor in Atlanta, keeps hoping to find an institution that will provide the kind of care Ben needs. His sister, Ivy angrily longs to escape after graduation, and his brother, Hugo gives up his own dreams to take care of Ben. Degrees of Difficulty (Fomite Press, 2019) follows the family over several decades as they each come to an understanding of how Ben affected their lives Born and raised in England, Julie Justicz moved to the Bahamas when she was ten, and then to the United States as a teenager. Julie comes from a family of Olympians: Her father George Justicz rowed for Great Britain in the 1960 Rome Olympics; her brother Robert competed in the Special Olympics as a swimmer; and Julie has been a proud participant as a triathlete in the Gay Games (formerly known as the Gay Olympics). She earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and received an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As an attorney and advocate, Julie currently works on civil rights issues in Chicago. She lives in Oak Park, Illinois with her spouse, Mary, and their two children. When she’s not trying to read, Julie likes to run - physical motion seems to result in creative composting. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Degrees of Difficulty

As revealed by the title of Talia Carner’s latest novel, The Third Daughter (William Morrow, 2019), her heroine, Batya, has two older sisters. Both ran off with men their parents could not tolerate, placing a heavy burden on Batya to compensate for her sisters’ failings by making her parents happy. When her family is forced to flee its home in a Ukrainian village to escape a pogrom, losing most of its goods, Batya helps out by taking a job at a local tavern. There she meets Yitzik Moskowitz, a smooth-talking, well-respected, and obviously well-off visitor who soon convinces Batya’s father to give his third daughter’s hand in marriage. Moskowitz promises to wait two years before making Batya his wife, but he insists she travel with him now, because who knows when he will return to Ukraine? Although only fourteen, Batya agrees to accompany her future husband on his journey. But after one night on the road, she discovers that what the “Man from Buenos Aires” wants from her has nothing to do with marriage. After a hideous journey across the Atlantic, Batya ends up in an Argentinean brothel, enslaved to the legal trafficking organization Zwi Migdal. For a while, she longs for death. But strong and resilient, she learns to adapt and even finds solace in unexpected places. Based on a series of stories by Sholem Aleichem, some of which became the basis for the popular musical Fiddler on the Roof, this fifth novel by a committed social activist is not always an easy read. But it is an essential and compelling read, not least because although set in the late nineteenth century its story is as contemporary as yesterday’s headlines. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Third Daughter: A Novel

"Poetry gave me back a way to find my culture, my history,” says Jason Bayani while discussion his new book Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019), which blends memoir and poetry into a stunning exploration of fragmented identities and the Pilipinx-American experience. Drawing inspiration from hip-hop and delving into the knotted complexity of family history and relationships, Bayani is able to recover a migrant identity and experience that is often silenced and shape a confident declaration of selfhood in American culture. In my grandfather’s last days He wandered the rice fields alone. What was left of his mind bringing him back to what he spent his entire life building. We are the land—lupa ay buhay, land is living. When my father talks of his poverty, he presents a bowl of rice and says, ‘Your Inang would put one piece of fish on the table, and we would press our fingers against it for flavor.’ Mimicking his hand scooping rice out of the bowl. — fragment from “The Low Lands” Bayani’s recommended poets and artists from the podcast: Microchips for Millions by Janice Sapigao, This is for the Mostless by Jason Magabo Perez, Souvenir by Aimee Suzara, Circa 91 by Ruby Ibarra, Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay, Insurrecto by Gina Apostol, and Anak Ko by Jay Som. Jason Bayani is an MFA graduate from Saint Mary's College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the artistic director for the Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, Muzzle Magazine, and Lantern Review, among others. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show "Locus of Control" in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin. You can join New Books in Poetry in a discussion of this episode on Shuffle by joining here. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Learn more at:www.andreablythe.com

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Insurrecto

Souvenir

Locus

This is for the mostless

Patron Saints of Nothing

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.” Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’s sentiments. In Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Harman takes scientific facts, as we know them today, and weaves them into narratives that have the tone, grace and drama of myth. Harman recognizes that despite the astounding achievements of science we are as humbled as the ancients by the existential mysteries of life. Has science revealed the secrets of fate or immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy insight into love? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe, and the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Here are the earth and the moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, and the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Renee Garfinkel is a Jerusalem-based psychologist, writer, and television & radio commentator. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com or tweet @embracingwisdom.

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Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World

Alan Bradley’s first mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, came out in 2009, and received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award, the Agatha Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Macavity Award and the Spotted Owl Award. This book introduced the intrepid 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous manor house in England, with her widowed father and two sisters. It’s 1950, and England is still rebuilding itself after WWII. Another book has followed each year. Golden Tresses of the Dead, the 10th novel in the series, was released in early 2019, and continues the escapades of now orphaned Flavia, who is being cared for, along with her annoying little cousin Undine, by a staff of servants. Flavia collaborates with the estate gardener, Dogger, who was her father's previous army companion and has a surprising repertoire of talents. Together, they solve whatever crimes pop up in the seemingly peaceful little English town of Bishop’s Lacey. In addition to the Flavia de Luce Mystery Series, Canadian-born author Alan Bradley is the author of many short stories, children's stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir, The Shoebox Bible. He co-authored Ms. Holmes of Baker Street with the late William A.S. Sarjeant. Alan Bradley and his wife live on the Isle of Mann in the middle of the Irish Sea. He began writing the series after retiring from the University of Saskatchewan, where, among other things, he taught television broadcast engineering and designed engineering studios. When not writing, he can be found reading, and often, both take place in his bed. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, to check out some of her awesome recipes, or to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview.

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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: A Flavia de Luce Mystery

Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash discusses his novel, The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017) writing fiction inspired by the South, and exploring the complexities of southern class, race, and gender relations against the backdrop of the 1929 Loray Mill strike. Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America—and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association.

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The Last Ballad: A Novel

After writing more than 30 books, including memoirs, military science fiction, alternate histories, and a book of writing advice, John Birmingham was ready to try his hand at the sweeping and dramatic science fiction subgenre known as space opera. But you’d never know The Cruel Stars(Del Rey, 2019) is his first attempt at epic, interstellar, battle-of-the-ages storytelling. His deft hand has produced a tightly paced, suspenseful, and bitingly funny adventure full of wild military tech, high-stakes conflict, and five eloquent characters. “I'm a huge fan of the [space opera] genre, but it took me a while to get the confidence to write my own,” Birmingham says. The conflict at the core of The Cruel Stars pits the Sturm—who believe with Nazi-like conviction in keeping humans “pure,” i.e. free of genetic or technological enhancements—against the rest of humanity. “I very much based [the Sturm] on the ultra-right, which was coming to scary prominence as I was first putting this book together. But in a way, the system against which they set themselves isn't particularly pretty either.” Set in the far future, the story follows multiple protagonists: a scrappy lieutenant who suddenly finds herself commanding a powerful warship, a pre-pubescent princess on the run from the Sturm, a sharp-shooting pirate, a centuries-old, reclusive and foul-mouthed war hero, and a prisoner convicted of treason whose computer-generated soul is facing permanent “deletion.” Each character has a distinct voice and unique challenges. Princess Alessia, for example, transforms overnight from a coddled heir to an embattled leader while war hero Admiral Frazer McLennan must finally confront the guilt he feels for decisions he made hundreds of years ago when he last battled the Sturm. But the story’s center of gravity is Lucinda Hardy, the lieutenant-turned-commander. “Hers is the story I want to investigate most of all,” Birmingham says. “She grew up poor, and she finds herself moving through rarefied and powerful centers of society. Early on, one of the other characters tells her ‘You don't belong here.’ And the thing that she has to come to terms with over the course of her story is whether or not she does.” The Cruel Stars, which came out in August, is the first installment of a planned trilogy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.

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The Cruel Stars: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

A man turns himself into the police for kidnapping an underage girl. The police chief tell him to go home but Walter insists on being arrested and charged. Back to the beginning of the story in 1999, Walter is an eighteen-year-old math prodigy who has already earned two doctorates but is told to get some work experience before going to law school. An investment banker on Wall Street, by nineteen he’s married, and by twenty, the father of a daughter, Olivia. Then 9/11 happens, Walter loses his best friend, he becomes disillusioned with the banking world, and he focuses on fatherhood. Then he includes the little next-door neighbor in all of Olivia’s activities. Later, as his marriage crumbles and his wife takes Olivia with her to Maine, Walter finds himself more and more drawn to the neighbor. This is a novel about family dynamics, growing older, struggling with loneliness, and forbidden love. K. C. Maher always knew that she wanted to write. She learned grammar in parochial school and did a BA at St Johns College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she found her second passion, philosophy. Her short fiction has appeared in literary journals including Ascent, Black Warrior Review, Confrontation, Cottonwood, Gargoyle, and The View From Here. Her work has been short-listed for the Iowa School of Letters Award and Drue Heinz Literature Prize. She lives in New York City and when not writing, she likes to run along the East River where it connects to the Hudson River, then back through the Financial District. Today we discuss her book The Best of Crimes (RedDoor Publishing, 2019). If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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The Best of Crimes

Francie Meeker and her best friend, Vi Carothers, bought into the promise offered to middle-class, especially white, women in the mid-twentieth-century United States: find a man with a good career, marry young, stay at home, raise the children, keep house, and all will be well. By 1952, despite some successes, reality has killed this dream. So at the beginning of Lies in White Dresses (William Morrow, 2019)—the sparkling new novel by Sofia Grant, who is also the author of The Dress in the Window and The Daisy Children—Francie and Vi are boarding a train to Reno, Nevada. There, after six weeks residency, they can file for divorce. On the train they meet a young woman, June Samples, traveling with a small child. Unlike Francie and Vi, June has almost no means of support. Vi takes a liking to the younger woman and, when they reach Reno, she invites June to share her hotel suite. The first night, a babysitting job brings the threesome to the attention of Virgie, the hotel keeper’s daughter and a self-styled detective. Then, not long after their arrival, the local police report that Vi has drowned. Virgie is convinced she knows what happened. But who will believe a twelve-year-old girl? Compared to medieval Europe or Han Dynasty China, the 1940s and 1950s do not seem so long ago. But as Sofia Grant makes clear in this page-turning novel, in many respects the previous century was indeed a different world. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Lies in White Dresses: A Novel

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s struggle to insulate itself from global trends as well the impact of the rise of ultra-conservative attitudes in its majority Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, but also increased difficulty in balancing rival powers China and the United States. If that were not enough, Singapore is juggling multiple issues at a time that it is transiting to a new generational leadership faced with the challenge of ensuring that Singapore remains relevant to its neighbours as well as the international community at large. To do so, Singapore’s leadership will have to upgrade if not reinvent its relevance to its neighbour as well as the international community at large given tectonic geopolitical and technological shifts among which first and foremost artificial intelligence. Walton argues convincingly that complacency may be one of Singapore’s greatest challenges. Generational change involves not only a new generation of leadership but also a generation that was born into a wealthy welfare state, lacks the older generations’ sense of being pioneers and takes things for granted. It is a challenge that is likely to have consequences for a rethink of Singapore’s education system, considered one of the world’s best. In portraying the miracle of Singapore’s success and the challenges it faces, Walton brings a strong sense of history, keen observation and a journalist’s ability to paint with words an incisive picture of a country that has turned its lack of resources into an asset. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute.

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Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency

The stories and fables in A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc Books, 2019) twist and turn with the sorrows and challenges of family, lovers, growing up, and aging. Sometimes wry, sometimes charming, occasionally a story will make you gasp, especially the one-pagers. In 78 pieces of fiction, flash fiction and micro-fiction, Alford’s writing is soothing, sparkling, opaque or mysterious, but it always packs a punch. Peg Alford Pursell, author of Show her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow,the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction, has had work published in many journals and anthologies. Her micro-fiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Micro-fictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There are Words, the national literary reading series. Also, she enjoys walking through her neighborhood with its redwoods and Little Free Libraries. One of the most fascinating dreams she's had was creating a crossword puzzle in her sleep and being able to remember the lower left section when she awoke. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join

G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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A Girl Goes Into the Forest

Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline(Tor, 2019)stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion. The book opens in an alternate America in which women gained the right to vote in the 1870s (rather than 1920), but abortion never became legal. “I was imagining that if women had gotten the vote earlier, there might have been a backlash, which would have prevented a reproductive rights movement from really taking hold,” Newitz says. In the novel, time travel has gone mainstream. Anyone with the proper training can do it, although technically it’s only supposed to be used for research. That doesn’t stop Tess, under the guise of studying cultural history, from trying to “edit” the timeline to thwart men’s rights activists from trying to subjugate women through their own illicit edits. And hidden within Tess’s agenda is another secret, which she hides even from her trusted friends. That secret is revealed slowly to the reader, through alternating chapters set in the 1990s in Irvine, California. For those chapters, Newitz draws on their own experiences, including being raised by an abusive father. While the father in the story is different from their own, “what’s true to my own experience is the emotional part of it,” Newitz says, adding that one of the ways “that fiction allows us to get distance on things that have happened to us is that we get to make shit up, and somehow, in the act of doing that, it’s healing.” The Future of Another Timeline is Newitz’s second novel. Their debut novel, Autonomous, which they discussed on the show last year, was nominated for Nebula and Locus awards, and won a Lambda Literary Award. They also co-host, with Charlie Jane Anders, the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, which won this year’s Hugo for best fancast. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.

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The Future of Another Timeline

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the most comprehensive collection of Sámi oral tradition available in English to date. Collected by August V. Koskimies and Toivo I. Itkonen in the 1880s from nearly two dozen storytellers from the arctic Aanaar (Inari) region of northeast Finland, the material reveals a complex web of social relations that existed both inside and far beyond the community. First published in 1918 only in the Aanaar Sámi language and in Finnish, this anthology is now available in a centennial English-language edition for a global readership. Translator Tim Frandy has added biographies of the storytellers, maps and period photos, annotations, and a glossary. In headnotes that contextualize the stories, he explains such underlying themes as Aanaar conflicts with neighboring Sámi and Finnish communities, the collapse of the wild reindeer populations less than a century before, and the pre-Christian past in Aanaar. He introduces us to the bawdy humor of Antti Kitti, the didacticism of Iisakki Mannermaa, and the feminist leanings of Juho Petteri Lusmaniemi, emphasizing that folktales and proverbs are rooted in the experiences of individuals who are links in a living tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar

Drawing on the author’s deep knowledge of classical literature, Deborah L. Davitt’s book of poetry The Gates of Never (Finishing Line Press, 2018) explores the intersections of myth, science, and humanity through her beautifully accessible poems, reflecting a variety of forms and linguistic styles. These poems morph between being moving, irreverent, unsettling, and erotic — offering up a richly textured collection of work. “He writes me upside down and backwards, so that I hardly know myself yet, but my hundred newly-open mouths whisper secret meanings, and offer atramentum kisses;

he soothes my wounds with copper vitriol, making the words holy and incorruptible, incapable of fading into sepia;

yet as he kisses me, our tongues meeting, the words spark white-fire under my skin, the runes writhing into new configurations”

– from “Testament” Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. She has worked as a technical writer on contracts involving nuclear submarines, NASA, and computer manufacturing. Her poetry has received nominations for the Rhysling, Dwarf Star, and Pushcart awards; and her short fiction has appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show, Compelling Science Fiction, and Pseudopod. For more about her work, including her Edda-Earth novels and her poetry collection, The Gates of Never, please see www.edda-earth.com. You can find New Books in Poetry on Shuffle here. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com

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It’s 1991, and recent college graduate Mim wants to be a writer, but for now she is folding clothes at Benetton. She notices the trash-filled streets and befriends exotic Kyra, who joins Mim’s disparate group of roommates, all squeezed together in a crumbling NYC apartment. Their relationship gets closer, and Mim meets Roy, the man Kyra plans to marry. Then, the anguish of another of the roommates, a veteran of the Gulf war, becomes unbearable, and Mim returns home to Boston. She loses track of Kyra for twenty years. Now it’s 2012, Mim is married, a successful writer and raising an adopted child when she learns that Kyra has disappeared in Afghanistan. Mim’s journey to find her old friend forces her to confront her choices, herself, and her understanding of America’s ability to change the world. Join me today as I talk to Daphne Kalotay about her new novel Blue Hours (Triquarterly, 2019). Kalotay is the author of the critically acclaimed collection Calamity and Other Stories, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Story Prize; the award-winning novel Russian Winter--a national and international bestseller--and the novel Sight Reading, winner of the 2014 New England Society Book Award in Fiction. She received her M.A. from Boston University's Creative Writing Program, where her stories won the Florence Engel Randall Fiction Prize and a Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, before earning her Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Daphne has received fellowships from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, Yaddo, and MacDowell. She has taught literature and creative writing at Princeton University, University of Massachusetts, Middlebury College, Boston University, Skidmore College, Harvard University and Grub Street. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and in her spare time, tries to keep rabbits out of her vegetable garden. She also likes to take long urban walks, from one neighborhood into another. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Blue Hours: A Novel

Grand Duchess Maria Romanova arrives in Ekaterinburg in 1918 with her parents, the former Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. After months of house arrest in the deep interior of Russia, the family is beginning to despair of ever being rescued. As conditions worsen, Maria and her family are increasingly at the mercy of the men set to guard them. As the pro-monarchist White Army approaches Ekaterinburg, the fate of the Romanovs hangs in the balance. Thousands of miles away and six decades later, Australian Val Doyle has her hands full with an abusive husband, a small daughter, and a mystery surrounding her recently deceased father, who died claiming, “I didn’t want to kill her!” The only clues to what may have happened are a vintage camera with a roll of film still in it and an exquisite jeweled box that refuses to open. Veteran novelist Gill Paul unravels the stories of Maria and Val in The Lost Daughter(William Morrow, 2019), a meticulously researched, engrossing novel set in Russia, China, and Australia, which follows her highly popular 2016, The Secret Wife, in which she imagined an alternative history for Maria’s elder sister, Grand Duchess Tatiana. As Val finds the courage to defend herself against her husband, so too, does Maria mature into a strong, self-sufficient woman, though in a vastly different setting than the one imagined for a Romanov Grand Duchess. The Lost Daughter is a thoroughly satisfying read: Romanov fans will rejoice at this latest iteration of the alternative narrative; one which elevates the genre considerably. Gill Paul’s deft plot twists as Val tries to solve her father’s mystery are rewarding and perfectly crafted, as is the marvelous detail Paul brings to the sweep of twentieth-century history. Gill Paul’s best-selling historical novels have been translated into twenty languages. They are set in recent history and feature real historical characters presented innovatively. Gill is a native of Scotland, but today makes her home in London. She is a popular speaker on subjects such as the British Royal Family, the Romanovs, and writing. Follow Gill on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or visit her website. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, USTOA, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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The Lost Daughter: A Novel

In Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson (Blackstone Publishing, 2019), the U.S. Virgin Islands serve as Earth’s entry point for the Ynaa, beings from a far corner of the universe whose intentions and desires are as complex as the humans who come to loathe them. The Ynaa (pronounced EE-nah) claim to come in peace, but there are echoes of colonization in the way they manipulate humans with fear and violence. And just as attitudes toward European colonization are reflected in the use of words like “discover” versus “invade,” so too do Virgin Islanders debate whether the Ynaa violently “invaded” or more neutrally “arrived.” Humans are no match—either physically or technologically—for the Ynaa, yet that doesn’t stop some angry (and one might argue foolish) homo sapiens from trying to thwart them. Turnbull treats human and Ynaa with an even hand, offering cultural and psychological insights into the nature of toxic masculinity and the Ynaa’s bursts of extreme violence. Even though Turnbull is from the U.S. Virgin Islands, he initially avoided it as a setting for his fiction. But when a teacher in his MFA program “recommended to me quite nicely that I should write about my own experience,” he found himself crafting stories that eventually turned into The Lesson. “I guess it's inevitable that once I started writing about home, something clicked for me. I think that my giving myself the opportunity to have that conversation with the place where I was from allowed me to find my way into storytelling in a way that I feel is more meaningful. I think lot of the things that I was trying to explore in the novel—faith and sexuality and relationships and violence and toxic masculinity—all these things are things that I have had to explore within myself.” (Note: In the interview, we talk about Hurricane Dorian as if it were a relatively minor storm. The interview was conducted on August 28, the day Tropical Storm Dorian moved through the U.S. Virgin Islands and turned into a hurricane. The U.S. Virgin Islands were not substantially affected, but four days later, Hurricane Dorian turned into a devastating Category 5 storm that inflicted catastrophic damage on the Bahamas. --RW) Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform.

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The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Lesson: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who might now be occupying one of many places she and her family lived back when she was growing up in downtown Vancouver’s eastside, and in this sense, her memoir is a map of the city, allowing us to see into lives and loves and struggles we might otherwise never see. But Dear Current Occupant is also a letter to Knight’s younger selves, to the girl and eventually young woman who lived in these places and who struggled to discover who she was and who she could be. The result of this correspondence is a rich and multifaceted account of what it means to become a strong writer and, in Knight’s words, “a strong black woman.” Knight’s book combines poetry, prose, maps, photographs, and other media to tell a singular story that could be told in no other way, to make visible what she calls “the cracks in the narrative,” which, in the end, hold the truth of her story and perhaps her very self. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (Essais)

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine. His knowledge of German literature came from his mother, and his love of the teachings of Maimonides and the Hassidim came from his father. In 1908 he left for Palestine, where, except for an extended stay in Germany from 1912 to 1924, he lived until his death. Agnon began writing stories when he was quite young. His first major publication, Hakhnasat Kalah (The Bridal Canopy), 1922, re-creates the golden age of Hassidism, and his apocalyptic novel, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest for the Night), 1939, depicts the ruin of Galicia after WWI. Much of Agnon’s other writing is set in Palestine. Israel’s early pioneers are portrayed in his epic Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945, considered his greatest work, and in the surreal stories of Sefer Hamaasim (The Book of Deeds), 1932. Agnon also published work on the Jewish holy days Yamin Noraim (Days of Awe), 1938, on the giving of the Torah, Atem Reitem (Present at Sinai), 1959, and on the gathering of Hassidic lore, Sifreihem Shel Tzadikim (Books of the Righteous) and Sippurei HaBesht (Stories of the Baal Shem Tov), 1960-1961. Considered one of the greatest Hebrew writers, in 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Rabbi Jeffrey Saks is the Director of Research at the Agnon House in Jerusalem and served as the Series Editor of The S.Y. Agnon Library at The Toby Press, now complete in 15 volumes. He is the founding director of The Academy for Torah Initiatives and Directions in Jewish Education, in Jerusalem, and its WebYeshiva.org program. Rabbi Saks was recently appointed as Editor of Tradition, the premier journal of Orthodox Jewish thought published in English. After earning his BA, MA, and rabbinic degrees from Yeshiva University, Rabbi Saks moved to Israel and has served on the faculties of several high schools and yeshivot, edited several books, and published widely on Jewish thought, education, and literature. Rabbi Saks lives in Efrat with his wife Ilana Goldstein Saks and their four children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Melissa Albert's novel The Hazel Wood(Flatiron Books, 2018) is a shivery delight, like a dazzling vintage ball gown of paisley silk, slithering over your head. Reading it is like drowning in musk rose petals and damson wine. It begins in an almost conventional manner, with a missing person mystery. Alice and her mother, Ella, live a peripatetic existence, which takes them from Nacogdoches, Texas to Brooklyn, New York. Alice copes with the frequent moves by becoming a loner, though she feels a fierce loyalty to her mother, and curiosity about her grandmother, a mysterious reclusive writer of fairy tales. When Ella meets and marries Harold, Alice and she stay still long enough for her past to catch up with them. One day Ella disappears, abducted in front of Harold. This is no ordinary kidnapping though, as Alice and her friend Finch soon find out. Their search for Ella takes them deeper and deeper into another reality, and the secrets of Alice’s origin, and things start to get really weird. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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The Hazel Wood: A Novel (The Hazel Wood, 1)

Two sisters are struggling to save their land when a gas well explodes on a neighboring ranch in western Colorado, setting off a disturbing chain of events. Their father has died, the older sister has become unraveled and the younger sister is mauled by an angry cow. Her ex-boyfriend is buying up oil and gas rights and downplays a spate of cancer-related deaths near his wells. The company offers the sisters bottled water when the river starts bubbling. There’s also an Iraqi war veteran who helps the sisters while he’s on probation from his job as a police officer, putting his own marriage at risk. This is a moving debut novel about family, land, and the preservation of both in rural America. Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren has been writing about the rural West for twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize, an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, and nine grants from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, has appeared in such publications as MotherJones, High Country News, The Nation, and Salon.com. Her debut novel, Kickdown (Arcade, 2018) was shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize. She lives in Portland, Ore. with her husband and two young sons. When she’s not writing, Rebecca can be found hiking, running with friends, or telling people what books to read. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kickdown: A Novel

C.A. Fletcher’s new novel, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World(Orbit, 2019), takes place several generations after a pandemic has turned humans into an endangered species. For Griz, the adolescent narrator, life is bounded by his family, two dogs, and the Outer Hebrides island where they hunt, fish, and farm. When Brand, a lone sailor, shows up, Griz is mesmerized by his stories of adventure. But when Brand steals one of the family’s dogs, Griz gives chase. As Griz and their other dog journey through the ruins of our world, they explore the limits of loyalty while learning a lesson in human cruelty. “If you're not true to the things you love, what are you?” Fletcher says, quoting Griz. “That's when you stop being human.” In his interview, Fletcher discusses the research that informs the novel’s “soft apocalypse,” the difference between writing screenplays and novels, his father’s wise words about dogs, and the real-life terrier behind Griz’s canine companion. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. A former journalist, he directs communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform

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The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

When I spoke with Linnea Hartsuyker back in 2017, her epic saga was just beginning. The first novel opens with her hero, Ragnvald, seeing a vision of a golden wolf who will unite the feuding kingdoms of Norway under one rule. The vision sets the course of Ragnvald’s life, bringing him into the service of Harald Fair-Hair, a young and confident warrior whose counselor and friend Ragnvald becomes. Meanwhile, Ragnvald’s sister, Svanhild, sets off on a different course, one that offers her a life of adventure not often available to women but pits her against her beloved brother. Twenty years later, Harald has come close to achieving his goal. One more wedding stands between him and a unified Norway. Svanhild and Ragnvald have returned to fighting on the same side, but two decades of wounds and battles, as well as old patterns, are catching up with the older generation. And the three of them have produced a large and varied group of children, most of them sons at or near adulthood, ready to challenge their parents’ ways and dreams. As fathers struggle with sons, mothers with daughters, brothers and cousins among themselves, and husbands with wives and concubines, Ragnvald stubbornly clings to the force of his vision and his dedication to the principles that have guided his life. Like its predecessors, The Half-Drowned King and The Sea Queen, The Golden Wolf (Harper, 2019) seamlessly blends Old Norse folklore with creative imagination to paint a picture of ninth-century Norway from the inside. Linnea Hartsuyker assembles a cast of characters that, however different they and their world may appear to a modern readership, tackles problems we all can recognize. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Golden Wolf

Planted in her mind while the author was working as a professional gardener, The Forgetting Flower (Magnolia Press, 2019) tells the story of Renia, a working- class young woman who left Crakow to live in Paris. She manages a flower shop for the obnoxious, oblivious owner, who is tone-deaf regarding business, money, and people. Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. Karen Hugg loves plants and is thrilled when new cultivars or varieties are discovered. She is often reminded that “if she didn’t exist, they would live on just fine anyway.” Karen is a Seattle-based certified ornamental horticulturalist and Master Pruner and is also a graduate of the Goddard MFA program. When she is not actually digging in the dirt, Karen likes to write mysteries and thrillers that are set in the world of plants. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going here. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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The Forgetting Flower

It is not easy to interview a writer of murder mysteries without giving away too many details, but when an author not only manages to create a full and complex cast of characters but also sweetens the deal with recipes for everything from cakes to zucchini dip (given in detail at the end of the book), that helps. G. P. Gottlieb does both in Battered (D. X. Varos, 2019), the first of her Whipped and Sipped Mystery series, set in present-day Chicago. Since divorcing her husband eight years ago, Alene Baron has owned a neighborhood café specializing in healthy but tasty breakfasts, lunches, and nonalcoholic drinks. Managing the business is a full-time job, and the staff ranges from Alene’s closest friend to relatives of the former owner who have been grandfathered in despite their troubled lives and work histories. With three children and an elderly father to support while counteracting the influence of her irresponsible ex-husband, Alene has her hands full. When one of the residents of her apartment block winds up dead, Alene takes it personally. The detective assigned to the case has an appealing way about him, although he discourages Alene when she seeks to do more than provide information. He urges her to leave the investigation in his hands, but Alene is not sure she can. After all, she has known most of the suspects for years, and as the chase continues, she begins to fear that she and her family may be the next targets on the killer’s list. G. P. Gottlieb hosts New Books in Literature, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. Battered is her debut novel. Listen to us chat about her characters, writing, and the source of her recipes (but don’t tell the children there are chickpeas hidden in the brownies). C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Zaytuna just wants to be left alone to her ascetic practices and nurse her dark view of the world. But when an impoverished servant girl she barely knows comes and begs her to bring some justice to the death of a local boy, she is forced to face the suffering of the most vulnerable in Baghdad and the emotional and mystical legacy of her mother, a famed ecstatic whose love for God eclipsed everything. The Lover (Kindle Direct Publishers, 2019) is a historically sensitive mystery that introduces us to the world of medieval Baghdad and the lives of the great Sufi mystics, washerwomen, Hadith scholars, tavern owners, slaves, corpsewashers, police, and children indentured to serve in the homes of the wealthy. It asks what it means to have family when you have nearly no one left, what it takes to love and be loved by those who have stuck by you, and how one can come to love God and everything He’s done to you. In our conversation Laury Silvers discusses her transition from writing scholarship to historical fiction, how her research equipped her to give life to 10th century Baghdad in her narrative, the primary and secondary sources that informed her novel, what daily life of diverse social classes would have looked like at that moment, early pious and mystic women, sufi training and practice, questions of race and colorism, and the complex environment women had to navigate in medieval Baghdad. She even gives us a preview of the second book in this series, called The Jealous. Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Interpreting Islam in China: Pilgrimage, Scripture, and Language in the Han Kitab (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a monograph entitled The Cinematic Lives of Muslims, and is the editor of the forthcoming volumes Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology (ILEX Foundation) and New Approaches to Islam in Film(Routledge). You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu.

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The Lover: A Sufi Mystery (The Sufi Mysteries Quartet)

Nellie Bly is in some respects a household name, yet the passage of time has erased many of her accomplishments from popular memory. One of the first well-known female journalists, she wrote for Joseph Pulitzer’s acclaimed paper The World, traveled around the world in less than eighty days, married a millionaire, and pursued a celebrated career at a time when the idea of women with professions was still new. But her first journalistic assignment—the one that landed her a job with The World when she was still Elizabeth Cochrane, a twenty-something from Pittsburgh trying to make her living in the big city—was quite different. As Kate Braithwaite details in The Girl Puzzle (Crooked Cat Books, 2019), at Pulitzer’s suggestion, Elizabeth had herself declared insane and sent off to Blackwell’s Island, the location of one of New York’s most notorious lunatic asylums, with the intention of reporting on life from the inside. Braithwaite’s dramatic and compelling novel opens with the middle-aged Nellie Bly revealing her story to a young typist. We see Elizabeth bursting into Pulitzer’s office, demanding a job and receiving her assignment to infiltrate Blackwell’s Island. There, shut in with no guarantee of release, she uncovers conditions at times medieval, at times punitive, at times simply alarming. Her own forthright character and instinct to confront injustice act against her, confirming the nurses’ and doctors’ views that she is not mentally stable. One of the doctors demonstrates a certain kindness toward the afflicted, but most of his colleagues cannot manage even that. Some of Elizabeth’s fellow patients are—or become—unbalanced, but others have been sent to the asylum because they are poor, foreign, short-tempered, demanding, or simply inconvenient for their families or for society. As days turn to weeks, and no one arrives from The World, Elizabeth has to face the possibility that she may never leave the asylum. Of course, we know she does. But it’s to the credit of this well-written, meticulously researched, and beautifully realized novel that we still remain on the edge of our seats, desperate to learn what will happen next. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Girl Puzzle: A Story of Nellie Bly

For Blue and Red—arch enemies at the center of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s epistolary novella, This is How You Lose the Time War (Gallery, 2019)—the only thing that endures after millennia of espionage and intrigue is love. El-Mohtar and Gladstone are themselves avid letter writers who favor fountain pens and G. Lalo stationery over pixels and Gmail. So it was only natural that when they decided to collaborate on a novella about enemies-turned-inamoratas, their tale takes the form of a correspondence. Since Blue and Red can travel across timelines and live for eons, they compose their letters from materials that take a long time to manipulate, such as the rings of a tree, an owl pellet, lava flows, and sumac seeds. El-Mohtar and Gladstone, on the other hand, were constrained by ordinary time and space. “He writes about four times as fast as I do. So it was it was tricky at first,” El-Mohtar says. “But then as we rounded off the first act, we started changing the pace of our respective writing. Max slowed down and I sped up. And then we were finishing at exactly the same time.” Like the co-authors, the book’s characters also found a rhythm. Blue and Red start our as sworn enemies sent across timelines to fight on behalf of very different futures. But they find that they have more in common with each other than they do with the universes that they’ve promised to defend. Red is “hungry for something more than what's known,” Gladstone says. “In Blue, she finds not just someone who takes the world as seriously as she does, but someone who has the same depth of desire and focus and devotion to her chosen art, which is time war … who throws her beyond her own limits.” “From both of their perspectives, there is a sense of alienation and insufficiency in the worlds that they come from,” El-Mohtar says. “Blue is someone who feels this constant gnawing, insatiable hunger that nothing in her world seems able to sate… until she starts being surprised by Red, this agent on the other side, who makes things hard for her.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.

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This Is How You Lose the Time War

A picaresque novel about a serious boy with special powers, The Lost Puzzler takes place in an impoverished, technologically backwards world. After the fall of the advanced Tarakan Empire, the remaining population struggles to get by on what remains of their technology. Others turn to a rural existence, adhering to religious dogma which condemns all those who still seek out technology. Children who spontaneously exhibit tattoos are linked to the fallen Tarakanian society, sought after by those who collect Tarakanian technology, and ostracized or killed by the religion rural faction. Two boys, born years apart, both possess the markings which indicate special powers. One, Rafik, flees death in his religiously conservative village only to be passed from hand to hand, as various factions try to make use of his powers. Rafik possesses one of the most useful mutations, the ability to open the locks that guard caches of the lost Tarkanian technology. Those locks are made of intricate puzzles that can only be solved by a Puzzler, someone who has the power to arrange symbols into patterns. The other tattooed young man, whose only mutation is the ability to see through materials, is a scribe in the society of Historians. Decades later, he is tasked with finding out what happened to Rafik, and why it changed the course of history for the worse. An elusive fighter and communications specialist, the alluring Vincha, knows most of Rafik’s story, but our scribe must find a way to convince her to talk. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one looking for Vincha. The Lost Puzzler: The Tarakan Chronicles (Harper Voyager, 2019), is Eyal Kless’s first novel in English. Eyal’s website is eyalkless.com, and he loves to hear from readers. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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The Lost Puzzler: The Tarakan Chronicles

It’s 1979, and the Islamic Revolution is just around the corner, as is a massive solar eclipse. In this epic novel set in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, grow apples, plums, peaches, and sour cherries, as well as manage several generations of family members. The days here are marked by long, elaborate lunches on the terrace and arguments about the corrupt monarchy in Iran and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And yet life in the orchard continues. An uncle develops into a powerful cleric. A young nephew goes to university, hoping to lead the fight for a new Iran and marry his childhood sweetheart. Another nephew surrenders to opium, while his widowed father dreams of a life in the West. Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters that range from servants to elderly friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive (Catapult, 2019) is the kind of rich, compelling story that not only informs the past, but raises questions about political and religious extremism today. Rabeah Ghaffari was born in Iran and lives in New York City. She is a filmmaker and writer whose work has appeared in the Tribeca Film Festival. Her collaborative fiction with artist Shirin Neshat was featured in "Reflections on Islamic Art"(Bloomsbury/Qatar) and her documentary, "The Troupe," featured Tony Kushner and received funding from the Ford Foundation and Lincoln Center. Her most recent feature-length screenplay, The Inheritors, was commissioned by producer and costume designer Patricia Field. Rabaeh is also a trained actor who spent her twenties doing theater and film in NYC. When not writing, she loves watching films and cooking. To Keep the Sun Alive is her first novel. If you enjoy this podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to here. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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In Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019), David Slucki, Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston, gives us a very different type of history book. Slucki’s memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, this is a unique story and an innovative approach to writing both history and family narrative. Students, scholars, and general readers of memoirs will enjoy this deeply personal reflection on family, Jewish history and grief. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au

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Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons

When Emily Dawson inherits a plantation in Barbados from her grandfather, Jonathan Fenty, in 1854, she is not quite sure what to make of the bequest. Emily, an English vicar’s daughter, has long been the “poor relation” of her merchant family, but the bigger surprise is that her grandfather never once mentioned the existence of this property, Peverills. In the company of her cousins Adam and Laura, Emily embarks on a sailing vessel for the West Indies. In Bridgeport, further shocks await. Their contact, Mr. Turner—reputed to be the wealthiest man in Barbados—is of African descent; and neither he nor anyone else in his family seems to think much of the English visitors. When Emily expresses the desire to see Peverills for herself, the Turners explicitly warn her away. Emily persists, only to find the estate in ruins and the family next door eager to take her in. But Emily soon begins to wonder about the neighbors’ motives, as well as the history of the plantation. How many other secrets did her grandfather conceal? In The Summer Country (William Morrow, 2019), Lauren Willig nimbly balances Emily’s story against her grandfather’s, interweaving the stories of three families across two timelines into a seamless whole. Better yet, she does it against the backdrop of a Barbados so beautifully realized that you will feel that you can smell the sugar cane burning and hear the singing carried on the wind. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Summer Country: A Novel

After surviving a car crash that left her widowed at twenty-two, Kathleen has retreated to a remote corner of a state park, where she works flipping burgers for deer hunters and hikers—happy, she insists, to be left alone. But when a stranger appears in the dead of winter—seemingly out of nowhere, kicking snow from his flimsy dress shoes—Kathleen is intrigued, despite herself. He says he’s a student visiting from Uzbekistan, and his worldliness fills her with curiosity about life beyond the valley. After a cautious friendship settles between them, the stranger confesses to a terrible crime in his home country, and Kathleen finds herself in the grip of a manhunt—and face-to-face with secrets of her own. Steeped in the rugged beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains as America’s War on Terror rages in the background, Sarah St. Vincent’s Ways to Hide in Winter (Melville House, 2018) is a powerful story about violence and redemption, betrayal and empathy, and how we reconcile the unforgivable in those we love. Sarah St. Vincent grew up in a rural Pennsylvania community similar to the one in which this novel is set. She attended Swarthmore College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan Law School. She has worked as a legal fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology and as a clerk at the International Court of Justice. St. Vincent is currently a researcher and advocate on national security, surveillance, and domestic law enforcement for Human Rights Watch. She frequently writes on these topics and has been interviewed recently by such outlets as the Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Reuters, NPR, and Bloomberg West. She lives in New York. Ways to Hide in Winter is her first novel. If you enjoy this podcast and want to discuss it further with me and other New Books network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going here. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) if you wish to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview, to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, or to check out some of her awesome recipes.

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Ways to Hide in Winter

In The Last Astronaut (Orbit, 2019), David Wellington turns his prolific imagination—which is more often associated with earthbound monsters like zombies, vampires, and werewolves—to the threat of an alien invasion. Set in 2055, the novel introduces a NASA ill equipped to respond to the arrival of a massive object from another star system. The agency no longer has an astronaut corps, so it turns to the last astronaut it trained, 56-year-old Sally Jansen, who retired in disgrace years earlier after the death of an astronaut under her command. Jansen and a crew of three, who are trained for space flight in just a few months, race to greet the massive 80-kilometer-long visitor, but the goal of each member of her team is as varied as their personalities. One wants to fulfill a life-long dream of being an astronaut; one wants to communicate with aliens; one wants to study them; and one wants to destroy them. Wellington says his interest in science fiction goes back to when he was six and he himself aspired to be an astronaut. “I wrote a letter to NASA saying, ‘Can you tell me what I should do to become an astronaut?’ And they sent me back a very nice form letter telling me I should enlist in the military and learn how to fly a plane,” he says. “They also sent me a manila envelope full of glossy 8-by-10 photographs of rocks on the moon and the Saturn 5 rocket and the Apollo lander and the Space Shuttle. Those photographs became some of my most prized possessions.” The alien object in The Last Astronaut was inspired by 'Oumuamua, which astronomers first observed in 2017 and had trouble classifying, first calling it an asteroid and now a comet. Because of its unusual trajectory and apparent interstellar origin, some even thought it could be an alien spaceship. “This is definitely a horror story,” Wellington says. “There's violence, there's death … This is not The Martian. In the Martian, Andy Weir creates a situation of peril, but it's all about solving that problem. My book is much more about surviving, if you can.” As for the all-important question of whether he’d rather dine with a monster or a space alien, Wellington is quick to answer. “I'd much rather have dinner with an alien,” he says. “I would love to try to communicate with a creature from another planet.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.

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The Last Astronaut

Rachel Stolzman Gullo Practice Dying (Bedazzled Ink, 2018) is about twins, David and Jamila, who seek meaning and connection from opposite ends of the world. Just as she turns 30, Jamila falls in love with an Indian pastry chef who is temporarily in New York City. When that doomed relationship falters, she unsuccessfully tries to commit suicide, and David flies immediately home from Tibet. David is a devoted Buddhist who has been mentored by the 14th Dalai Lama. He is obsessed with a rash of self-immolations by Tibetan monks who are protesting China’s occupation of their country and attempts to annihilate their culture. In alternating chapters, the twins grapple with family bonds, spirituality, illness, death, and love. Rachel Stolzman Gullo is the author of The Sign for Drowning (Shambhala, 2008). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in various publications. Practice Dying was a semi-finalist for Best Novel in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Literary Competition, received a fellowship from Summer Literary Seminars, and was a finalist for the Inkubate Literary Blockbuster Challenge. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two sons. G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com) to listen to her previous podcast interviews, to read her mystery book reviews, to check out some of her awesome recipes, or to recommend an author (of a beautifully-written new novel) to interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Practice Dying

101 years have passed since the murder of the Imperial Family of Russia at Yekaterinburg, but their appeal has not diminished. Indeed, interest in the Romanovs is at a historic high as television and the Internet age enables ever more devotees to discover the sepia-tinged appeal of Tsar Nicholas II and his doomed family. Less attention is devoted to the members of Nicholas’s family of origin, including many who survived the slaughter of 1917, escaping Russia for lives of exile in Europe and North America. And of these, no one is more fascinating than Nicholas's own mother, Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Danish princess who captured the hearts of Russia when she arrived to marry the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Alexander Alexandrovich in 1866. C.W. Gortner's latest novel, The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna (Ballentine Books, 2018) goes a long way to addressing this disparity. The novel is an exceptionally well-researched, masterfully crafted account of Maria Fyodorovna from her upbringing in a cozy and modest childhood home in Denmark — which she shares with her sister, Alix, destined to be Britain's Queen Alexandra — to her final bittersweet moments in Russia in 1918. Gortner endows Maria Fyodorovna with the ability to see more than one side of an argument, and through her interaction with her father-in-law, the Tsar Liberator Alexander II, the reader gets keen insight into the urgent need for political and social reform in Imperial Russia. The tragic early death of Maria Feodorovna’s husband leaves her eldest son, Nicholas, woefully unprepared to assume the throne. Gortner deftly draws the inevitable clash of wills between Maria and Alexandra, 'Nicholas's stubborn but strong-willed wife, who comes to entirely rely upon the Mad Monk Rasputin. This struggle between the two women successfully drives the second half of the novel as war and revolution begin to overshadow the gilded Romanov world. Gortner's research shines through The Romanov Empress, and the resulting novel is several notches above many other attempts to recreate the hermetically sealed world of Tsarskoye Selo and the Winter Palace in terms of both quality and accuracy. His cameo portraits of the sprawling tribe of Romanovs are spot on — particularly that of Maria Feodorovna’s sister-in-law and sidekick, the redoubtable Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna the Elder. But at the heart of the novel is Maria Fyodorovna herself — by no means perfect but trying hard to do what is right for the family and the country she loves in almost impossible circumstances. Romanov fans will rejoice in this welcome addition to the canon. Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who divides her time between Riga, Latvia, and New England. Jennifer writes about travel, food, lifestyle, and Russian history and culture with bylines in Reuters, Fodor’s, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the in-house travel blogger for Alexander & Roberts, and the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow. Follow Jennifer on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook or visit jennifereremeeva.com for more information.

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The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna

If the prompt is “respond to a myth of Narcissus using thoughtful, meditative poems,” then jayy dodd gave us a beautiful answer. In The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books, 2019), jayy dodd offers her own brilliant reflections on so many things: the contemporary moment, dystopia, her transition, and more. In this interview, jayy dodd shares poems from this collection, discusses the process of making the book come to light, and talks about her other projects. jayy dodd is a blxk trans womxn from Los Angeles, California who is now based in Portland, Oregon. She is a poet and a performance artist. You can also follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @deyblxk. Adrian King (pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a recently graduate of Brandies University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies MA program and is an incoming graduate student in University of Michigan’s American Culture PhD program.

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The Black Condition ft. Narcissus

The story of where we come from is such an important aspect of our personal sense of self, the forefront of many conversations about national identity, community, and belonging. In a country like the United States, where so many of us are or are descended from immigrants, the answer to this question of heritage can be a complicated one that takes us back generations. And, with proliferation of home genealogy tests like AncestryDNA and 23andMe, people are learning more about their family histories than was ever thought possible. But what happens when the questions we have about our identities and parentage can’t be answered by a simple test? For writer Sophia Shalmiyev, the question was never “who is my mother,” but rather, “where has she gone?” Mother Winter: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2019) traces Shalmiyev’s journey from early childhood in Leningrad, Russia to parenthood in Portland, Oregon as she comes to terms with the ambiguous loss of the most important relationship in her life. Finding inspiration in great feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, Rita Ackermann, Sappho, Anaïs Nin, and so many others, Shalmiyev masterfully weaves philosophy, literature, and art history with personal memory to craft a reading experience unlike any other. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies nonfiction and teaches creative writing classes. She is also the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or visit her online at zoebossiere.com.

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Mother Winter: A Memoir

For twenty years, 47-year-old Isabel Toledo has been ghostwriting the stories of Holocaust survivors. It's the mid 1990's, Isabel is divorced from the father of her three children and in precarious relationships with three different men. Now, for the first time since she began ghosting, she’s having trouble finishing a book. This Holocaust survivor’s story brings up the angst she feels about not knowing how her own mother survived the war. And how much of Isabel’s inability to love just one man comes from the trauma of being raised by broken parents, also divorced? Miryam Sivan is the author of Make it Concrete (Cuidono Press, 2019). She is a former New Yorker who has lived in Tel Aviv for over 20 years. Miryam teaches literature and writing at the University of Haifa and has published scholarly work on numerous Israeli authors and American writers Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, and Jane Bowles. Her short fiction has appeared in various journals in the US and UK, and two of her short stories were adopted for the stage in London and New York. A collection, ANAFU and Other Stories, was published by Cuidono Press in 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Make It Concrete

Zoya Andropova—soon to be known in her adopted country as Zoë Andropov—didn’t ask to be rescued from her Soviet orphanage, even after the arrest of her father, a strong supporter of the very regime that has now taken his life. But rescued she is, by well-meaning Americans, who soon dump her at a wealthy boarding school where she struggles to retain far more than her name. She takes refuge in literature, in particular by the émigré writer Lev (Leo) Orlov, whose science fiction transports her to more satisfying times and places. So perhaps it is no surprise that when Orlov shows up to teach at the school where Zoya, having nowhere else to go, has moved from student to worker, she tumbles into love with him, ignoring both his advances to the other girls and his very present and controlling wife. Zoya charts the evolution of this romantic triangle in her diary, which we read, interspersed with letters from Lev to his wife. As Adrienne Celt notes early on,Invitation to a Bonfire (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019) is inspired by the life of the well-known Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov. But as the story builds, it leaves the details of Nabokov’s life and marriage behind, roaring out of a deliberately quiet academic beginning until it reaches a place that upends much of what we have believed up to that point. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Invitation to a Bonfire

The massive corporation at the center of Eliot Peper’s Analog trilogy, which he completed last month with the publication of Breach (47North, 2019) is radically different from most science fictional companies. It aspires to do good. The growth of Commonwealth into a benevolent behemoth is chronicled in the series’ first two novels, Bandwidth and Borderless (which Peper discussed on the New Books Network last fall.) By the end of Borderless, Commonwealth, which controls the near-future version of the internet, has become its own sovereign entity, one whose ownership of the “feed” has given it enough soft power to force nations—through a clause in its terms of service—to implement an international carbon tax. Breach opens 10 years later. By this point, Commonwealth has instituted open borders and replaced national currencies with “feed credits” (if that sounds implausible, see Facebook’s recently unveiled plans to create its own digital currency, Libra). Commonwealth is now considering implementing something that one of the company’s loudest critics, billionaire Lowell Harding, is willing to kill to prevent: progressive membership fees—essentially a wealth tax—that will charge users to access the feed in proportion to their net worth, with profits invested in infrastructure for the poor. Harding calls the plan “worse than the French Revolution” and “f**king Piketty on algorithmic steroids!” Peper brings back the characters from the first two books, giving a star turn to Emily Kim, a hacker turned MMA fighter who has gone into hiding after earlier misdeeds. Between suspenseful fight scenes, characters grapple with heady topics like economic inequality, corporate responsibility and national governance. There’s a message in Peper’s books for today’s internet giants. The companies “that have gained a lot of power in society,” Peper says, “need to look in the mirror and think about how they should actually be making decisions … that will actually result in a future that people want to live in for the long term not just for the next quarterly report.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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Breach (An Analog Novel Book 3)

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Brianna, our narrator, is the daughter of a country inn-keeper. Her quick thinking and compassion during a job interview earn her a coveted position as lady’s maid for Lady Marguerite, the daughter of the governor of Orenza. Like many members of the nobility in this fantasy world, Marguerite has Echoes, people who look and act just like her, but rarely move of independent volition and don’t speak. (Echoes were originally created by the Goddess to protect nobles by foiling assassination attempts.) As a lady’s maid, Brianna must attend to dressing and coiffing all four of them, something she enjoys and shows a talent for. Down-to earth and conscientious, Brianna soon makes new friends. Her new employer, who is sweet and gentle, also turns out to be lonely and in need of a confidante. The eligible and single Lady Marguerite is a pawn in the kingdom’s politics. Her parents hope Prince Cormac will choose her as his bride, smoothing over a possible rebellion in the Western provinces. Though Prince Cormac is pleasant enough, Marguerite has secretly given her heart to someone else. Brianna’s other new friend, Nico, a handsome and jocular fellow, unfortunately turns out to be the apprentice to the King’s inquisitor. Though Brianna is shocked to learn of his profession, she has a hard time resisting his attention. Nico seems to care for her, and defends his professional duties persuasively, claiming his work keeps the kingdom safe. When Nico follows her and learns that Marguerite has a secret, Brianna is torn. Nico claims she can trust him, but Brianna is not so sure. The stakes are raised when the king’s illegitimate son assaults Lady Marguerite. The resulting struggle has tragic consequences, which force Brianna to masquerade as Marguerite’s Echo herself during public appearances, while acting as lady’s maid the rest of the time. Will she succeed in fooling Nico in order to protect Lady Marguerite? A romantic fantasy, Sharon Shinn’s new Uncommon Echoes series is an Audible exclusive, with Echo in Onyx, Echo in Amethyst, and Echo in Emerald releasing simultaneously. Paperback release is slated for summer 2019. To hear an excerpt, click here. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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Echo in Onyx: Uncommon Echoes, Book 1

Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through the tumultuous decades of the pre-Mao era. Xu was a popular and prolific literary humorist who styled himself variously as Master of the Broken Chamberpot Studio, Dr. Split-Crotch Pants, Dr. Hairy Li, and Old Man Soy Sauce. He was also an entrepreneur who founded gymnastics academies, theater troupes, film companies, magazines, and a home condiments business. While pursuing this varied career, Xu Zhuodai made a name for himself as a “Charlie Chaplin of the East.” He wrote and acted in stage comedies and slapstick films, compiled joke books, penned humorous advice columns, dabbled in parodic verse, and wrote innumerable works of comic fiction. China’s Chaplin contains a selection of Xu’s best stories and stage plays (plus a smattering of jokes) that will answer the questions that keep you up at night. What is a father’s duty when he and his son are courting the same prostitute? What ingenious method might save the world from economic crisis after a world war? Who is Shanghai’s most outrageous grandmother? What is the best revenge against plagiarists, thieves, landlords, or spouses? And why should you never, never, never pull a hair from a horse’s tail? Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.

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China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai

Today, I’m talking with Nina Boutsikaris. Her new book is called I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). And if you’ve ever said those words—I’m trying to tell you I’m sorry—you know they usually come at some crisis point in a conversation that’s already underway. A misunderstanding has happened or some confusion has started to mount, and so you try to reset and make things clear: “Hey look, I’m trying to apologize!” Boutsikaris makes this gesture throughout her book, yet the “you” to whom she’s speaking is not as simple as any one person. She speaks to friends and former lovers, artists and theorists, members of her own family, and, ultimately, to her younger self. Nor is she carrying on one conversation. She’s trying to describe what it means to be a self, a female self, one living through illness, loneliness, desire, and the aspiration to make art. And finally, her book is no simple apology. It’s more of a reckoning, an attempt to understand who we are in our brokenness and in our hopes. So if it is an apology, it’s an apology in the classic sense of the genre, like the one Socrates gives in Plato’s famous dialogue where he defends the value of philosophy or like the apology that Sir Philip Sydney gives in defense of poetry. In this classic sense, an apology is not merely apologizing, merely saying, “I’m sorry.” It’s offering a full account. It’s showing why, whatever the charge, whatever the crime, the case is more complex than those charging you could ever imagine and that not only are you perhaps not guilty and not only are those who accuse you perhaps not innocent, but also that guilt and innocence are too simple as categories to make sense of our complex and messy lives. It takes an apology like Boutsikaris gives to reveal that complexity and help us live with it and in it rather than reduce it to some simple—and false—truth. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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I'm Trying to Tell You I'm Sorry : An Intimacy Triptych

John Sibley Williams’ As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Books, 2019) presents a familiar world full of burnings carried out on both the grand and intimate scale. The newspaper-like columns of prose poetry provide a social critique of the violent side of American culture centered within the boundaries of self and family. Although an apocalyptic tension permeates throughout, these poems envision the kind of fires that not only provide destruction but also illuminate a spark of hope. “Dust rises from the road & there is too much curve to resolve the edges of embankment & asphalt. Backfire keeps the pastureland carefully lit. Static keeps us wanting for another kind of song.” — from “Story that Begins and Ends with Burning” John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (which won the Orison Poetry Prize in 2019 and which we’ll be talking about today). He is also the author Skin Memory (which won the Backwaters Prize and is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press also in 2019) as well as Disinheritance and Controlled Hallucinations. A nineteen-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is a cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and the Horror Writers Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com

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As One Fire Consumes Another

Since its inception in 2017, the viral #MeToo movement has called more cultural attention to abusive behavior, creating a much-needed public space for women to speak up about the violence they have endured at the hands of abusers, and for women to speak more openly about their own ambitions, dreams, and desires. For the first time in history, there is a platform for women to speak, and—most importantly—to be heard. In 2019, we can add another voice to this ongoing conversation: Reema Zaman’s radical assertion that “[t]o speak is a revolution.” Reema Zaman’s bold debut book, I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir (Amberjack, 2019) details what happens when women are silenced by the patriarchy—and what it means to find the power inherent in one’s own voice. As a Bengali woman who immigrated to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming a stage actress, Zaman portrays herself as both driven and fearless, despite the many hardships she endures as a young woman in the city. From navigating toxic relationships with men in the industry to finding the courage to leave an abusive marriage, Zaman touches on both the struggles and beauty of one woman’s journey towards speaking her truth. Today on New Books in Literature, join us as we sit down with Reema Zaman to learn more about her debut, I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir, available now from Amberjack Publishing. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies nonfiction and teaches creative writing classes. She is also the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or visit her online at zoebossiere.com.

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I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir

Kate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Harris’s book, Lands of Lost Borders: a Journey on the Silk Road (Dey Street Books, 2019). Lands of Lost Borders, winner of the 2018 Banff Adventure Travel Award and a 2018 Nautilus Award, is the chronicle of Harris’s odyssey and an exploration of the importance of breaking the boundaries we set ourselves; an examination of the stories borders tell, and the restrictions they place on nature and humanity; and a meditation on the existential need to explore—the essential longing to discover what in the universe we are doing here. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped the way she practices medicine. Chen is the author of Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality (Vintage, 2008) and the New York Times column “Doctor and Patient.” Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review. Her work has been nominated for a National Magazine Award. Michael F. Robinson is professor of history at Hillyer College, University of Hartford. He's the author of The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2006) and The Lost White Tribe: Scientists, Explorers, and the Theory that Changed a Continent (Oxford University Press, 2016). He's also the host of the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs, a weekly podcast about science, history, and exploration.

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Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality

Vandana Singh has made a career of studying both hard science and the far corners of creativity. It’s no surprise then that Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), which was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, reflects a fluency in multiple languages—not just English and Hindi, but the idioms of both particle physics and fantastical narratives that reach far beyond what science can (as of yet, at least) describe. “One of the things that really bothers me about how we think about the world is that we split it up into all these different disciplines and fields that have impenetrable walls between them, and one of the reasons I love … writing science fiction is that it allows us to make those walls porous,” Singh says. A reader might think that an expert in both particle physics and climate science might hesitate to write stories that explore impossibilities like time travel or machines “that cannot exist because they violate the known laws of reality” (the subject of the collection’s eponymous tale). But Singh embraces paradox and the simple truth that there’s still much about the universe that we don’t understand. Scientists are supposed to be objective and “check their emotions at the door,” she says. But it “isn't that simple because, after all, the paradox is that we are a part of the universe, studying the universe. And so how can we claim full objectivity?” Singh feels the only way to be authentic is “to acknowledge who I am as a human, as this little splinter of the universe conversing with another little splinter of the universe.” Several of the stories’ characters are, like Singh, female scientists, and their struggles to be taken seriously reflect real-world conditions. “In the physical sciences, it's still pretty tough for women,” says Singh, an assistant professor of physics at Framingham State University. “We have plenty of gender issues in India but the assumption that women can't do as well or don’t have the ability … is not that strong or strident in India.” In the U.S., however, “the negative micro-messaging and sometimes macro-messaging I've come across has been ‘Well a woman, so what do you know?’ You’re automatically assumed to be more touchy-feely and … you must not be as good at science, which is utterly absurd.” For Singh, physics and storytelling are intrinsically linked. “The way that I think about physics is really influenced by the way I think about story, and they're different but they talk to each other,” she says. For instance, she’s used fiction “to explore concepts that help me also conceptualize climate science for the classroom and beyond, and think of or reframe different ways of thinking about climate change and what's happening to our world. … I guess one analogy I could make is binocular vision. I have two ways of seeing the world, and they talk to each other so you get more depth.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Khronos Chronicles. He worked for a decade as a journalist and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks.

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Ambiguity Machines: and Other stories

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Sutra is the Sanskrit name for a short spiritual teaching, and it comes from the same root as the English word suture, or stitch. This story of motherhood as a path to awakening is, says yoga and meditation teacher Anne Cushman, “an homage to the long threads that run through all human lives, stitching up what’s shredded in our hearts.” In this interview, Anne Cushman, a longtime yoga and dharma teacher, talks about her new book The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood(Shambala, 2019). This thoughtful book spans an eighteen-year journey through motherhood as a spiritual practice, chronicling Cushman’s first pregnancy, her daughter's tragic stillbirth, the joyful birth of her son, the “home retreat” of early motherhood, the challenges of parenthood, the diagnosis and gifts of her son’s developmental differences, the meltdown of her nuclear family and its reconfiguration into a new and joyful form, and more. This is a powerful story of the rawness and beauty of life. Anne Cushman is a creative writer and mindfulness meditation teacher whose work focuses on the intersection between spiritual practice and the wild, messy, heartbreaking, and hilarious details of ordinary life. She is the author of Enlightenment for Idiots, From Here to Nirvana, and the meditative yoga program Moving Into Meditation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood

A series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christopher Peacock, with a contribution from Lauran Hartley, masterfully introduces the work of contemporary Tibetan author Tsering Döndrup. One of the most popular and critically acclaimed figures of Modern Tibetan literature of the post-Mao period, Tsering Döndrup is known for his earthy humor and his unflinchingly satirical portrayals of Tibetan life. Resisting the urge to romanticize Tibetan life, Tsering Döndrup’s stories relentlessly satirize both those in power—including clerics and government officials—and those without. Stories describe emergent social problems like gambling and long-standing folk institutions of violent feuds alike. The narratives compiled in The Handsome Monk could only be written by someone intimately familiar with Tibetan life over the last fifty years, and by placing many of his stories together, this volume evocatively portrays resilience and the problems of Tibetan culture. Timothy Thurston is Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Leeds. His research examines language at the nexus of tradition and modernity in China’s Tibet.

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The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

Naoko Nakamura is only seventeen when she falls madly in love with an American navy man. It’s 1957, and the US occupation of Japan has ended just a few years before, leaving bitter memories in the local population. Even though Naoko’s beloved Hajime wants to marry her, her family will have nothing to do with him—in part because they have another husband picked out for her, but also because marriage to an American will cast shame on the entire family. When it becomes clear that Naoko is pregnant, her mother gives her a choice: rid herself of the child or leave the family forever. More than fifty years later, as Tori Kovac’s father lies dying, she learns he once had, as he puts it, “another life before this one.” Her journey to discover the truth of that other life leads her halfway around the world as she struggles to separate truth from the stories—always dismissed as fiction—that her father told her as she was growing up. Ten thousand babies were born to Japanese women fathered by US servicemen; the vast majority of them did not survive. The Woman in the White Kimono (Park Row Books, 2019) explains the challenges that the children and their mothers faced. Ana Johns tells a story that will linger in your mind long after you turn the last page. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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None

It’s the late 1990’s and Alice Stein is a grad student in New York City. Her father died the previous year, leaving her mother with 8-year-old twins to raise. Alice is in charge of looking in on her dying grandmother, and then is first, after the thieving caregiver, to sort through her grandmother’s apartment after her death. There, Alice discovers a purse with a hidden compartment. As she struggles to study, write, teach, take care of the little girl from downstairs, and figure out her grandmother’s secrets, Alice uncovers layers of secrets about herself, her family, and everyone around her. Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers' Federation's 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a PhD from New York University and has published articles on Mary Borden, James Joyce, First World war literature, and postcolonial theory. Freedman’s book Death, Men, and Modernism appeared in 2003. Her first novel, Arabic for Beginners (LLP, 2017), was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and is the Winner of the 2018 J. I. Segal Prize for Fiction. A Joy to be Hidden (Linda Leith Publishing, 2019) is her second novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explore climate change, over-dependence on technology, and the challenge of a body that produces more pain than pleasure. The novel, which won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award and Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award from Dartmouth, was almost never written.. Despite the fact that her four previous books had been well received, Schulman found it a continual challenge to get published and was on the brink of abandoning writing altogether. But Kent Carroll, the editor at Europa Editions who oversaw the publication of her novel Three Weeks in December, reached out, saying he wanted to publish a new book by her. “I've always wanted to write—there's nothing more I've wanted—and so given the opportunity, I couldn't say no.” Schulman’s work returns again and again to a few themes. “I feel like every writer—if they're very lucky—figures out the themes that allow them to do their best writing. And I seem to have very, very narrow themes: some large, charismatic mega-fauna, a hint of possible violence, a different climate, some possible scientific research, and the main character has to be in a body that's somehow physically different from most other people.” The main character in Theory of Bastards, Frankie Burk, an evolutionary psychologist and recipient of a MacArthur genius award, has endometriosis, a painful condition that limits her activity and fuels her misanthropy. As the book opens, the 33-year-old Frankie is arriving at the Foundation, a zoo for primates where she can observe bonobos to research her hypothesis about infidelity—the eponymous “theory of bastards”—which postulates that the reason 10 percent of human children are produced through affairs (a number Schulman encountered while researching the book) is because the mothers have an impulse—regardless of the strictures against infidelity—to have sex with men whose genes will improve the child's immune function. “You have to wonder why there is such a huge percentage of children who are not related to their fathers,” says Schulman, who was raised by her father after her own mother had had an affair. “There has to be a big benefit because the dangers are so big for getting pregnant illegitimately, for having a bastard. And so the theory that my character comes up with is that that it offers genetic benefits.” The plot takes a sharp turn when a dust storm knocks out the power and information grid. To keep both themselves and the bonobos alive, Frankie and her colleague David Stotts, free the animals and lead them on an expedition across rural America, where the primates show that they might be better suited than humans to survive in what appears to be a post-technology world, and Frankie starts to shed her misanthropy, even as society is on the brink of collapse. “I've always loved post-apocalyptic novels, but it's almost always only able-bodied humans that survive. Nobody ever pulls their pet corgi out of the rubble and marches on. And I just thought it would be really interesting to play out what would happen if a relatively capable, somewhat-similar-to-human species survived with humans, post-apocalypse.” Schulman is working on a new novel featuring dolphins. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks.

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Theory of Bastards

If you’ve ever flipped a large rock over to see what was underneath and encountered dark sludge, the movement of insects, and the stirring of your own fascination, then you know something about the project that Chelsea Biondolillo undertakes in her debut essay collection, The Skinned Bird (Kernpunkt Press, 2019). In it, Biondolillo peels away both her own, and her reader’s, tidy understandings of the self and the natural world, and reveals messy and difficult narratives, memories, and revelations. This is a book that makes connections between the writer’s personal and familial histories and biology, meteorology, anatomy, astronomy, and even pseudosciences like phrenology. In one essay, Biondolillo immerses her reader in a juxtaposition of the phases of birdsong acquisition with memories and questions about childhood and inherited heartbreak. In the title essay, Biondolillo details how to turn a dead bird into a scientific specimen. She instructs her reader, “When both wings are free from the body, gently peel the back skin from the muscle.” She then uses that same precision, that desire to handle and observe, to catalogue and examine her own relationship with her father. Over the course of this collection a reader can expect wide range of forms on the page. Some essays are a series of richly detailed vignettes, others contain lists and scientific diagrams, others pair photographs with text, or even obscure the text with those images. The center of gravity of The Skinned Bird is, however, a mind that is deeply interested in how we become who we are, what can we learn from the beauty and cruelty of our own lives and the world we live in, what it means to read and learn, and what are the consequences of loving something, be it a grandmother, a lover, or the songbird outside our window. Christine G. Adams is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets Prizes, the runner-up for the 2018 Gulf Coast Prize in nonfiction, and the winner of the 2018 Prairie Schooner Summer Nonfiction Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and is currently a PhD student in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. Her poetry and nonfiction can be found in The Lily, The Washington Post, Grist, Best New Poets, and Prairie Schooner, among others.

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The Skinned Bird

Rin, an orphan raised by a family that treats her badly, is no Harry Potter, despite the superficial similarities. No kindly wizards await her; there are no summons from a cute feathered familiar. She studies day and night to be able to attend the military academy at the city of Sinegard, the capital of Nikara. She wins a coveted place at the Academy through sheer endurance, but once she arrives, she realizes how far she still has to go. The rich and educated students are dismissive or downright cruel to Rin, because she comes from a farming district in the south of Nikara, and has darker skin. After several strenuous years at the Academy, another student’s taunts and bullying lead to a fight, during which Rin displays supernatural ability during combat. Until that moment, Rin displays no unusual traits other than exceptional endurance in the face of pain and disappointment. Only the eccentric Lore teacher, Jiang, understands that she has the ability to call down a god to inhabit her body, allowing her to fight with supernatural powers. He’s hoping he can convince her this path will only lead to madness and destruction. Rin initially listens to Jiang, but when she is assigned to the Cike, an assassination squad, after graduation, she falls under the sway of the commander, the charismatic and powerful Altan. Altan, like her, is a Speerly, a member of an island race almost obliterated by the genocide of the Mugen, the enemy of the Nikara. When the Mugen invade Nikara again, Altan and his small band of outcast assassins try in vain to win a significant victory. After discovering the slaughter of the entire population of a town and trying to console a former classmate who survived multiple rapes, Rin is willing to try anything to save the rest of Nikara. But will the solution Altan proposes be the ultimate catastrophe? Join me as I talk to R. F. Kuang about her novel The Poppy War (Harper Voyager, 2019). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Poppy War: A Novel (The Poppy War, 1)

Julie Zuckerman’s moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah (Press 53, 2019), tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler—the son of immigrants, brilliant political science professor, husband, and father. Jeremiah has yearned for respect and acceptance his entire life, and no matter his success, he still strives for more. As a boy, he was feisty and irreverent and constantly compared to his sweet and well-behaved older brother, Lenny. At the university, he worries he is a token hire. Occasionally, he’s combative with colleagues, especially as he ages. But there is a sweetness to Gerstler, too, and an abiding loyalty and affection for those he loves. When he can overcome his worst impulses, his moments of humility become among the best measures of his achievements. Spanning eight decades and interwoven with the Jewish experience of the 20th century, Julie Zuckerman charts Jeremiah’s life from boyhood, through service in WWII, to marriage and children, a professorship and finally retirement, with compassion, honesty, and a respect that even Gerstler himself would find touching. Julie’s fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including The SFWP Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Sixfold, The Coil, Ellipsis, MoonPark Review and others. A native of Connecticut, she lives in Modiin, Israel, with her husband and four children. The Book of Jeremiah was the runner-up for the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Book of Jeremiah: A Novel in Stories

In Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them. “I’ve tried to hard to erase myself. That iconography—my face in Technicolor, the manta ray eyelashes, the nacre and chignon. I’ll bet four limbs they’d cast me as another Mongol slave. I will blow a hole in the airwaves, duck lasers in my dugout. I’m done kidding them. Today I fly the hell out in my Chrono-Jet.” — from “Anna May Wong Fans Her Time Machine” Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her work won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in A Public Space, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Tin House, The Best of the Net 2014, and The Best American Poetry 2013, among others. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mao holds an M.F.A. from Cornell University. Learn more at: www.sallywenmao.com. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is cohost of the New Books in Poetry podcast, serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press, and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com

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Oculus: Poems

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examines our moment at the cellular level—whether that’s a cancerous cell or a terrorist cell—with the aim of understanding what’s happened to us in the Iraq War, in the attacks on 9/11, at the Boston Marathon bombings, or in the time-out-of-time we experience when we suffer from chronic illness. How do we make sense of a global world where drones, autoimmune disease, migrants, suicide, and mass violence all feel interconnected? That’s exactly what Plum sets out to do. In prose as keen and incisive as a scalpel, she locates and exposes the malignancies of our time. She doesn’t offer us a cure—who could?—but she gives us a brilliant diagnoses of how deeply the disease and diseases from which we suffer run. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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Watchfires

Caitlin Starling’s debut The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019) takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabited by avalanche-inducing, rock-eating worms from which only one human being (among many) has emerged alive. Still, Gyre thinks the risk of scouting for minerals is worth it. Not only does the job pay extraordinarily well, but she’s wearing a state-of-the-art suit, which protects her from the cave’s potentially lethal environment. Normally, there’s a whole team of experts guiding cavers like Gyre, but when she’s deep underground Gyre learns her team consists of only one person—a woman name Em, whose motives and reliability become increasingly murky as the days pass. “The more that it is only Em there with her, the worse things get because Em isn’t sleeping, Gyre isn’t getting to talk to anybody else …, and they’re getting more and more drawn into each other’s problems as opposed to it being a professional sort of interaction,” Starling says. Gyre knows Em only by voice and an occasional video transmission, and yet they form a profoundly intimate—and arguably twisted—bond. It perhaps comes as no surprise that Starling was a teen in the 1990s, forming intense online relationships with people she never met in person. “It's very easy to construct ideas around who that person is and what your relationship is like that can become very tumultuous or intense,” she says. With a single setting and only two main characters, one of her biggest challenges was keeping the plot propulsive. Fortunately, with corpses of dead cavers appearing in unexpected places, massive worms threatening to bury her, and the ever-present possibility that rather than help Gyre, Em wants to kill her, Starling meets that challenge with page-turning ferocity. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, and now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter.

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The Luminous Dead: A Novel

In his own description of his book, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, & Inappropriate Jokes About Death, J Mase III writes, “Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to.” It is in this invitation that J Mase III takes on themes of the messiness of grief, Black trans spirituality, and what it means to be an independent artist. Written after the passing of both his grandmother and father within the span of three months, this book is honest, brave, and full of love. J Mase III is a Black trans queer poet and educator and is the founder of awQward, a talent agency exclusively for trans and queer people of color. You can check out his amazing work and purchase his book here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When a strange man knocks on Deborah Tyler’s door one January evening in 1888, she faces a difficult decision. She can guess that her visitor is a criminal, because who else would travel to her isolated Utah community in the dead of winter? And her husband, who normally handles such situations, left home five months ago and has not returned. She is tempted not to answer, but that will only send the unwanted traveler to the next house in Junction, endangering her younger sister and her sister’s children. Besides, most of the criminals who arrive on Deborah’s doorstep are not thieves or murderers but polygamists evading arrest for what the US government has recently declared a felony. Deborah has little sympathy for plural marriage or the men who practice it, but she is a loyal Mormon who distrusts those inclined to persecute her faith and cares about the families left destitute when their breadwinners flee. Deborah makes her choice. But the next day, a federal marshal arrives in pursuit. Threatened with prosecution for aiding and abetting a felon, Deborah fights to protect herself, her community, and those she loves from unpredictable consequences that draw her ever deeper into a web of secrets and lies. The Glovemaker (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019) asks important questions about love and loyalty, faith and independence, the power of love and of family. And through Deborah and her struggles, Ann Weisgarber brings vividly to life the joys and terrors of life in a small, isolated community on the US frontier, the moral compromises we all face, and the capacity of one strong woman to adapt in a time of rapid change. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Glovemaker: A Novel

Meg Elison’s The Book of Flora (47North, 2019) trilogy is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse. The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive. In the next volume, The Books of Etta, set a century later, gender remains fraught but the rules have changed. The midwife’s legacy lives on in the town of Nowhere, where women are decision-makers and leaders. In this evolved world, Etta is allowed to choose the traditionally male job of raider, although she must still pretend to be a man to travel across a sparsely populated Midwest. Fortunately, this isn’t as heavy a lift for Etta as it had been for the midwife since Etta prefers to be called Eddie and identifies as male. The notion of choice is one that Elison takes a step further in the trilogy’s latest and final installment, The Book of Flora. Born male, Flora was neutered as a young boy by a slaver, and, as an adult, identifies as female. Although she doesn’t always find acceptance among the communities she encounters, she refuses to hide her gender identity even when traveling alone, preferring the risk of being female to hiding who she is. “As the world goes from absolute chaos to small pockets of … a more peaceful existence for women, I thought the most gendered person in the series, Flora, was the right person to come to something like peace,” Elison says. Set in a still dangerous world, The Book of Flora is nonetheless a riot of humanity, full of characters representing marginalized voices and communities incubating new cultures and norms. There’s even a hint of an evolutionary leap that may one day make gender obsolete. “I was really interested in books like Gulliver's Travels, but also in the idea of, after the loss of national media and immediate communications, how different our societies would immediately become: we'd have these little pockets of culture where every town would have its own urban legends and every town might have its own religion and every town might have its own courtship rituals. So that that gave me a real opportunity to get weird and I got really weird with it, and it was extremely fun.” Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from medicine to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a non-profit dedicated to justice reform. You can follow him on Twitter.

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The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Book of Flora (The Road to Nowhere, 3)

In this episode, I talked with Patricia Leavy on her new book, Spark (The Guilford Press, 2019). The book is a highly original novel about an unexpected yet extremely fruitful journey of a sociologist professor, Peyton Wilde. Peyton, together with a diverse group of companions, was charged with answering a perplexing question in a five-day seminar held in Iceland. As they worked to address the question from very different perspectives, the experience also transformed each and every one of the team members. This innovative text offers far more than what a typical novel could offer: The author seamlessly incorporates into it a process of social inquiry. Readers can relate to the book on multiple levels—It can be read for fun, for a book club discussion, or adapted as a required text for qualitative inquiry courses in fields such as education, social work, and communication. Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

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Spark

The Genuine Storiesis a linked collection centered around Genevieve “Genuine” Eriksson, a woman with an uncanny ability to heal people. Her gift begins to unfold at the age of eight despite the lingering disbelief of her parents. Though she grows up under the watchful eyes of her parents and the jealous protection of the Catholic Church, she strikes out on her own after healing, and falling in love with, Kevin Saunders, a man fifteen years her senior. In her own voice, and those of family, friends, and the healed, Genuine’s experiences peel back and expose the gritty aspects of power and privilege, the far-reaching limit of parental love, the perpetually oscillating balance in relationships, and the ineffable nature of grief. Susan Smith Daniels, author and freelance journalist, is the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize for The Genuine Stories (New Rivers Press, 2018). Born and raised in Philadelphia, she moved to Iowa with her husband and family in 1981. Susan began her writing career as a columnist for Practical Horseman Magazine when her youngest daughter was attending horse shows. She is the author of the very popular The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide (The Lyons Press, 2005). An MFA graduate of Fairfield University, Daniels is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Genuine Stories

If there is one thing more fun than discovering a new (to oneself) author, it is discovering a new author with a series already well underway. In City of Ink (Minotaur Books, 2018), the third of Elsa Hart’s mystery novels set in early eighteenth-century China during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor and featuring former imperial librarian Li Du and his storytelling friend Hamza, Li has returned to his former home of Beijing. His intention is to learn more about the events that led to his own exile from the capital years before, the result of guilt by association. But he soon discovers that the imperial library has been closed since his departure, and to make ends meet, he takes a job with his former brother-in-law, in charge of the North Borough Office. When, on the eve of the imperial examinations, a young woman is murdered at a tile factory in the North Borough, Li accompanies the investigator. The case appears to be clear-cut, since the victim turns out to be the wife of the tile-factory owner, and she is found with a man whom everyone assumes to be her lover. Clearly, this is a crime of passion, committed by the jealous husband. The authorities rush to endorse this explanation, since crimes of passion are not punishable under the law and the whole matter can be neatly swept under the rug before the imperial examinations begin. But no case associated with Li Du is ever what it seems. As he and Hamza chase the real solution through the locked alleys of Beijing and past the city walls into the surrounding territory, Hart’s richly informed, beautifully detailed, and wonderfully complex yet satisfying story plays out against the backdrop of early Qing China, with its rebels, dynasts, foreign visitors, and ordinary folk with conflicting motives—not to mention Li Du’s own troubled past. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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City of Ink: A Mystery (Li Du Novels, 3)

Grey Held writes of Frances Donovan's book, Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore (Reaching Press 2018 ), "there is hunting for love, there is basking in love, there is longing." This collection offers all of these things. It examines what it is to love romantically, sexually, as a friend, and as a resident of the world. It pulls us down into the micro-moments of our lives and then catapults us out into the universe. In this episode, we touch upon marginalization, hope for inclusion, the writer's journey, and how we come to the page on our own terms. Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore was named a finalist in the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards. Her publication credits include The Rumpus, Snapdragon, and SWWIM. An MFA candidate at Lesley University, she is a certified Poet Educator with Mass Poetry and has appeared as a featured reader at numerous venues. She once drove a bulldozer in a GLBT Pride parade while wearing a bustier and combat boots. You can find her climbing hills in Boston and online at www.gardenofwords.com. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a writer and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal. Athena's work has appeared in various publications both online and in print. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Athena has attended workshops with Callaloo, V.O.N.A., and Tin House. She is a member of the Moving Forewards Memoir Writers Collective. She is the author of No God In This Room (Argus House Press). Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic (Haymarket Books). She writes, edits, and resides in Philadelphia.

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Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore: Love Poems

Sunil Chandaria is struggling to write his PhD dissertation in philosophy at Harvard University. He feels his father’s disapproval because he didn’t become a doctor, and his mother’s disapproval that he doesn’t have a job or a wife. The Chandaria family lives in Columbus, Ohio. They are emigrants from Nairobi, Kenya, but they are Gujarati-speaking Jains whose grandparents left India for jobs in Africa at the end of the 19th century. Sunil’s father is now a successful doctor and his mother owns a giftshop that sells African-made art, clothing, and gifts. When Sunil’s cousin gets injured in a horrible car accident, the family returns to Nairobi, where Sunil surprises everyone by announcing that he and his Jewish-American girlfriend are married. Then he in turn is surprised to learn that his cousin is actually his brother. The Limits of the World (Delphinium Books, 2019) is a rich novel about how we navigate the bonds of family, culture and religion in a world made smaller by immigration and technology. Jennifer Acker is founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Common. Her short stories, translations, and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Guernica, n+1, Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Millions, and Publishers Weekly, among other places. Acker has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and teaches literature, creative writing, and editing at Amherst College. She was born and grew up in rural Maine and has lived in Kenya, Mexico, and Abu Dhabi. She now lives in western Massachusetts with her husband, Nishi Shah, and The Limits of the World is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Limits of the World: A Novel

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story. For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn’t speak. But his silence didn’t stop him from communicating—or communing—with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. Ever so slowly, he emerged, learning to talk and evolving into an artist and educator. His journey takes readers across the United States during one of its most turbulent moments, and Prahlad experiences it all, from the heights of the Civil Rights Movement to West Coast hippie enclaves to a college town that continues to struggle with racism and its border state legacy. Rooted in black folklore and cultural ambience, and offering new perspectives on autism and more, The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir (University of Alaska Press, 2017) will inspire and delight readers and deepen our understanding of the marginal spaces of human existence. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir

Many of you listening to this now probably recall growing up in a household of faith. You may have fond memories of the familiar rituals, the holidays, the shared family values. A weekly service at a church, a temple or a mosque. For many worshippers, religion can provide a sense of comfort in an otherwise uncertain universe. But for some, being in communion with God can mean placing your faith above all else—including your own children. Such was the case for writer Kelly J. Beard, whose family struggled to feed themselves under the fundamentalist purview of the Desert Chapel. In a new book, An Imperfect Rapture, Beard describes growing up in a community that required its members to participate in excessive tithing, among other practices designed to prey on those who had the least to give. As a child of the 1960s with a strong spirit, Beard defied the religious tenants of her upbringing, seeking to learn more about the world beyond the church and discovering her love of music, travel, and writing in the process. Winner of the Zone 3 Press Nonfiction Book Prize, An Imperfect Rapture (2018) tells the incredible story of one woman’s redemptive journey through an oppressive religious childhood, exploring the ways we both can and can’t transcend the circumstances we’re born into. Today on New Books in Literature, join us as we sit down with Kelly J. Beard to learn more about An Imperfect Rapture, available now from Zone 3 Press. Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

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An Imperfect Rapture

The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018) is a debut novel of Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist and composer. The novel narrates a story of a priest Joseph Flynn, who undergoes a deep emotional and psychological confusion that arises out of his devotion to religion and his desire to be happy and content in his private life, which goes against traditional and conservative beliefs and principles. Performed at times in a shocking and destabilizing manner, the novel includes references to music and literature, theatricalizing the text that allows space for clashing ideas. The novel has a profoundly provocative energy, inviting the readers to explore the nature of self and existence. One of the key questions that The Final Retreat poses is connected with the pursuit of peace and harmony: the quest, however, is inseparable from struggles and frustrations. What is happiness? And what is the role of the other for the individual’s self-content? These questions are explored through delving into the dreary abyss of loneliness and alienation. The Final Retreat offers an insight into a soul tormented by doubts, fears, and frustrations which become part of the individual’s journey to the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Final Retreat: A Novel

In The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes (StrangeHouse Books, 2018), Sara Tantlinger intertwines fact and speculation to examine inner workings of H.H. Holmes, a man who committed ghastly crimes in the late 19th century and who is often credited with being America’s first serial killer. Narratively arranged, these poems offer up an evocative and chilling imagining of life and times of Holmes along with his wives, victims, and accomplices. A profound and fascinating collection for anyone interested in the riveting realm of true crime. “The building shivers beneath each curve of my footstep, my home, my castle fit for Bluebeard himself, entwining murder and luxury like salt and sugar placed gently on the tongue where each tiny grain dissolves in a way blood never will.” — from “Shades of Wild Plum” Sara resides outside of Pittsburgh on a hill in the woods. Her dark poetry collections Love for Slaughter and The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes are published with StrangeHouse books. She is a poetry editor for the Oddville Press, a graduate of Seton Hill’s MFA program, a member of the SFPA, and an active member of the Horror Writers Association. Sara’s poetry, flash fiction, and short stories can be found in several magazines and anthologies, including the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. II and V, The Horror Zine, Unnerving, Abyss & Apex, the 2018 Rhysling Anthology, 100 Word Horrors, and The Sunlight Press. She embraces all things strange and can be found lurking in graveyards or on Twitter @SaraJane524 and at saratantlinger.com. Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast, serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press, and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Devil's Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes

Circe is an immortal naiad, the daughter of the Sun God, Helios. Ignored or belittled by her divine kin because of her human-sounding voice, dull-colored hair, and quiet manner, she turns to her little brother for company, and then eventually, meets a human man who seems to offer her adoration. Yet her good will and nurturing are wasted on these relationships. Stung because the man she loves does not recognize her worth, Circe uses her newly found power of witchcraft to transform her romantic rival into a monster. This act has serious consequences; the new gods of Olympus are angered, and demand that her father punish her. She is exiled to the island of Aiaia. Alone at last, without the mockery of the gods, Circle develops inner resilience and wisdom, refining her plant lore, and finding companionship among the animals of the island. But Circe is immortal, and her island paradise will not remain undiscovered forever. Through the ages many mortals visit her; some seek to exploit her, and others appreciate her. Gods visit her island as well. Hermes becomes an occasional lover, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, a frightening opponent. In her wonderful book Circe (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), Madeline Miller makes the ancient myths come alive with her vivid luscious writing style, and her sympathetic portrayal of the witch Circe, a peripheral character in the Odyssey. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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Circe

Andrea Miller is the deputy editor of Lion's Roar magazine (formerly the Shambhala Sun) and the author of two picture books: The Day the Buddha Woke Up and My First Book of Canadian Birds. She's also the editor of three anthologies, most recently All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance. I spoke with Andrea on the heels of her trip to India to attend the International Buddhist Conclave, which afforded her the chance to attend sacred Buddhist sites. She has a brand new piece out in December, 2018 called “The Buddha Was Here.” This conversation discusses the impetus and creative process behind The Day The Buddha Woke Up, out now from Wisdom Publications (2018). Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.

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The Day the Buddha Woke Up

Lindsay Townsend is doing well at her high school in Wollongong, Australia. She’s pretty and popular and smart enough that she can spend as much time at the beach as she does hunched over her books. Only she knows that the confident self she projects to her friends and fellow students conceals life with an abusive father and a mother determined to keep the peace at all costs. When Lindsay’s handsome young gym teacher takes an interest in her, she lacks both the maturity to resist and the experience she needs to protect herself from harm. Soon she’s caught up in a scandal, facing pressure from the adult world to accept a decision no teenage girl should have to make. In The Swooping Magpie (Triskele Books, 2019), the second of a trilogy set in southeastern Australia, Liza Perrat explores in gritty, compelling prose the rapid social changes of the 1960s and 1970s and the tragedy, loss, and grief that the collision between rules and reality sometimes caused. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Swooping Magpie: 1970s Australian Family Drama

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.

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And It Begins Like This

Against the backdrop of a gritty 1890’s Chicago teaming with labor problems, filthy sweatshops, and putrid stockyards, two young immigrants struggle to survive. Chaya and her brilliant younger brother Asher escape the tedium of the Wisconsin farm to which their parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Guided by a kind, wealthy young man to the Jewish neighborhood of Maxwell Street, the two siblings, still speaking with Yiddish accents, scrape together a living until they each find a way to reconcile their convictions with their lives. The Lake on Fire (Sarabande Books, 2018) is about whom to love, the struggle between rich and poor, and the choices we make about how to live in an unfair world. Although set in the 19th century, Rosellen Brown’s writing, as intriguing and luminous as Chicago’s “White City,” has something to say about our still unfair, turbulent times. Rosellen Brown currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, home of the Columbian Exposition, the University of Chicago, and the Obamas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Lake on Fire

That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (Pantheon, 2017), the distinguished classics scholar Kurt Raaflaub provides readers with a new translation of the collection of writings known as the Corpus Caesarianum, which he supplements with footnotes, maps, and images designed to make Caesar’s writings accessible for the modern-day reader. Raaflaub situates the books within the context of Caesar’s life, explaining how the first and most famous of them, the Gallic War, was a political tool designed to bolster Caesar’s stature back in Rome. In the aftermath of the civil wars that followed his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE, Caesar wrote his follow-up Civil War, which was largely complete when he was assassinated five years later. Though Caesar died before writing the later works attributed to his authorship, Raaflaub presents them as extensions of Caesar’s labors, with the Alexandrian War written from his notes and early materials he drafted, and the African War and the Spanish War authored by men who served in both campaigns and who were firsthand witnesses to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works: Gallic War, Civil War, Alexandrian War, African War, and Spanish War (Landmark Series)

Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in the world is shattered by a debilitating illness and she is spurned by the entire Polish royal court. Enter Felix Ossolinski—scholar, diplomat, Renaissance man. A riding accident in his teens forced him to redirect his energies from war to the life of the mind, and alone among the men of the sixteenth-century Polish court, he sees in Juliana a kindred spirit, a woman who has never appreciated her own value and whose inner beauty outweighs any marring of her face. Then the Polish queen offers Juliana a way out of her difficulties: travel to Moscow with Felix and spy for the royal family in return for a promise of financial independence. Facing poverty and degradation, Juliana cannot refuse, although the mission threatens not only her freedom but her life. Felix swears he will protect her. But no one can protect Juliana from the demons of her past. Join me for a discussion with C. P. Lesley about her new novel Song of the Siren (Five Directions Press 2019). Carolyn Pouncy (who holds a PhD in Russian history from Stanford University) writes under the pen name C. P. Lesley (who doesn’t exist and has no degrees). Carolyn (aka C.P.) is the author of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess , The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum. Song of the Siren is the first in her newest series, Songs of Steppe & Forest, based on 16th-century Russian history. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, she edits other people’s manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet. That love of ballet finds expression in her Tarkei Chronicles. A historian by profession, she also hosts New Books in Historical Fiction for the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Song of the Siren (Songs of Steppe & Forest)

Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019) takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to stop them. The book is the second in Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy. The first, Rosewater, earned the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction. In most alien invasion stories, mankind and the invaders battle to the death. In Thompson’s tale, however, there is more inter- than intra-planetary conflict, with the insurrection in the title referring to the city of Rosewater’s rebellion against greater Nigeria. Meanwhile, the alien invaders have their own conflicts, with Wormwood—a powerful consciousness that reads minds and invades human bodies—battling for its survival against a fast-growing plant from its home planet. The book reflects a subtle grasp of war and politics with characters capable of eliciting a reader’s empathy even as they sometimes behave in less than admirable ways. “What someone told me this week about The Rosewater Insurrection was that they don’t know who to root for. To me that just means that I've been successful in showing the different points of view and the reasons for them doing what they're doing without bias,” Thompson says. There are hints of Thompson’s own life in the storytelling—as a working psychiatrist, as a Londoner of African heritage, as a student of history. The most powerful characters in The Rosewater Insurrection are women, reflecting his upbringing. “I had really strong sisters,” he says. “If you think about your average sub-Saharan African country now, you know there is lots of misogyny... However, the women actually hold the society up.” For Thompson, human nature is largely to blame for the civil war at the heart of his story. “They were dealing with something they don't understand, and the human tendency when they don’t understand something is to lash out one way or the other. … Any time when you get prolonged uncertainty with human beings, conflict is usually the outcome.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He has worked as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter.

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The Rosewater Insurrection (The Wormwood Trilogy, 2)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Henri is a middle-aged doctor, one of the few employed people left in the U.S, though the reader suspect his job might be in danger. The hospital administrator, Serena, keeps reducing staff. A large sector of the population, the Absolved are freed from doing any work and receive a guaranteed minimum income. Their days are spent watching sports on TV, or like Henri’s wife, Rachel, staying productive with charity work. Another contingent of people can’t register for the guaranteed income; they’re known as the dispossessed. Political upheaval results as another election draws near; the liberal president who promised jobs has been unable to deliver, and a demagogue throws his hat in the ring for the highest office. However, Henri remains an ironic observer of society; he is too preoccupied by his affair with a failed medical student, his demanding wife and his shots of whisky at a dive bar to engage. That is, until he sacrifices his own career for his mistress, and his life beings to unravel. Join me, as I speak with Matthew Binder about The Absolved (Black Spot Books, 2018). Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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The Absolved

Allison Coffelt lives and writes in Columbia, Missouri. She works as the director of education and outreach for the annual documentary-based True/False Film Festival, as well as hosting the fantastic True/False Podcast, featuring interviews and commentary with documentary filmmakers, available anywhere you get podcasts. Her writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford Public Health Magazine, and more. She won the 2015 University of Missouri Essay Prize. The topic of today’s conversation is her new book, Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti, out now from Lanternfish Press (2018). Greg Soden is the host of “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti

Isobel O’Hare’s all this can be yours (University of Hell Press, 2019) presents a series of erasures crafted from celebrity sexual assault apologies. These poems offer fierce explorations of the truth hidden behind apologies intended to explain away or dilute culpability, rather than accept responsibility. The result is a powerful collection that opens up a wider conversation surrounding sexual assault and the need for change on a systemic level. Isobel O’Hare is a poet and essayist who has dual Irish and American citizenship. She is the author of the chapbooks Wild Materials (from Zoo Cake Press, 2015), The Garden Inside Her (from Ladybox Books, 2016), and Heartbreak Machinery (forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2019). Her collection of erasures of celebrity sexual assault apologies, all this can be yours, is now available from University of Hell Press. And she is currently editing an anthology of erasure poetry, called Erase the Patriarchy, due out from University of Hell Press in 2019. Isobel earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been the recipient of awards from Split This Rock and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her work has been reviewed in Harper's Magazine, VICE, Fast Company, The Irish Times, AV Club, and many other publications. Isobel also co-edits the journal and small press Dream Pop with poet Carleen Tibbetts. Andrea Blythe is a co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com.

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Mike Chen’s debut novel Here and Now and Then (MIRA, 2019) is a portrait of patience. The main character, Kin Stewart, waits 18 years for his employer to retrieve him from an assignment. Then, after being rescued, he needs many months to re-acclimate to his old life. Those waits, however, are nothing compared to how long it takes him to re-connect with the daughter he is forced to abandon: more than 120 years. Stewart, of course, has no ordinary job. He’s an agent from the year 2142, employed by the Temporal Corruption Bureau to fix anomalies in the timeline. When his retrieval beacon breaks on assignment in the 1990s, he’s convinced he’ll be stranded forever. To make the best of a dire situation, he ignores his employer’s prohibition on having relationships in the past: he falls in love, gets married, has a daughter, and settles into a quiet life in the suburbs. Needless to say, it throws monkey wrench in his plans when the Temporal Corruption Bureau arrives in 2014 and compels him to return to 2142, where an entirely different life—including a fiancé who thinks he’s been gone only a few weeks—awaits. For Chen, time travel is a vehicle to explore topographies of loss and healing. Being ripped from first one time and then another, leaves both Kin and those around him despairing—until he discovers that 120 years is no obstacle to the love of a father trying to do anything to save his child. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He has worked as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.

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The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Here and Now and Then: A Novel

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

When we think of World War II, we envision a catastrophe of massive proportions: millions killed in concentration camps, on the battlefield, during bombing raids and in the nuclear explosions that ended the war. But World War II can also be seen as a vast collection of small catastrophes—a dozen executions or experiments here, a casual act of antisemitism or cruelty there—committed by otherwise ordinary people who either had no moral compass to start with or lost their bearings in an environment that brought out the worst in them. That insight drives The Huntress (William Morrow, 2019), Kate Quinn’s fast-moving, compelling mystery about Nazi hunters in the decade after VJ Day. Ian Graham, a British war correspondent, is chasing an escaped Nazi known only as die Jaegerin, the Huntress. He is determined to see her tried for her crimes, and his motives are both professional and personal: she murdered his younger brother, as well as a dozen Polish children. With the help of the intrepid Nina Markova, former lieutenant of the Night Witches and the only survivor who can identify the Huntress by sight, Ian follows his quarry’s trail across the Atlantic. Meanwhile, in Boston, seventeen-year-old Jordan McBride welcomes Anneliese, soon renamed Anna—the love interest her lonely father brings home. A budding photographer, Jordan wants first and foremost to go to college, a goal that Anna supports but Jordan’s father overrules. He considers higher education unnecessary for a young woman in 1946, especially one with marriage plans in her future. But the camera does not lie, and Jordan’s photographs soon raise questions about what Anna really left behind when she fled Europe the year before. And before long, Jordan has to wonder why Anna seems to eager to get her new stepdaughter out of the house. C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Huntress: A Novel

Today, I’m talking with Nicole Walker, who’s just published a new book about sustainability. In fact, that’s its title: Sustainability, A Love Story (Ohio State University Press, 2018). Now if some part of you is groaning at the possibility of hearing another gloom-and-doom sermon about the destruction of the planet and everything you haven’t been doing to prevent it. And if some part of you is inclined to skip this interview because, well, you’re driving down the road by yourself, not carpooling, not in an electric car, with the heater or the air conditioning turned up a little too far, don’t skip it and stop groaning. Walker’s book is not that kind of book. She’s been there and, in some ways, is still there, trying to figure out how to live sustainably when it seems so impossible, when the demands of family and work and everything else press in on us in this great mess that is our lives and, damn, if we didn’t forget our re-useable shopping bags. And yet we’d still really like to see our planet not die and we’d really like to be a part of its not dying. In situations ranging from McDonald’s and Sam’s Club to outer space and our inner lives, Walker faces the challenges of sustainability with deep humor, deeper insight, and an abiding sympathy for what it means to be all-too-human in your love for other humans and the struggling earth we all share. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Basic Programming ( Lavender Ink, 2018), the latest collection by Megan Burns, is an exercise in balance. Between grief and healing. Between humanness and technology. Between examination and acceptance. Building from her brother's death and journeying through her grieving process, Burns guides readers into her heart and back out the other side, all of us changed and inquisitive after learning just what it means to be who we are both as people and programs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement(State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s short stories edited and translated by Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani and Michael Monhart, with assistance from Southwest University’s Carl Robertson and INALCO’s Francoise Robin. Along with a translator’s introduction and author’s preface, the 10 short stories selected with input from the author himself range from the realistic to the fantastic. For the more realistic stories, lovingly playful descriptions of everyday Tibetan life bring a relatively apolitical look at contemporary Tibetan experience that defies simplistic interpretation. In the more fantastic stories, some of the same issues appear through descriptions that are stubbornly not realistic. Throughout the stories a narrative style and thematic influences from Tibetan oral traditions, his portrayal of media within media, and his tendency to use conclusions that do not lend a sense of finality to the stories create a reading experience that mirrors, in many ways the author’s unique cinematic storytelling style. This first ever English translation of Pema Tseden’s short stories provides a new way of approaching contemporary Tibet through the eyes of one of its most impressive storytellers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving around the effort to control Eve, an artificial super-intelligence. On one side of the conflict is a secret sect, the Crucibulum. The spiritual descendents of the Spanish Inquisition, the members of the Crucibulum consider female scientists—like Eve’s inventor, Mara Silviera, a Portuguese graduate student—to be heretics and witches. On the other side is Sigma Force, a group of former soldiers working for the Defense Department’s research and development arm. This is Collins’ 14th novel featuring Sigma Force. When the Crucibulum steal Eve and order her to destroy Paris, the only way Sigma Force can hope to prevent disaster is by unleashing Eve’s equal: a second Eve. The two Eves represent the risks and rewards of the singularity, Rollins says. The bad Eve is a super-intelligence run amok, one who will do anything—including destroying its human inventors—in a fight to survive. The good Eve, who sides with Sigma Force, represents the hope that “the singularity will be a boon to mankind,” Rollins says. Collins concedes that genre categories are sometimes arbitrary. “When I wrote my first novel, Subterranean, I thought I was writing a science fiction novel,” he says. “My editor … said, ‘Hey, we’re going sell this as a modern-day thriller,’ and I said, ‘What about those telepathic marsupial creatures that live under Antarctica?’ and she said, ‘You set your story in modern times, and you have enough scientific basis for those telepathic marsupial creatures, so therefore we’re just going to pitch you as a thriller writer.’” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Subterranean: A Thriller

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

An 8-year-old awaits her father’s return from the war. A young man returns home to northern Minnesota for his sister’s funeral. A woman struggles to survive in New York City. Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s award-winning collection of short stories is peopled with characters who leave home, return home, or dream of home. The stories alternate between sweet, thoughtful, and sad, all expressing a universal longing for family, friendship and connection. To Lay to Rest our Ghosts (Fornite Press, 2017) won Silver in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, was selected for 35 Over 35’s annual 2017 list, and was named a Pulpwood Queen Book Club Bonus Book. It is also the winner of the fourth annual Phillip H. McMath Post Publication book award. Summie, who earned an MFA at Colorado State University, is the co-founder/owner of a book marketing firm and is online at caitlinhamiltonsummie.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

To Lay To Rest Our Ghosts: Stories

If you read a lot of nonfiction, you may be familiar with what some call the “memoir quandary”—the complaint that memoir and autobiography are too narrowly focused on the writer’s life to be of real interest to anyone but themselves. To avoid this criticism, many nonfiction writers attempt to achieve greater relatability and universality in their writing. But is this appeal really more desirable than the art of telling a good story? While there’s nothing wrong with seeking common ground, one of the magical qualities of writing is how it can not only transport the reader to new places and experiences, but also introduce them to perspectives they might not have considered before. As a recent entry in the University of Nebraska Press’ award-winning American Lives Series, Micah McCrary’s Island in the City (2018) challenges us to consider both personal and political implications of one man’s life experiences through intimately intersectional prose. As a black and queer-identifying man, McCrary examines these identities through keen exploration of gender, sexuality, race, class, geography, and more in order to comment on the simultaneous singularity and ubiquity of human experience. Though McCrary is careful to note that his is an autobiography of one man, and that he can speak for no one but himself, Island in the City is nevertheless a radical exercise in empathetic connection. Today on New Books in Literature, join us as we sit down with author Micah McCrary to hear more about Island in the City, available now from the University of Nebraska Press (2018). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiereor head to zoebossiere.com.

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Island in the City: A Memoir (American Lives)

Although World War II has long been a favorite subject in both literature and history, a new interest seems to have developed in the multiple roles played by women during the war. In The Lost Girls of Paris (Park Row Books, 2019), Pam Jenoff examines from three different fictional perspectives a little-known, real-life British secret service called the Special Operations Executive (SEO). Originally developed to send male saboteurs and radio operators behind enemy lines in France, the SEO had to change its focus when unexpectedly high casualties revealed that men had become so scarce in rural France that its agents were instantly identifiable as people who did not fit in. The director then chose to recruit and send women instead. The novel opens from the perspective of Grace Healey, detoured into Grand Central Station on her way to work. Grace discovers a suitcase sitting by itself under a bench and, while she’s trying to find out where it belongs, extracts a set of photographs. When she goes to replace them, the suitcase is gone. Grace’s curiosity is piqued, especially when she realizes that a connection exists between the photographs and Eleanor Trigg, whose death in a car crash caused Grace’s detour in the first place. Eleanor, the second point-of-view character, turns out to have been the head of the female agents at SEO, a job for which she recruits the third character we meet, Marie Roux—a single mother forced to choose between spending time with her daughter and financially supporting her child while serving her country. As we move ever closer, from Grace’s distance in time and place to Eleanor’s founding role to Marie’s experiences on the ground, the danger and the potential for betrayal confronting the SEO agents become increasingly clear. C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Lost Girls of Paris: A Novel

The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s, in the state of Perak, The Night Tiger closely follows three narrators, mysteriously interlinked by their names. There is a clever orphan named Ren who works as a houseboy, a spunky and funny young beauty, Ji Lin, and a British surgeon, William Acton. Though the novel is grounded in mundane concerns, such as Ji Lin’s effort to pay back her mother’s gambling debt before her step-father discovers it, there are also numinous aspects, such as the waking-dream states that Ji-Lin and Ren enter, during which they communicate with Ren’s dead brother. Even as Ji Lin tried to cope with the restricted options available to a woman of that time period, and surgeon William Acton grapples with his lusty urges, a shimmer of the supernatural imbues the narrative, and a sense of transcendent beauty weaves its way through the chapters. One of the supernatural aspects concerns were-tigers. Ren’s former master, a colleague of the surgeon William Acton, has recently died. Before his passing, he implored Ren, his loyal houseboy, to locate his missing finger. It seems if he is buried without it, his spirit will roam as a were-tiger. Ren has only forty-nine days during which he can bury the finger with the corpse; should he not suceed, the spirit of his former master will never find peace. The book opens as Ji-Lin has discovers the missing finger in her pocket, as a result of a chance encounter with a salesman. She is unaware of its significance but would like nothing better than to be rid of this macabre item. Through a series of events, Ji-Lin and Ren meet, exchange stories, and befriend each other. Their fates are linked through ancient Confucian tradition with other characters. Ji-Lin, Ren, and William Acton all have names which denote Confucian virtues; there is also Ji-Lin’s alluring step-brother, whose motivation for helping Ji-Lin is shrouded, and Ren’s dead brother, Yi. One of the five is deeply flawed and may bring doom onto the rest. Yang-sze’s characters are engrossing, beckoning you into look deep into their psyches, and the setting of colonial Malaysia is a refreshing change to Eurocentric fantasy literature. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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The Night Tiger: A Novel

Dayne has the highest respect for the order he’s joined, the Tarians. The Tarian warriors adhere to a chivalrous code of honor, though they live in a time period vaguely suggestive of post-Renaissance Europe during the Age of Discovery. When Dayne, a Candidate, returns to the order’s home in the city of Maradaine, he finds events of the past year prevent him from advancing to the level of Adept. Despite Dayne’s best effort, the boy he was to rescue from a criminal’s trap died when Dayne failed to protect him. Now the boy’s relatives are determined to block his ascent in the Tarian order, which means that Dayne will not be allowed to stay for good. Though Dayne is saddened about his pending departure, he still takes the way of the shield and sword seriously. The shield, which appears in the title of the book, symbolizes protection, while the sword should only be drawn as a last resort. Dayne believes that protecting lives doesn’t mean taking other lives, though he is always willing to sacrifice himself, if needed. His ideals will be challenged as he is drawn into events orchestrated by a conspiracy featuring ten masked men and women, most of them highly placed. What appears at first to be a movement to give more power to the commoners is actually a secret conspiracy to replace the King and achieve new alliances in the Parliament to further the aims of the Traditionalist Party, the political arm of the nobility. The plot is set into motion through pawns that are unaware of the true goal. As Dayne rushes forth, despite the Tarian Grandmaster’s injunction, to save the day, he’s helped by another Candidate, Jerinne, as well as the daughter of his lordly sponsor, the Lady Mirianne, and an assortment of politically-radicalized writers. Listen in as we talk to author Marshall Ryan Maresca about The Way of the Shield(DAW, 2018). Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor.

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The Way of the Shield (Maradaine Elite)

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes. The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of questions about consciousness, identity, and reality. The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his brother-in-law, a real-life special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “A lot of his investigations are essentially solved when a victim or someone who knows a criminal tells the investigators what happens and why, but if people don’t talk, the investigation becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible to solve,” Sweterlitsch says. “And so [my brother-in-law] was musing that if he could go forward in time, he could talk to a lot of the witnesses after the emotions had cooled, and they might be more willing to talk.” Sweterlitsch gives Moss the ability to jump forward in time, but any future she visits is only a possibility, one of an infinite number of options. That means the clues she collects aren’t hard-and-fast truths; at best, they are hints that may (or may not) allow her to solve the crime. In the present, such futures are referred to as “Inadmissible Future Trajectories,” since the evidence they generate can’t be used to prosecute a case. The only certainty, as far as Moss and her fellow time-traveling agents are concerned, is the present—or “terra firma,” as they call it. The notion that the present is “solid ground” remains a cornerstone of Moss’s beliefs even as the case of the missing girl grows more complex and Moss’s trips to the future start offering more question than answers. Sweterlitsch introduces a host of fascinating concepts, such as “echoes”—duplicates brought from Inadmissible Future Trajectories who already exist in terra firma. “Thin spaces” are dangerous places where slivers of different times and places intersect, and “lensing” is the idea that a future trajectory is always warped by a time traveler’s psyche, much as dreams are shaped by the unconscious. Sweterlitsch has found inspiration in everything from Dante’s Inferno to J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition to Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men.

In the Inferno, “the punishment for the heretics is that they can see far off into the future but can’t see the present … And that was the perfect literary precedent for what I was hoping to write about in this novel in terms of the mechanism of time travel, but it also put the idea of heresy and belief into the book,” Sweterlitsch says. “A lot of characters express beliefs about the nature of the universe, but in almost all cases, those beliefs are proved incorrect by the novel itself… Reality around them is very slippery.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks

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The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Gone World

Minneapolis environmental attorneys Nick Ward and Lena Grant are no longer partners in law or marriage, but their lives are still strongly intertwined. Nick and his puppet can charm his psychiatrist, his attendant at the psychiatric facility, his supervisors at his mandatory community service, and his former students, but he just keeps breaking Lena’s heart. She tries to protect him as Nick pursues ever-wilder animal rescue schemes, until it seems like everything is starting to unravel. Stephen Evans is a playwright and the author of several books, including The Marriage of True Minds, A Transcendental Journey, Painting Sunsets and The Island of Always (Time Being Press, 2019). He attended Georgetown University, and when not reading, writing or acting, works as a technical writer and systems analyst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Island of Always

When Olivia Givens and her family leave Ireland in 1819, they have no idea that they are distant victims of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia four years before. They know only that the crops are failing and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars have led to the loss of their family property. Fifteen-year-old Olivia has a special reason to want to stay: her first crush on a local boy. But no one listens to a young girl in love, and soon Olivia is standing on the shores of the Ohio River with the rest of her Ulster Protestant family. The city of Cincinnati has just come into being, and that, combined with the illness of Erasmus, the family’s youngest child, convince the Givens to end their journey west in Ohio. Before long, Olivia’s mother has died in childbirth and her father has abandoned his three surviving children to head south on a paddle boat. James, the eldest son, takes responsibility for his brother and sister. But it’s not the easiest job in the world: Olivia has too much independence of thought to fit neatly into the Victorian vision of “the angel in the house,” and Erasmus cares more for drinking, womanizing, and hanging around with revivalist preachers—even preaching himself—than he does about working in James’s growing candle factory. Meanwhile, right across the river lies the slave state of Kentucky. As the years go by, the Givens family becomes ever more entangled in helping fugitives cross the water to freedom, whatever the cost to themselves, their lives, and even those they strive to protect. The Eulogist (William Morrow, 2019) opens a window onto a time when the frontier began at the Mississippi and North and South, although divided by no more than a waterway, occupied different mental and social universes. Terry Gamble’s ability to reveal the many sides of complex conflicts and gift for making even difficult characters appealingly human should not be missed. C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Eulogist: A Novel

The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later. Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” Valente says, and proves her point by turning Eurovision’s 50 nations and 100 million viewers into a competition that extends across the universe, attracting billions of viewers and outrageous alien performers—everything from sentient viruses and talented wormholes, to creatures that look like red pandas—but can travel through time—or like Microsoft’s much-maligned animated office assistant Clippy. Space Opera’s intergalactic song contest was founded following the devastating Sentient Wars to promote amity among species (much as Eurovision was designed to promote understanding among nations—as well as promote the newfangled technology of TV—after two world wars). Speaking of Eurovision, Valente says: “I think it’s one of the more extraordinary things that humanity has ever pulled off to look back at those two world wars and say, ‘Hey, let’s sing it out.’” However, the stakes are a bit higher in Space Opera than in Eurovision since the contest at the heart of Valente’s story is designed to test whether humans (recently discovered by the rest of the universe) deserve to be welcomed into the community of sentient beings or, for the sake of the greater good, be obliterated from existence. In the end, the job of saving homo sapiens falls to a washed up one-hit former British glam rock band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros. Under the story’s playful surface are messages about diversity and the absurdity of one clan claiming innate superiority over others when random luck is the most important factor underlying a species’ survival and success. Space Opera became “a frothy glittery book about rock and roll and comedy that has at its core a dark political vein going through it,” Valente says. Valente is a fast writer (see her blog post “How to Write a Novel in 30 Days”) and was able to turn the Twitter dare into a manuscript in two and a half months. “If I take much longer, I start to hate myself and the book and don’t finish. I’m really always trying to outrace my own self-doubt. That’s why I write fast. It’s not because it’s fun.” Her agent worked even faster than she did. He “still calls it the fastest deal in publishing because within 24 hours [of the first tweet] we had a contract.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks

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Space Opera

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The poetry and prose in Ivy Johnson’s Born Again (The Operating System, 2018) beautifully dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, this collection gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. The work blends sensuality and spirituality, merging the grounded reality of existing a physical body in the world with a sense of worship, prayer, and spell casting. I submerge my hands in ink and smear them across the wall I cover my body in rich purple paint and rub against white paper I place a sticker of the Virgin Mary on my bedroom window next to the fire escape She hurts with the glow of blue frost I race down the stairs to make snow angels in the dog-piss Fill the silhouette of my body with marigolds

— from “Take a Moment to Gather Yourself” Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA. Her book, As They Fall, is a collection of 110 notecards for aleatoric ritual and was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013. She is co-founder of The Third Thing, an ecstatic feminist performance art duo. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published their self-titled chapbook, The Third Thing, in 2016. Her book Born Again came out with The Operating System in 2018. Her most recent chapbook, an excerpt from her current memoir project, came out with Sky Trail press and is called Precious Moments. If you'd like a copy, email her at ivy.m.johnson@gmail.com. Andrea Blythe is a co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com.

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An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. They’re good people, the law is on their side, and it’s hard not to root for them, but we’re forced to ask ourselves - what defines parenthood? Is it the biological connection or is it the daily grind of feeding, changing diapers, and tending to all their needs? In addition to a mother’s love, Lucky Boy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) deals with immigration, undocumented workers, the struggle between haves and the have-nots, infertility, survival, and love. Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. Sekaran is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and she teaches writing at Mills College. She was born in Sacramento, is the daughter of immigrants from India, and has two older brothers, a husband, two young sons, and a cat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lucky Boy

The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable woman by any standards. Known for her musical compositions and mystical prayers, Hildegard was also Germany’s first recognized female physician. The daughter of minor nobility, she entered the convent in childhood as a tithe from her parents. Excited by the prospect of acquiring an education, then a goal unattainable for girls outside a convent, Hildegard suffers a setback when she confronts the strict seclusion imposed on nuns by the anchorage of St. Disibod and its ascetic magistra, Jutta of Sponheim. But relief comes from the company of Volmar, a fellow oblate who like Hildegard loves to sneak out of the abbey and walk in the nearby woods, and Brother Wigbert, the monastery’s infirmarian. It’s through the teaching of Brother Wigbert that Hildegard discovers her affinity for medicine. Alas, not every member of the abbey hierarchy believes that young women should spend time outside the walls of the anchorage, and as political threats from the outside world intensify and Hildegard’s detractors rise higher in the administration, she must fight for her right to practice medicine—and to express her opinion at all. In this charmingly personal account, P. K. Adams explores the first part of Hildegard’s life, the richly developed characters who influenced her, and the factors that gave her the strength to define her own dream and pursue it to fulfillment despite opposition from a society determined to keep her in her place. The story begun in The Greenest Branch (Iron Knight Press, 2018) concludes in The Column of Burning Spices (Iron Knight Press, 2019), where Hildegard leaves the Abbey of St. Disibod to found a convent of her own. C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Greenest Branch: A Novel of Germany's First Female Physician (Hildegard of Bingen)

The pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow. The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. People start losing their memories as well—while gaining an ability to change the world with the power of their imaginations. As society collapses, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowers bloom in winter. The Book of M has garnered widespread praise, earning recommendations from The Today Show and USA Today, and making Amazon’s list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2018. A reviewer on Bustle called it a “post-apocalyptic masterpiece.” In a world of vanishing memories, Shepherd finds an unlikely hero: a patient with classic amnesia. Unlike the “shadowless”—who eventually forget everything, including how to speak or eat or breathe—the amnesiac never forgets how the world works. This allows him to explore, in a race against the seemingly unstoppable pandemic, ways to save the memories of the few who remain. For several of Shepherd’s characters, the worst thing that can happen to them is losing their connection to those they love. “Their greatest fear is the people they care about who’ve lost their shadows [will forget] their love and the memories they have together,” Shepherd says. The book is mum about the pandemic’s cause—as is Shepherd. “I sort of felt like if this really happened to all of us and the world was plunged into this kind of dream-like forgetting state, probably nobody would [know the cause] but everyone would have their theories. Some make more sense than others.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks

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The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

It’s 1999, and Ann is a guitar-playing thirty-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of having children even though she was born without a uterus. As Laura Catherine Brown's novel Made by Mary (C and R Press, 2018) opens, Ann and her husband Joel have been rejected as adoptive parents, and their plan to host and pay medical expenses for a pregnant teen goes terribly wrong. Then Ann’s 49-year-old mother Mary, a jewelry-designing, goddess-worshipping, lesbian hippie, offers to carry her daughter’s baby. Brown’s debut novel, Quickening, was published by Random House and featured in Barnes & Noble’s "Discover Great New Writers" series. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Monkeybicycle, Paragraphiti and Tin House; and in anthologies with Seal Press and Overlook Press. She received her BA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and supports her writing habit by working as a graphic designer. Her writing education came through many writing workshops including the Bread Loaf Conference and the Sewanee Writers' Workshop where she was a fiction fellow. She has also taught yoga since 2003 and has been a yoga practitioner for almost 30 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Made by Mary

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was published in 1976 and then went out of print. In this new edition, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody write the introduction, while Baldwin’s nephew and niece, Tejan Karefa-Smart and Aisha Karefa-Smart write the foreword and afterword respectively. In Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin alternately described as a children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children, we see a slice of a Harlem neighborhood through the eyes of young TJ. The story presents a complex and multifaceted vision of black childhood in America and nudges the contemporary reader to think critically about what it means to see through the eyes of a child and to be seen by those in one’s world. Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay on Little Man Little Man that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely" and Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for their feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW , on Black America TV , and on a panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture moderated by Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Camargo Foundation, he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Reimagined Belongings: Black Women’s Decolonial Citizenship in the French Empire examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements.

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Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018) is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after wars and disease render women devastatingly scarce. A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called it a “thrilling novel” with “exquisite” social commentary. Before She Sleeps was also among the books recently highlighted in an article in The Atlanticabout “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.” Before She Sleeps focuses on a group of women who’ve found a modicum of freedom by hiding underground with the assistance of powerful men, for whom they provide clandestine but non-sexual companionship. The book explores the boundaries of their freedom through an eastern and Islamic lens. “Western readers… are expecting some fantastic like Hunger Games-type scenario where the women come out as warriors and just smash the patriarchy. Feminism in my part of the world, in the Middle East and South Asia is a lot more subtle. We’re dealing with tremendous amounts of misogyny and … gender-based violence. So I think what women over the centuries have learned is not to directly confront that misogyny … but to subvert it, to go around it,” Shah says. The risks facing outspoken women in Pakistan today are real. Shah’s friend, Sabeen Mahmud, was murdered in 2015. Mahmud had founded a popular café-gallery and meeting space in Karachi that seeks to foster conversations about human rights, diversity, and other topics that are controversial in Pakistan. After the murder, Shah wrote with greater urgency, channeling all her “terrible feelings” over Mahmud’s assassination into the novel. While some might call Mahmud and Shah activists, Shah resists the label. “We feel like we’re just out there doing our work and saying what needs to be said and telling the truth about what we see in our lives around us and if that’s activism, then OK,” she says. Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks

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Before She Sleeps: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Emery, Em for short, is a smart and dedicated college graduate. She anticipates a future in which she, and eventually, her parents, can escape the lower strata of the domed city of New Worth. She hopes her upcoming career as a data curator, someone who pores over the copious electronic exchanges which constantly overwrite the old, will make the sacrifice of her parents worthwhile. They saved their money to buy her an implant, a neurological link to the data network, so that she would be in an advantageous position. But just as she’s about to move her virtual relationship with a man she knows as Rik to the next level, after meeting him in person, her life takes a twist. Em has a secret life pursuing and punishing criminals who rip the valuable implants out and resell them. In a highly structured society, she’s taken the law into her own hands, making her vulnerable to blackmail. Aventine, a pseudo-government company which specializes in safe data-transfer by through encoding the data in the blood of its couriers, wants her to work for them. They’ll pay off her sizable school debt, and keep her past activities tracking criminals secret. They promise exciting and fulfilling work. There’s only one catch. She will be officially dead. To prevent friends from recognizing her, she’ll be outfitted with safeguards, including a slightly altered physical appearance, and a variety of false ids. Although Em misses Rik and her friends and family, she tells herself they’re better off without her. She soon becomes comfortable with her Aventine handler, Tahir, and gets to know some of the other couriers. But when a data-drop turns dangerous, and a man gets shot, Em doesn’t know who to trust anymore. Could she turn to Rik for help? She’s only met him once in person, and besides, he seems to be sympathetic to a radical contingent of Disconnects, who are calling the whole idea of implants into question. Fast paced, with a touch of romance, Lauren C. Teffeau's cyberpunk novel Implanted(Angry Robot, 2018) explores trust and intimacy in a society based on electronic connections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Implanted

When you picture the midwestern United States, what do you see? For those who live on either coast, the phrase “flyover country,” might come to mind. Wide open spaces and vast empty plains. Miles and miles of corn, as far as the eye can see. The kind of place where nothing much happens, and nobody important ever lived. At least, so goes the prevailing stereotype. But if you’ve spent much time in the Midwest, chances are you have a very different perspective of this landscape. Your vision of America’s heartland is probably populated with the friends, family, and experiences that helped shape you, and the great state you call home. For writer Erica Trabold of Stromsburg, Nebraska, the Midwest is more than the place she came of age—it’s also a landscape rich with stories. In her debut collection, Five Plots (Seneca Review Books, 2018), Trabold explores themes of family, heritage, belonging, nostalgia, and the natural world in a series of beautiful, tightly-woven essays. Through her unique formal experimentations with prose, Trabold offers a fresh perspective of this often overlooked terrain. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we welcome Erica Trabold to discuss her essay collection, Five Plots, winner of the Seneca Review’s first Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, now available from Seneca Review Books (2018). Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere (https://twitter.com/zoebossiere?lang=en) or head to zoebossiere.com (http://www.zoebossiere.com).

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Five Plots

On its back cover, Patrick B. Mullen’s Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music(University of Illinois Press, 2018) is aptly described as “part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir”. Mullen is professor emeritus of English and folklore at the Ohio State University and across the eight chapters that make up this book, he enthusiastically and engagingly describes his many encounters with a wide range of vernacular musics throughout the north American continent and details his experiences with the musical genres, performers, events, and songs that have shaped the soundscape of his life. As his fellow music scholar, E. Cecilia Conway puts it: this “book lets us ride shotgun with Mullen on his journey from Beaumont, Texas boy to Ohio professor to dancing to 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'The Twist' amidst the diversity of American Music. Read Pat Mullen at his expansive best." Rachel Hopkin is a UK-born, US-based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University.

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Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music (Music in American Life)

Christmas is not looking bright for Charles Dickens. His latest novel has proven a massive flop, and that upstart William Thackeray doesn’t miss an opportunity to crow. Bills are rolling in, every relative in creation has his or her hand out, the kids (number steadily increasing) have their hearts set on expensive toys, and Mrs. Dickens has already started making plans for the most elaborate holiday party yet. Oh yes, and Dickens’ publisher is begging him to write a Christmas book when the spirit of Christmas seems to have packed up and moved to Scotland together with Dickens’ exasperated family. Determined not to give in, Dickens moves to a cheap hotel, rents a room under the name Ebenezer Scrooge, dons the disguise of an old man, and roams the streets of London in pursuit of a mysterious young woman in a purple cloak. And surprise, by the time December 25 rolls around, Dickens has not only recovered his joie de vivre but penned what may be the world’s most beloved holiday classic, A Christmas Carol. In Mr. Dickens and His Carol (Flatiron Books, 2018), Samantha Silva takes events we all know from childhood and, through the application of a light touch and a gifted imagination, turns them into a story at once comfortably familiar and delightfully different. C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Mr. Dickens and His Carol: A Novel

In her new novel This is How it Always is (Flatiron Books, 2017), Laurie Frankel tells the story of the Walsh-Adams family and how they grapple with the youngest child, the fifth son, who announces at age three that he wants to be a girl. While his four older brothers revel in typical boy behavior, Claude, who decides her name is now Poppy, wears dresses and purses to school. Local homophobia pushes the Walsh-Adams family to leave their big old farmhouse in Madison, Wi. for a smaller home in Seattle. There, they decide to keep Poppy’s trans status a family secret. When Poppy is outed, her mother takes leave from her job and travels across the world to help her daughter figure out who she wants to be. Laurie Frankel is the author of the novels This Is How It Always Is, The Atlas of Love, and Goodbye for Now. She lives in Seattle with her family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This Is How It Always Is: A Novel

In Joshua Max Feldman's thoughtful, bittersweet novel Start Without Me (William Morrow, 2017), two strangers meet at an airport restaurant, and through the course of one Thanksgiving Day, help each other grapple with love, disappointment, and family. In candid, witty, and often funny, razor-sharp dialogue, Feldman confronts the fall-out from excessive drinking, mental illness, childhood trauma, drugs, adultery, and nearly every other way a person can be wounded. His deeply-flawed characters are recognizable and honest as they strive to understand their mistakes while continuing to make them. Adam is a former musical prodigy who comes home for Thanksgiving for the first time since getting sober. Even though his family has seen him hit rock-bottom, he still feels like he’ll never be able to get anything right with them. Flight-attendant Marissa is in a marriage strained by tensions over race, class, and her husband’s lack of ambition. Now she finds out that she’s pregnant following a one-night-stand with her high school sweetheart. If Thanksgiving is the classic, all-American holiday, Start Without Me should be the classic, all-American tale about the struggle we face to become our best selves. Joshua Max Feldman is the author of two novels, The Book of Jonah (translated into nine languages) and Start Without Me. Joshua has written for The New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and is a former fellow of New York's Laboratory for Jewish Culture. He currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Start Without Me: A Novel

Pillow of Dreams (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) is an intensely emotional and inspirational collection of poetry and art by Dr. Nivedita Lakhera. She experienced a stroke, divorce, and then a heartbreak all at the young age of 27. She is a doctor of Internal Medicine and is serving as a Hospitalist in San Jose, California. Her career in medicine has inspired some of her greatest work, such as a poem written about the last moments of life of a cancer patient she treated. In this book, she opens each section with a letter written to the reader. In these sections you will meet: Saibo – the one who loves, Meera- the one who yearns, Anahita-the one who heals, and Mulan – the one who conquers. One hundred percent of the book sale profits go towards developing telemedicine software for Syrian refugee camps, developing countries, tribal / remote areas and acute disaster situations. Her work has inspired many and she is a keynote speaker at multiple conferences.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com.

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Pillow of Dreams: poetry & art collection

How do families decide when financial relief outweighs the risks of drilling for natural gas on their land? In Kate Brandes’ novel Promise of Pierson Orchard (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2017), a big energy company comes to Minden, Pennsylvania and hires the long-estranged brother of orchard owner Jack Pierson. Thinking that Wade Pierson is one of their own, some struggling neighbors start selling mining rights to Green Energy. Jack fears what the company will do to the land and worries that Wade will try to rekindle his relationship with Jack’s wife LeeAnn, who recently left him. Jack reaches out to the mother who abandoned him and his brother when they were teenagers. She’s now an environmental lawyer with experience in dealing with companies whose spurious promises to landowners are broken, along with ecosystems, relationships, and towns.

Kate Brandes is an environmental scientist with 20 years of experience. A geology teacher at Moravian College, she is also a painter and writer who focuses on the environment. Her short stories have been published in The Binnacle, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal. A member of the Arts Community of Easton (ACE), the Pennwriters, as well as the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Kate lives near the Delaware River with her husband and two sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Promise of Pierson Orchard

The Draconis Memoria series is comprised of a trilogy set in a world where drake (dragon) blood is a prized commodity, the basis of the trading fortune of the Ironship Syndicate. It is a brilliant, savage adventure. When I jumped in with Anthony Ryan’s latest release, ominously named The Empire of Ashes (Ace, 2018), I soon realized I couldn’t do justice to the detailed, intricately plotted series without reading all three. In for a penny, in for a pound.

August, September, and October found me delving into a world with various cultures: a decadent empire, complete with a doddering emperor, and another continent in thrall to a powerful corporation. There were steaming jungles, barren mountains, and ice floes overlaying ocean-bed volcanoes

In addition to the challenges of noting the terrain and politics, there are multiple points of view, as in most adult epic fiction. From my reading, two main characters emerged, and tied together the evolving narrative.

Lizanne Lethridge is a ruthless Special Initiatives Agent, an employee of the Ironship Trading Syndicate with a taste for explosives and occasional dalliances. Clay Torcreek is an emotionally scarred young man, survivor of a slum called The Blinds. They’re both Blood-Blessed; humans that can ingest the blood of drakes and manifest superpowers. When Clay is forced into service by Lizanne’s employers, he and Lizanne are initially at odds.

In the first book, Clay is sent on a secret expedition to find out what happened to an earlier force that braved the interior of the continent Arradsia intent on finding the fabled White Drake. A taste of its blood and the future becomes known.

When Clay encounters the White Drake in its resting place, and unintentionally activates it, he learns that the beast has its own nefarious plans for humanity. In the second book, he and Lizanne become unlikely allies, dedicated to stopping the threat. Clay and his kin go south to a land of perpetual snow, to seek out the secret of crystals from space that are linked to the past and can induce changes in drakes and humans. Lizanne infiltrates a prison, looking for a mysterious man called the Tinkerer, who may be able to unlock the secret of an ancient music box which holds additional clues about the White Drake. In the process of breaking out of the infamous prison, she becomes known as Miss Blood, and topples an empire. Clay, on his own journey, discovers a long-lost culture and a 2000-year old survivor under the ice.

In meantime, the White Drake leads the drakes in a war against mankind. The otherworldly crystals aid the transformation of its human captives into “the Spoiled.” The Spoiled, who have a linked consciousness, are under the control of the White Drake, who mobilizes them as an army, as well as occasionally feeding them to its brood.

Will Clay, Lizanne, and their allies find the key to destroying the White Dragon? The third book, the last, concludes the series and the fight against the White Drake’s domination.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Empire of Ashes (The Draconis Memoria)

It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once happened there. The youngest child disappears, the quarry is drained, and news of the missing child spreads. As the days and months pass, it becomes clear that Pansy has vanished into thin air. Then older sister Bert graduates from high school. Sure that her little sister is still alive somewhere, she convinces her brother to help find Pansy.

Tiffany Quay Tyson’s debut novel, Three Rivers, was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Past is Never (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) is a 2018 Okra Pick. Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi and is a graduate of Delta State University. After college she worked for a brief stint as a newspaper reporter in the Mississippi Delta, where she received the Frank Allen Award for Journalism. She is the recipient of two Heartland Emmy Awards including one for writing for a children’s public television program. She is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Past Is Never: A Novel

It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland?

That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy.

In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of today’s technology and internet giants “times a thousand.”

Despite its monopolistic control over the world’s information delivery system, it finds itself vulnerable to a clandestine group of hackers and psychologists, who, over many years, covertly and subtly manipulate the feeds of world leaders to influence their thinking about important policies, such as climate change.

“They’re not creating fake news,” Peper says. “They are actually sorting, ordering, and surfacing true facts about the world in a way that shapes someone’s opinion.”

In Bandwidth, the behemoth corporation finds itself at the mercy of wily hackers, but in the series’ second book, Borderless, (47North, 2018) published last month, Commonwealth gains the upper hand, using its massive influence to challenge the idea of a nation-state.

To Peper’s credit, things are never black and white. “I dig out sources of contradiction in day-to-day life and our relationship to technology and the world,” he says in his New Books interview.

Many readers might argue that the goals of the hackers in Bandwidth are good—such as forcing nations to respond to climate change. But these same readers would probably also agree that the hackers’ methods—secretly manipulating individuals’ feeds to change their opinions—violates ethical principles of privacy and autonomy.

The power of Peper’s books is that their world isn’t far from our own. The algorithms that animate Facebook and Google and (and Netflix and Amazon and on and on) are a bit like Peper’s hackers, subtly guiding our thoughts to give us what we think we want while also giving the tech companies what they want (likes, clicks, views, purchases).

The compromises we make with today’s internet seem to exact a low cost. But Peper wants us to stay on our toes. In the afterward to Bandwidth, he says people can remain autonomous by questioning their assumptions and remaining contemplative. “The feed,” he says, “can only define you if you let it.”

The third book in the series, Breach, is scheduled for publication in May.

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press.

Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or prose. Keeve’s work is a bridge between both worlds. In a manner that is simultaneously universal and intimate, his book is an unflinching view at what it is to be black, queer, disenfranchised, jubilant, and resilient. Via his deft pen, Keeve turns his focus on how his own personal history is deeply connected to, and is bolstered by, the black experience in society.

It is via this collection, Keeve hopes to create a legacy for the story of his family, his culture, and the future. As he writes in “The decomposition of Emmett,”

There is a dis-

ease in the land.

This collection dissects the diss, the unease, and the sickness of American generations as a means of healing and reconciliation.

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Southern Migrant Mixtape

The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip ticket, hockey games, and his old bedroom with free WiFi in exchange for taking care of their aging grandmother. Andrei imagines the scholarly article he’ll write based on his grandmother’s stories of Soviet intrigue. He imagines himself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping his grandmother company in the evening. But his Russian is rusty, finding a place to play hockey is difficult, and the grandmother has dementia. As Keith Gessen explains in his wonderful novel A Terrible Country (Viking, 2018), Russia turns out to be something different than he expected.

Keith Gessen is the founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men. He is also the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Terrible Country: A Novel

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction Ser.)

If you are a young moody woman who likes to wear black, you might well be a witch. Or aspire to be a witch. If you needed a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to behave, you could benefit from picking up The Winter Riddle (Black Spot Books, 2018) by Sam Hooker. Quaint, and yet somehow very modern, this is the tale of Volgha the Winter Witch. Volgha, like Greta Garbo just “vants to be alone,” in her moldering, but cozy hut in the North Pole. Unfortunately, not only is she royal by blood, her depraved, needy sister is the Queen. The Queen enjoys teasing and tormenting her introverted sister, almost as much as chopping peoples’ heads off or getting stimulated with the Royal Tickler. (A person in the employ of the palace who is always masked.) To add to Volgha’s woes, her mind is soon shared by her familiar, a red crow, and her old mentor, which leads to some lively discussions inside her head. And that handsome Santa, with a secret past as a warrior? Volgha tries to push him away, but he doesn’t allow her rebuffs to discomfort him.

There is a plot to all this farce as well. Volgha, who has spent years trying to get away from everything and everyone, is chosen by fate to become the Warden of the North Pole and mediate between nature spirits and the doings of man. With a motley crew of assistants, including the vain and talkative red crow, a terrified elf, and a practical scullery maid, she must set things to right.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Winter Riddle

Lake Michigan in 1936 is an essential commercial seaway, one that captains and their crews must cross regularly no matter the season, breaking massive ice floes under the prows of their ships and praying that they survive the fierce swells and changeable winds that have left a legacy of ghost ships and wrecks. Into this world comes five-year-old Fern Halvorsen, daughter of the captain of the Manitou, with a small suitcase and her teddy bear. Fern’s mother is consumed with grief after the loss of another child, and her father fears for his daughter’s welfare.

To Fern, the Manitou is a magical place where she can roam largely unsupervised with her new friend Alv. She gets into every corner of the ship, becomes a pet of the crew, and even adopts a stray kitten she finds in the hold. But the winter of 1936 on Lake Michigan is more brutal even than most, and the consequences of that journey and the secret Fern carries away from it haunt her for the rest of her life.

With an ear for crisp dialogue, an unflinching focus on character, and a remarkable instinct for spare but telling detail, Lee Zacharias, creates in Across the Great Lake (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), an unforgettable tale about the child inside every adult and the long-term effects of the choices we make.

C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Across the Great Lake

Questions about freedom of the press, defamation, libel and slander have been in the news quite a bit lately. Bad Lies (Mascot Books, 2017) tells the story of Eddie Bennison, who is over 50 when he makes it into the professional golf circuit. In two years, he wins millions of dollars in endorsements and prize money. Then a leading golf magazine publishes articles that suggest he unfairly tampered with his clubs and used performance-enhancing drugs. Bennison loses all his endorsements and his ability to play the game. His lawyer, Charlie Mayfield, files a libel and slander lawsuit against the magazine and its powerful corporate owner. Then a woman accuses Bennison of sexually assaulting and beating her. While the lawyers on both sides build their arguments and tensions rise, we’re kept guessing right up to the moment when the jury foreman announces the verdict.

Lawyer and author Shelby Yastrow, formerly General Counsel and Executive Vice President for McDonald’s Corporation, wrote two previous novels based on civil lawsuits that he litigated, and one non-fiction book about franchising the world’s largest hair-salon franchise. World-famous British professional golfer Tony Jacklin, who won many tournaments and helped popularize golf around the world, was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2002. He is also the author of several autobiographical books about golf. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bad Lies

In Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga Press, 2017), John Crowley provides an account of human history through the eyes of a crow.

The story takes flight in the Iron Age, when the eponymous main character, Dar Oakley, is the first of his kind to encounter humans. He finds these upright beings (who hail from a realm that Dar Oakley calls “Ymr” in crow-speak) both fascinating and baffling.

Witnessing a battle for the first time, Dar Oakley can’t make sense of it. In his experience, animals kill for food, but absurdly people don’t eat their opponents. Rather, they defile and plunder their enemies’ bodies while tenderly attending to the corpses of their compatriots. (Any unburied remains are, of course, a windfall to hungry crows, who happily peck the bones clean).

Crowley calls the novel “a long meditation on death,” which makes the story sound more morose than it is. Dar Oakley is actually a charming companion, his wonder over human ideas about the soul and afterlife leavened by his kindness and humor. He makes several trips to the underworld (which changes over time to reflect evolving human beliefs) and even assists a clairvoyant after the American Civil War.

Dar Oakley’s long-life makes him a consummate storyteller, and towards the end of the book, his exploits—like his introducing the concept of names to crow culture in the pre-Christian era—are re-told as myth among modern crows. Thus Ka is also a novel about the power of words.

“If you’ve written 13 or 14 novels like I have, you cannot forget almost in every sentence that you are in a story,” Crowley says. And a good writer plays with that idea, leaving the reader poised between a belief that, on the one hand, what they’re reading “is just a story” and, on the other, that it’s reality.

Crowley, 75, has earned both the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement.

“If you want to write a realistic novel it ought to contain a little bit of the fantastical and the spiritual and the impossible because life does,” Crowley says. “I don’t particularly care for books that don’t have something of that in it.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events of his life and shows how they can inform many of the concepts for which he is best known. The son of a clergyman, Nietzsche excelled at university and became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel without even taking a degree. It was at that time he began a long-term friendship with Richard Wagner and often traveled to Bayreuth. Yet Nietzsche soon drifted away from philology towards philosophy, which led to his dismissal from his teaching post. As Prideaux shows, Nietzsche overcame ill health, physical handicaps, and the poor reception of his work to develop his ideas, and was on the cusp of gaining a wider audience when a mental breakdown led him to spend the last years of his life institutionalized, little knowing of the growing impact his books and ideas were having on European thought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.

Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.

The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review. The series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction.

It’s the first time Roush, who hosts the podcast Soonish and specializes in writing about science and technology, has edited fiction. “The mission of Twelve Tomorrows is to highlight stories that are totally plausible from an engineering point of view,” Roush says.

In “The Heart of the Matter,” Nnedi Okorafur explores how suspicion of new technology can have real life consequences. In this case, plotters against the reformist president of Nigeria try to muster support for a coup by manipulating fears about the president’s new artificial heart, claiming that the organ—which was grown in a Chinese laboratory from plant cells—is powered by witchcraft.

In “The Woman Who Destroyed Us,” SL Huang describes the plight of a mother who wants to exact revenge on a doctor who used deep brain stimulation to treat her son’s behavioral and mental health issues. The changes in her son are so dramatic that the mother feels she’s lost her child, and yet the son is happy with the result, feeling that the treatment has revealed his true self.

If there’s one message Roush hopes readers take from the collection, it’s that people are in the driver’s seat when it comes to building and using new technologies. He hopes the book reminds people “that we do have the power to adopt or shun technology, that we can decide how to bring it into our lives, to what extent we want to use it or not use it. We can even influence the way innovation happens. We can tell scientists and engineers, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough’ or ‘We’re worried about this. We want you to build in more safeguards.’… We have that power.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize every conceivable human activity, from keeping track of personal bests at the gym to getting a good night’s sleep—all from the comfort of our homes. But what do these measurements actually tell us about ourselves? What happens when the data sets for these functions are subjective? And how do we know whether we’re measuring ourselves accurately?

In her debut collection of essays, nonfiction writer Rachel Z. Arndt explores the answers to these questions, interrogating the methods through which we measure our lives in the modern world. Through a series of 19 researched personal essays, Arndt speaks from her own experiences managing her narcolepsy, participating in judo tournaments, analyzing the rituals of online dating and more in order to answer the question of what can be measured—or, more accurately, what cannot.

Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Rachel Z. Arndt to hear more about Beyond Measure available now from Sarabande Books (2018).

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Beyond Measure: Essays

In Karin Tidbeck‘s Amatka (Vintage, 2017), words weave—and have the potential to shred—the fabric of reality.

Amatka was shortlisted for the Compton Crook and Locus Awards. A reviewer on NPR called it “a warped and chilling portrait of post-truth reality” while a Chicago Tribune reviewer called it “disturbing and provocative.”

The book’s title takes its name from a colony settled at an unspecified point in the past by pioneers. Life there is hard; not only is it always maddeningly cold, but a paucity of resources requires the colonists to recycle everything, including dead bodies, and they depend on mushrooms for all their nourishment.

But the most unusual feature of life in Amatka is that all objects must be labeled. According to the rules set forth by a secretive ruling committee, a pencil must be labeled “pencil.” A toothbrush must be labeled “toothbrush.” If a label wears off, or if something is mislabeled, the consequences are disastrous: the object degenerates into a primordial substance known as gloop.

Tidbeck says the novel began as a thought experiment. Essentially, she wondered, “What if we lived in a world where reality is controlled by language?” The idea was inspired, in part, by the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the structure of a language affects the speakers’ worldview. Thus, in Amatka, “Language has enormous power. You have to be extremely careful about what you say, what you do… because upsetting the order of things can literally mean the end of the world.”

To avoid the risk of things transforming into gloop, the colony Amatka (and therefore the book Amatka) doesn’t use homonyms, synonyms or metaphors—a principle adhered to not only in the original Swedish but in the English translation.

Amatka itself actually started as a poetry collection, but when Tidbeck couldn’t find a publisher, she turned the book into a narrative, a process that took six years. But Tidbeck hasn’t abandoned poetry entirely. As the plot unfolds, the main character, Vanja, is inspired by a book of poetry to rebel. Thus words serve as both the backbone of this cold authoritarian society and also offer—through poetry—a route to freedom.

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Amatka

As seems appropriate for a character as resourceful, skilled, and self-confident as Uhtred of Bebbanburg, he goes from strength to strength. In addition to a set of bestselling novels, collectively dubbed The Saxon Tales, Uhtred has a television series to his name: The Last Kingdom, just renewed for its third year by Netflix.

Here in his eleventh adventure, War of the Wolf (Harper, 2018), Uhtred should be enjoying the fruits of his labors over the last ten books, but of course, that story would be no fun to read or to write. Instead Uhtred, now past sixty, receives a summons to travel south to protect the fortress of Ceaster (Chester) on behalf of Aethelstan, the son of King Edward of Wessex. Uhtred soon realizes that the summons is a ruse: the greater danger lies in the North, in the person of the Dane Sköll and his warriors, who dose themselves with henbane to harness the power of the wolf. Sköll also has the support of a powerful sorcerer, who Uhtred comes to believe has cursed him—especially after Sköll attacks the city of Eoferwic (York), where Uhtred’s son-in-law rules, with devastating effect.

Bernard Cornwell does not disappoint, and this latest entry in the Last Kingdom saga sees Uhtred at the top of his game and England a bit closer to its eventual unification, a goal that Uhtred both supports and fears as it becomes ever clearer that his kingdom, Northumbria, and his pagan religion increasingly pose the only barriers to King Edward’s success.

C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

War of the Wolf

When Giselle Gélis runs into David Rettig at a biblical studies conference, she’s not expecting a life-changing experience. On the contrary, the thought foremost in her mind is escaping the creepy colleague who seems oblivious to hints of dislike and even outright putdowns. But Giselle and David hit it off, despite their differences of personality and the reality that any relationship between them can only be long-distance: she lives in France while he’s based in Israel.

In an attempt to spend time together, Giselle and David agree to undertake a journey across southern France, from just below Marseille to Toulouse. It’s supposed to be a vacation, casually devoted to learning more about each other while unraveling a mystery associated with Giselle’s uncle, murdered late in the nineteenth century in a crime that was never solved, between stops at luxury hotels and meals at fabulous restaurants. Instead, Giselle and David stumble over a discovery that challenges doctrine fundamental to the Christian religion, and with it her faith and their future as a couple.

Discovery (Notramour Press, 2018) skips back and forth between Giselle and David’s present and her uncle’s past, with at least one foray even deeper into time as the underlying mystery is gradually revealed. Leslie Schweitzer Miller juggles these multiple realities with aplomb, bringing to life not only the breathtaking scenery of the mountains around Rennes-le-Château, where the central action takes place, but the contrasting time periods and the characters who populate them.

C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Discovery

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the John Dewey Prize from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Kaag offers a rich history, philosophical inquiry and a memoir of an existential crisis that takes us to the heart of American philosophy. He embarks on an unexpected journey of discover in the abandoned library at West Wind, the estate of the early twentieth-century philosopher William Ernest Hocking, an intellectual descendent of William James. At West Wind, Kaag finds an invaluable repository of Hocking’s thinking, evidence of many significant friendships, and the remains of fundamental questions of American philosophy. Like his philosophical forbearers he ponders essential questions: Is life worth living? What is the meaning of life? How are we both free and obligated to others? Seeking answers, Kaag engages with the thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, who drew on a wealth of classical and continental philosophy to create an American philosophical tradition. Kaag has produced a personal and intellectual creative work sure to inspire all who ask the same questions.

This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.

Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

American Philosophy: A Love Story

In Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters.

The book launches The Sixth World, a planned four-part series set in the near future. The series title refers to the Navajo origin story, which says that our current world—the fifth—emerged after floods destroyed the previous ones.

In Trail of Lightning, the six world is wrought from similar devastation, a combination of earthquakes and rising seas. The Navajo Nation survives thanks to a protective wall and a shot of magic, which transforms the barrier into four culturally resonant materials: turquoise, abalone, jet and white shell.

The wall seals the nation off from not only the apocalypse but from white Euro-centric colonialism. Roanhorse considers her work a form of indigenous futurism that tells “a sovereign story, a story that exists on its own, on native land in native thought with native characters’ stories and processes that don’t have to acknowledge the larger, white western world. This is not a story that even has any white folks in it. This is a Navajo-centric story, and that’s on purpose.”

In creating a magic system, Roanhorse decided not to draw on Navajo spirituality. “There’s already a mess in New Age thinking about Native American spirituality as magic and yet somehow other spiritualities are not,” she says. Still, she wanted to make the magic “distinctly Navajo” so she turned to the concept of clans, which imbue her characters with unique powers.

For instance, the clan powers of the book’s protagonist, Maggie Hoskie, make her ideally suited to be a monster hunter. She is Honágháahnii, which means Walks-Around, giving her lightning speed. And she is K’aahanáanii, which means Living Arrow, making her, as Maggie herself puts it, “really good at killing people.”

Maggie’s powers emerge spontaneously in response to a devastating incident from her childhood.

“The clan powers answer your need,” Roanhorse says. “In Maggie’s case, her jumping off traumatic event was the murder of her grandmother, so what she needed then were those two powers … But often the coping skills that we learn in dealing with trauma—especially childhood trauma—may serve us in the moment but don’t necessarily serve us as we grow. And overcoming those and the baggage that comes with it is part of Maggie’s journey.”

The novel is a gripping action-adventure that all readers can appreciate but that holds particular resonance for Native Americans. Some readers have told Roanhorse that “they’ve never seen some of the things I talk about on the rez in a book… I had one reader say she cried the whole way through because she’s never gotten to see that.”

A Yale graduate and lawyer specializing in federal Indian law, Roanhorse didn’t get serious about writing until 2013. But she’s quickly made a name for herself. A couple days before we recorded her interview in August, she was honored at the 76th WorldCon with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” (The story also earned the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in May and is read by Lavar Burton on his podcast.)

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Trail of Lightning (1) (The Sixth World)

In her first novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018), author Mira T. Lee delves into the sometimes troubled but always compelling life of Lucia from the perspectives of her older sister Miranda, her husband, Yonah, and the father of her child, Manny. Miranda, who has taken care of Lucia since she was a baby, struggles to help her sister from near and far. Lucia and those who love her are forced to grapple with her recklessness and her mental illness. They also cope with immigration and cultural issues, relationships, raising Lucia’s child, and all the flotsam and jetsam of Lucia’s chaotic life. In rich, evocative prose, Mira T. Lee has written about love that spans oceans, perspectives, and time. Her work has been published in numerous quarterlies and reviews, including the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review and Triquarterly. She was awarded an Artists fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2012 and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a graduate of Stanford University and currently lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, Mass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Everything Here Is Beautiful (Lee, Mira T.)

Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England. That was also the summer of the London rush hour bombings that paralyzed the city and killed and maimed hundreds. Those news reports marinated over the years and finally led Margot to write her first novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017). The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage. Esther’s mother, Lonia, tosses in bed remembering her escape from Nazi Germany, and her beloved brother’s failure to make it out alive. Esther’s neighbor, Javad, is the Persian doctor who is consulted about a mute piano player who washed up on the beach in the north of England. He is also the long-divorced father of nineteen-year-old Amir, who comes and goes at odd hours, and seems to be involved in something secretive. The story weaves the lives and thoughts of these four characters before and after the shocking 7/7 terror attack in London’s underground.

Underground Fugue won the 2017 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish fiction. Singer’s 2007 story collection, The Pale of Settlement, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margot Singer’s work has been featured on NPR and in many publications such as theKenyon Review, the Gettysburg Review, Agni, and Conjunctions. She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

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Underground Fugue

In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely, in conversations public or private among Americans is there any discussion of the nation’s northern border with Canada. Whatever the reason (ignorance, indifference, or both) all this changes with the publication of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017). In this stunning comparison of life along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borderlands, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the award-winning travel writer and Professor of Creative Non-fiction at UNC Chapel Hill, busts the conceptual block that views “the border” as a place of exceptionality. Focusing on the modern-day experiences of Tejanos/as, Mexican nationals, and Akwesasne Mohawks, Griest uncovers startling similarities between people and places separated by nearly 2,000 miles. Whether the issue is drug trafficking, confrontations with the Border Patrol, assimilation, environmental pollution, or health epidemics, Griest records the echoing testimonies of northern and southern border dwellers. Yet, amidst the harrowing tales of struggle and loss, Griest finds another commonality…transcendence! In both the northern and southern borderlands, residents, artists, and people of faith stand their ground by staging individual and collective battles against the forces that threaten communities and livelihoods. Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands

Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder.

That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matilda, a massive generation starship where the nightmare of slavery persists hundreds of years after humans have fled their dying planet.

At the center of Solomon’s masterful debut is Aster, a young woman trying to figure out why her mother apparently killed herself shortly after giving birth to her 25 years ago. An Unkindness of Ghosts is a powerful story about oppression, racism, gender non-conformity, and the role of trauma in society and peoples’ lives.

The book earned a spot on many best-of-the-year lists, including the Guardian‘s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2017. It also made the shortlist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 2018 Locus Award for First Novel, and the Lambda Literary Award for best science fiction, fantasy or horror novel.

The Matilda is as complex as a planet with social castes and languages that have evolved so much over time that people who live on different floors don’t always understand each other. “Matilda first came to me when I was reading about the last slave ship to come to the Americas,” Solomon says in her New Books interview.

The Matilda’s black and brown citizens live in cramped squalor and endure constant violence at the hands of armed soldiers and the white, wealthy upper-deckers. But Aster refuses to be defined by threats and social controls. A brilliant scientist, she’s learned how to make medicines from plants that she grows herself. Despite having trouble reading social queues, she’s a fearless defender of her dignity and doing what’s right.

“How do you have hope when it’s not just you and your individual life, but it’s all your friends and family and it’s your parents and your grandparents and their parents and back and so forth and it really does seem like you’re trapped?” Solomon asks.

“I was the kind of child who every night, I watched the news and used to cry. I was very, very sensitive. Even as young as 10, I didn’t understand how people just went on in it. And so I think it’s no surprise that … that’s kind of an essential question of the novel.”

Her next book project—which she was embargoed from mentioning during the interview but which she subsequently tweeted about —is inspired by Clipping’s song The Deep “about descendants of enslaved Africans living in the ocean’s deep.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An Unkindness of Ghosts

Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia Press, 2018) describes Skyler Faralan’s travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: a short-fused NGO worker called Sophea; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, an intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place. Stamped will appeal to progressive-minded readers of literary fiction and travel writing, especially those with an interest in Asia or the Asian American experience.

Melody Yunzi Li is an Assistant Professor at University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, an MPhil degree in Translation Studies in the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong, and a BA in English/Translation Studies at Sun Yat-sen University in China. Her research interests include Asian diaspora literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration Studies, translation studies and cultural identities. Her current project focuses on Chinese diasporic literature from the 1960s to the present. She has published in various journals including Pacific Coast Philology, Telos and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel

Who doesn’t remember their first trip to the county fair? The greasy hotdogs and popcorn and cotton candy. The lights and sounds of the seemingly endless games and rides and shows on the midway. But maybe most of all, the sense of wonder inspired by real people who could contort their bodies into incredible shapes with ease, and show off amazing feats of agility and strength you never thought possible. Feats that made you think, “How on earth did they do that?”

The trick, it turns out, is that there is no trick. Most of what you see, you can believe. This is the first of many sideshow axioms writer Tessa Fontaine learned when she left the life she knew to join the circus in 2013. Now, in her debut book of nonfiction, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts (FSG, 2018), Fontaine’s keen descriptive powers offer a revealing glimpse into the secret world of the United States’ last traditional traveling sideshow. On the road, Fontaine met all kinds of personalities—from carnies to showpeople—who taught her about wonder, and how to inspire it through her performances as a fire breather, a sword swallower, a snake charmer, and so much more.

Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Tessa Fontaine to hear more about The Electric Woman and her incredible journey traveling with the World of Wonders sideshow.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

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Electric Woman: A Memoir In Death-Defying Acts

Margo Catts’ new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA, discovers she’s pregnant. She considers it to be just one more mistake in a lifetime of screw-ups. Her mother abandoned her after she accidentally set a deadly fire as a child, and she was raised by her cold distant father. She felt loved only when visiting her grandmother, who divides her time between the town of Leadville, Colorado, and a rustic mountain cabin in an old abandoned mining town. When her grandmother writes to ask Elena to come and babysit for two children whose mother is “gone,” Elena accepts with hopes that she can put off making any real decisions about her future. Through her grandmother’s stories, Elena starts to understand her father’s remoteness, and as the children she babysits become more attached to her, she starts to understand herself. “It seems a person is never finished learning about sorrow…” Elena’s internal conflicts, metaphysical musings, and reflections on family and forgiveness are all part of the stunning landscape. Then the two children go missing, and Elena is forced to confront the guilt that has followed her since childhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Among the Lesser Gods: A Novel

Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South Carolina, but Douglas finds it abhorrent. He has promised his father-in-law to care for the family business, so he can’t simply pack up and go home. Instead he becomes involved in the nascent abolition movement, using his inherited fleet and his manumitted laborers to intercept illegal slave traders on the high seas.

But when his estate goes up in flames, killing his wife and young daughter, Douglas is shattered. Can any good he might do by fighting the entrenched slave culture of the US South justify the death of his loved ones? He retreats into his shell until, three years later, the arrival of Abigail Milton, another English refugee, summons him back to society.

Abigail, aged seventeen, has a difficult past of her own. Her family has fallen from a comfortable middle-class existence to a life of poverty, and the wealthy uncle who helps them keep food on the table expects a price in return: Abby’s virtue. She doesn’t dare share the truth of her uncle’s advances: he’s promised to cut off all support if she tells. But the invitation to live as Douglas’s ward offers a perfect solution, even after she arrives in Charleston and realizes that not all is as it seems. Especially where Douglas is concerned …

In Trouble the Water (SparkPress, 2018), Jacqueline Friedland explores the complex society of the antebellum South, the influence and consequences of slavery, and the contributions of those who strove to help its victims escape through the Underground Railroad and ultimately to end the system altogether.

C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Trouble the Water: A Novel

For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab.

What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s police force. The life circumstances that lead Dillal to surrender part of his body is as much a part of the story as the brutal mass murder that he must solve with his new cybernetic implants.

While cyborgs are often depicted as superior to ordinary humans, Richardson doesn’t hesitate to describe the dark side of a surgery that reconfigures a significant part of a person’s body. Not only are many people repulsed when they see Dillal, but the surgery is still fresh, and he grapples with fatigue, infection, leaks, and other menacing complications.

His condition “is considerably less than optimal because that’s an aspect of a highly intrusive body change,” Richardson says. She herself had undergone major surgery while working on the book. “People who’ve never been through a major surgery are unaware of how long you continue to be less than normal.”

Richardson was inspired by a real-life crime, the Wah Mee massacre, which occurred in Seattle in 1983, transferring real-life ethnic tensions and police corruption to a new planet with its own culture and ethnic strife.

Blood Orbit represents a change of genre for Richardson, who previously authored the Greywalker paranormal detective novels as Kat Richardson. She switched from “Kat” to the gender-neutral “K.R.” to escape the misperception that “women writing urban fantasy actually write paranormal romance.”

“It was a perception I’ve been fighting since the very first book because the Greywalker novels are not particularly romantic. They’re detective noir in urban fantasy clothes. I’ve always been a detective writer, and fighting that fight every book for nine books was really disheartening.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Blood Orbit (Gattis File)

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any hour of the day (“I got next”); there’s a lot of beer to be drunk and, um, other things to be ingested (some of which will, so you are told, “expand your mind” or something like that); and you don’t really have to work (other than the job you get to raise the money to buy the aforementioned beer). Oh, and the dining hall (a really magical place) always had soft serve!

It never occurred to me to leave this youthful paradise of irresponsibility. So I didn’t; I went to graduate school where I continued to live that indolent life for nearly another decade. And even when I was done there and got my first “job”, I continued to live more or less like I did in college well into my 30s, a kind of over-educated man-child.

Eventually, though, there was a reckoning. And it was rough. I’ll spare you the sad, painful details.

Happily for Bob Brody and his lovely family, his reckoning came sooner and he handled it with much more grace that I did. But our stories of growing up are of an American-male piece. He tells his tale in a wonderful series of vignettes in his new memoir Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age (Heliotrope Books, 2017). They are at moments funny, touching, instructive, wise and always heartfelt. And (spoiler alert!) the entire set ends well, because Bob grows up to be a very responsible family man. And a great writer to boot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age

Cat Rambo‘s Hearts of Tabat (WordFire Press, 2018) is rich in emotions and description, though it revolves around a murder mystery as well. We experience the imaginary port city of Tabat through the eyes of four narrators, two merchants and two siblings from a poor household. Adelina, the secret publisher of a newspaper, and Sebastiano, a member of the Mages’ College who handles trade negotiations, both come from Merchant families with high expectations. Neither Sebastiano’s critical father, or Adelina’s overbearing mother, are pleased with the careers their offspring have chosen. Into their lives come two people from a very different background, Eloquence and his sister Obedience. Like most of the poor, they worship at the Moon Temples, and therefore receive names based on personality traits. While Eloquence, who has the good fortune to become a fresh-water pilot, does have a gift with words, Obedience doesn’t fit her name. She struggles to escape the miserable apprenticeship the Temple finds for her.

As the novel begins, Adelina is still obsessed with her former lover, the famous female gladiator, Bella Canto. When she meets the charming Eloquence, it seems she might finally move on. But will Eloquence’s rigid ideas about his younger sister, Obedience, ruin their relationship?

Though Hearts of Tabat has romantic elements, it offers suspense against a background of political unrest. The book plays out against a richly developed world, one in which mythical animals serve mankind and fuel machines. Revolutionary ideas about the magical beasts are developing; the murders that take place serve as a testament to that. Far from being mere “beasts”, the wonderful magical creatures that populate Cat Rambo’s world have feelings and needs that human society will ignore at its peril.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hearts of Tabat (The Tabat Quartet)

In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The Verdun Affair: A Novel (Scribner, 2018). It’s protagonist is Tom, an American living in France after World War I, having served as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He has the macabre task of gathering bones from the battlefield at Verdun, in preparation for the construction of ossuary there. Families come from all over France, looking for news, or perhaps the remains, of loved ones reported missing or dead during the war. One such pilgrim is Sarah, also American, looking for her husband, Lee, whom she is convinced still lives.

You can learn more about the story in the interview (or go read the book!), which also details some of the remarkable historical research that Dybek conducted as he wrote. The sense of global catastrophe, the losses of grieving families, the search for meaning, the efforts to rebuild, all conjure the atmosphere of postwar Europe. Dybek’s descriptions of Verdun, of the battles on the Isonzo and in the Dolomites, the fascist violence in Italy reflect that careful research and teach the history of the period with greater impact than all but the best works of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Verdun Affair: A Novel

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.”

Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s Shanghai during wartime. Hull’s translation is a sensitive and humane rendering of characters that are by turns laughable and heartbreaking, coming together in a story about what it is to be a hero – or just to be a functional human being – in times of personal and social upheaval. As you’ll hear me say on the podcast, I actually put down the most recent climactic issues of the Saga comic book because the story here was so gripping. That’s to say: this is not just going to be a great book to teach and learn with. It’s also a gripping and fascinatingly rendered story in its own right. In this podcast, Hull and I continued some of the conversation about translation and its joys and challenges that we started in our previous podcast about his translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings, and I recommend checking that one out as well!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Pidgin Warrior

Where My Body Ends and the World Begins (Allium Press, 2017) imagines what it might have been like for one of the survivors of a tragic fire that took place on December 1, 1958, in a Catholic school on Chicago’s west side. The fire broke out just before the end of the day at Our Lady of the Angels School and went unnoticed for a critical amount of time. Ninety-two children and three nuns were killed. The ‘Angels’ fire is still considered to be one of Chicago’s most horrendous tragedies.

In his book, author Tony Romano imagines twenty-year old Anthony Lazzaro, who along with his best friend Maryann, survived the fire. The story opens with Anthony, suffering from an unnamed mental illness. He deliberately breaks his own leg, which had started to feel foreign to his body. Lipschultz, the retired cop who lives next door, thinks Anthony may have set the fire and that his strange behavior is just another sign of his guilt. Since the fire, Anthony’s family has fallen apart – his father disappears, and his mother takes a job far from home. In this beautifully-written, sensitive novel, Tony Romano considers how trauma can be overcome through the love of family and community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Where My Body Ends and the World Begins

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries.

Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship.

An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India.

Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How I Became a Tree

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes:

“I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.”

Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together.

And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Litany for the Long Moment

Sharon Solwitz‘s novel, Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel & Grau, 2017), is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide, during the summer before their senior year of high school, to make a suicide pact. The four friends are all struggling with something beyond normal adolescent angst–Kay is tormented by her weight and the new stepfamily she acquired after her mother’s death; CJ hides who he really is even from the friends; Saint struggles not to destroy everyone around him; and Vera is horrified by a shameful secret. The two weeks of the pact take place during the tumultuous summer of 1968. As the ground shifts beneath them, the four friends confront who they are and what the world means to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Once, in Lourdes: A Novel

The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings?

While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations.

One of the most engaging A.I.s in recent years is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, a people-averse, soap-opera loving, snark-spewing and highly efficient killing machine. The first book in Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, earned numerous honors this year, including Nebula and Locus awards. It also made the short list for the Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards. The second and third books—Artificial Condition, which came out in May, and Rogue Protocol, out next week on Aug. 7—are equally engaging, taking Murderbot on a journey of self discovery that one hopes will eventually allow it a chance to retire from the business of saving human lives and spend its days watching its beloved “entertainment media” in peace.

“Does it have a place in this world?” is the question at the back of its mind, Wells says. “It can’t go back to its corporate owner, which would destroy or erase it for going rogue; and it’s not sure it wants to go to a human who is offering it a home because it would still essentially be property.”

Despite its name, Murderbot is only murderous when work requires it. As it says on the first page of All Systems Red, “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Thus, even though it could seek revenge against its human taskmasters, try to amass power or wreak havoc (since it has “borked” the programs that restrain its behavior), it voluntarily elects to continue performing the function for which it was designed—providing security to “small soft” humans. Why it so often says “yes” to a dangerous assignment when it really wants to hide in a closet is as much a mystery to it as our motivations are to us. Perhaps all forms of “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise, could benefit from a few sessions on an analyst’s couch.

Wells has incorporated aspects of herself in Murderbot, a fact that resonates with readers. “I have some problems with anxiety and OCD and I’ve put those into the character… and one of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who also have bad anxiety and have other issues say that they saw themselves in this character and that was heartwarming to me.”

The final book in the series of novellas, Exit Strategy, is due out in October.

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries

“What should be wild” is really asking who should be wild? Simultaneously a plea against the domestication of women, a unique fairy tale, and impressive literary fiction, this novel explores the taming of women through the experiences of the modern Maisie and some of her female ancestors, who sought shelter in a magical forest.

Maisie Cothay, whose story unfolds in the present, is frightened of her unique gift. Just her touch will take life, but also return it. Though she can revive those she kills, her somewhat inept, father confines her to the grounds, spending their time together in devising meaningless tests, which bring neither of them much insight. In the first few chapters, Maisie is presented like an artifact in a contemporary version of a medieval tower, with a loving jailor.

Deep in the forest, there is another version of Maisie, a powerful supernatural girl with black eyes, who is slowly waking while Maisie reaches the brink of womanhood. The persecuted Blakely women who have fled to this forest throughout the centuries gather around the new arrival, both hoping, and fearing change.

And they should fear. For while Maisie is civilized and complaint, the black-eyed girl in the forest is a creature of appetite, feral and without compassion. She metes out death. But is she evil? Read closely, and ponder. Julia Fine‘s What Should be Wild (Harper, 2018) is a novel well suited for writing that thoughtful English paper.

Should you find the symbolism and the themes too strenuous, you can always luxuriate in the beautifully writing. Here, for instance, Lucy, one of the Blakely women, finds shelter in the woods. “The usual sounds of the forest—plaintive owls, scuttling wood mice, the papery screech and flutter of young bats—have been usurped by the lullaby of ancient temperate trees, a sentient quiet, a deep and subtle whisper.” There’s even a touch of horror for those who like to be a little scared.

Truly a joy to read, Fine’s bold debut has me anticipating her future work.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor.

Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any other book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What Should Be Wild: A Novel

Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City (Ecco, 2018), in a teeming metropolis full of people who are grateful to be there.

The fictional metropolis is Qaanaak, which floats in arctic waters like a massive 8-armed asterisk and serves as a refuge for those fleeing climate change, resource scarcity and war.

Like Miller’s hometown of New York City, the book is packed with diverse characters, including Fill, a privileged gay man suffering from a new horrifying disease; Kaev, a fighter who’s paid to lose fights; Ankit, chief of staff to a hack politician; and Soq, a gender-fluid messenger with ambitions of becoming a crime boss like the one he works for. They are strangers to each other until a mysterious woman, on a mission of rescue and revenge, rides into town on the back of a killer whale. This woman–an “orcamancer”–brings them close, revealing secret ties that had bound them together all along.

Miller uses his fiction to imagine solutions to problems he grapples with in his job as a community organizer and advocate for the homeless. “I wanted to imagine a city where many of the sort of problematic things that have been the prime directives of urban policy over the last 30 years in cities like New York were no longer true. Maybe you don’t need a racist police force in order to have a functional city; maybe you don’t need to make homeless people’s lives miserable as your prime mandate for how architecture and public space happen.”

Miller calls Blackfish City “a hopeful dystopia.”

“Yes, many of the things we love will be destroyed; yes, maybe there will be unspeakable horror in our future as a result of climate change or social injustice, but that doesn’t mean humanity is going to cease…. I wanted to imagine a dramatically transformed world that is still recognizably human and where things like love, and family and community and noodles can save us.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Blackfish City: A Novel

“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018). The house is Saratoga, a colonial-era estate in Virginia that is at once a joy and a burden to the family that lives there, the Cookes. In particular, it determines the life trajectory of Diana Cooke, the eighteen-year-old heiress charged with saving her family and her home from poverty right after World War I. Diana reluctantly embraces her destiny, agreeing to marry Captain Copperton, a wealthy but uncouth man who doesn’t hesitate to remind the Cookes at every turn that he owns not only the house but them, in principle if not in fact.

But Copperton has one virtue in addition to his entrepreneurial abilities: he is a good father to the son he has with Diana. And it is, in the end, their son who unwittingly sets off the series of events that leaves Saratoga in ashes. Along the way, a cast of delightfully realized and often eccentric characters interact in sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising ways against the backdrop of Saratoga and its ever changing, ever inspiring river.

C. P. Lesley is the author of eight novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Dying of the Light: A Novel

In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about Detroit music by a diverse group of music scholars, journalists, and musicians. Instead of relying on familiar narratives about Motown and rock and roll, this anthology engages a vast array of musical genres and sub-genres, while sharing the oft-surprising hidden histories of artists, institutions, and communities integral to Detroit’s unique sound. Heaven Was Detroit begins with former California Poet Laureate Al Young’s meditation on his childhood obsession with early to mid-20th-century Detroit jazz and ends with an essay by Jarrett Koral about Jett Plastic Recordings, the 21st-century vinyl-only record label he runs out of his parents’ basement. In between are a mix of new and classic essays about Detroit jazz, blues, pre-Motown soul, Motown, rock, hip-hop, techno, and more.

Kimberly Mack holds a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, and she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her book, Fade to Black: Blues Music and the Art of Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White, is under contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. She is also a music journalist who has written articles and reviews for national and international publications, including Music Connection, Village Voice, Relix, PopMatters, and Hot Press.

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Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Painted Turtle)

If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.” Then again, who needs Tolstoy when you have Daryl Gregory, whose masterful family drama is tied together with telekinesis, astral traveling, and genuine mindreading magic.

A Nebula Award finalist and an NPR Best Book for 2017, Spoonbenders tells the story of the one-time Amazing Telemachus Family, who have struggled to make ends meet ever since they were exposed as frauds on national TV. Only they really aren’t frauds. Most of them have true psychic gifts. The problem is that psychic gifts aren’t all that they’re cracked up to be.

As Gregory explains, “I was trying to figure out why if people have these powers … wouldn’t they just become rulers of the world? Why wouldn’t they become rich and famous, and I was struck by the rationale that Uri Geller always used, which is ‘there are so many things that can reach out and interfere with your powers that only a faker can make his powers work all the time.’”

Frankie Telemachus, whose get-rich-quick schemes have left him in debt to the mob, can move objects with his mind, but his ability never comes when he needs it. His sister, Irene, a grocery store cashier, is a human lie detector, which makes it impossible to have intimate relationships. And their brother, Buddy, is so worried about the looming end of the world (which he replays over and over again in his clairvoyant mind) that he devotes every waking moment to fretful, obsessive planning to prevent it.

The story is told from five alternating points of view, revealing a cascade of secrets that explain the siblings’ inability to lead fulfilling lives while laying a foundation for their future salvation.

Among the inspirations for the Spoonbenders is the U.S. Army’s Stargate Project, launched in 1978 to study the potential military uses of psychic phenomena. “I was intrigued by the idea that the government was buying into this… Up until 1995, we were throwing millions of dollars into it,” Gregory says. The book, in fact, is set in 1995, when a CIA agent hopes to save the program by recruiting Irene’s adolescent son, Matty, who has just discovered he can astral travel.

Gregory himself doesn’t believe in psychic powers. “I’m a skeptic but I do like it in science fiction.” The only magic he believes in is that which a writer produces from his imagination. “A reader with a writer is making the same kind of contract as an audience with a magician. You know that magician is trying to fool you; you want them to fool you… And that’s what I’m really interested in. You know I’m going to tell you a story… but hopefully you’re willing to go along.”

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

If you’ve read the news or been on the internet at all this year, you’ve probably come across the hashtag #MeToo, the rallying cry of a movement aimed at calling out the harassment and abuse men in positions of power have perpetuated against mostly silent women for years without consequence. But what began as a takedown of some of the most powerful abusers in our country—the Bill Cosbys and Harvey Weinsteins—has lately been moving into domestic territory, as women are holding more and more of the abusive men in their lives publicly accountable for the hurt they’ve caused.

Social attitudes are changing, with champions of the #MeToo movement raising awareness about the prevalence of domestic violence in American households. According to The National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men will be the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. Statistically, an estimated 70% of this violence will go unreported. The numbers are, frankly, staggering, and part of the reason why writer Kelly Sundberg has chosen to tell her story in a new book, Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Abuse and Survival (Harper, 2018).

Adapted from her 2014 viral essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” Goodbye, Sweet Girl follows Sundberg as she recounts the most difficult years of marriage to her abuser, and the courage it took for her to make the final leap to safety.

Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival

Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of “extra” men who will never find spouses.

The country is China, which in 1979 adopted its one-child policy in the hope of reducing its population of 940 million to around 700 million. The plan was intended to last only one generation, but it endured until 2015. The degree to which the policy has contributed to a drop in China’s fertility rate is an open question, since other factors (like rapid economic development) are also at play. But one consequence of the policy is clear: China now has millions more men than women.

An Excess Male made the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award Honor List and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. It also earned spots on a number of “best of” lists, including Barnes and Noble’s and the Washington Post’s lists of the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy novels of 2017.

The idea for An Excess Male came to King, a native of Taiwan, five years ago after she read a newspaper article about the gender imbalance. “The statistics say that by 2030, a quarter of the men over the age of 35 will not be able to find a wife,” King says in her New Books interview. But the problem impacts more than marriage; it also affects social order. “When you have 30 million men at the prime of their lives, testosterone-fueled, you have a society that’s more prone to aggression and violence and crime, or, if you go to the other end, dissatisfaction or possibly depression. It’s a very, very volatile mix.”

In An Excess Male, the government solves the problem by allowing (and incentivizing) polyandry. “What if a woman could marry more than one husband? I thought that would be a really provocative way to talk about how China, in favoring their sons, actually achieved the opposite and a very devastating effect,” King says.

The story is told through the eyes of the members of the family of Wu May-Ling, a woman with two husbands, and their suitor, Lee Wei-Guo, who aspires to be her third. One might expect such a complicated courtship to collapse of its own weight, but Wei-Guo’s determination to find love allows him to develop genuine affection for all three potential mates. Whether these bonds are mutual, however, becomes the crucial question when two characters, for different reasons, become enemies of the state and Wei-Guo’s would-be spouses must risk their lives to help each other as only a family can.

In her conversation with Rob Wolf, King discusses, among other things, the historical precedents for polyandry, China’s repressive policies toward homosexuality, and the role a writing group played in the shaping of her novel.

Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

An Excess Male: A Novel

What is it really like to have a family member with serious mental illness? Sandra Allen’s unique book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia (Scribner, 2018), addresses this question. In the book, a hybrid between memoir and third-person narrative, Sandra publishes excerpts from her schizophrenic uncle’s autobiography interlaced with her own narrative about her uncle and his life. This poignant combination offers readers a rare, real-life glimpse into the mind and heart of a person with schizophrenia and what it feels like to be the relative of such a person. In our interview, Sandra candidly talks about what it was like to publish her uncle’s memoir, how her conception of him evolved, and the significant lessons she learned about living with schizophrenia. This book and our interview will speak to those who deal with, or have a loved one with, serious mental illness, inspiring compassion and hope where in an area where it is often lacking.

Sandra Allen is a nonfiction writer based in the Catskills and former BuzzFeed News features editor. Her essays and features stories have been published by BuzzFeed News, CNN Opinion, and Pop-Up Magazine. She also founded and ran the online-only literary quarterly Wag’s Revue. Her work focuses on the past, present, and future of mental healthcare in America and on constructs of normalcy, including psychiatric disability and gender.

Eugenio Duarte, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City and Miami. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in gender and sexuality, eating and body image problems, and relationship issues. He is a graduate of the psychoanalytic training program at William Alanson White Institute, where he chairs their monthly LGBTQ Study Group. He is also a contributing author to the book Introduction to Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Defining Terms and Building Bridges (2018, Routledge).

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A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts.

Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with both internal and external conflicts earned Jade City nominations for the Nebula and Locus Awards. The book is her first written for adults. (Her previous books, Exo and Zeroboxer, were written for young adults and both were shortlisted for the Andre Norton Award).

Set in the fictional post-colonial nation of Kekon, Jade City (Orbit, 2017) introduces readers to an economic system governed by family-run clans, where power is obtained through conventional assets, such as the loyalty of businesses and politicians, as well as through use of the gemstone jade. Jade’s special powers include strength, agility and the ability to deflect weapons. But to harness these powers, a Green Bone warrior needs both an innate affinity for jade and extensive training.

Lee says jade was “the natural choice” for a magic substance. “In Eastern culture, jade is considered more valuable than any other substance. It’s been referred to as the stone of heaven.” It was also a natural choice for Lee—who has black belts in karate and kung fu—to require Green Bones to undergo years of practice before they’re allowed to use jade on the streets.

“One of the things I find frustrating/annoying about some fantasy stories is this idea that the magic is just given and you are just born with it, or you … get the magic sword and now you have the power. As any martial artist knows, achieving a level of proficiency involves a long arduous amount of discipline and schooling.”

In her New Books interview, Lee discusses her characters’ struggles with tradition and the challenge of balancing their personal desires with familial responsibilities. She also offers insight into the writing process—specifically, how she managed to polish an epic tale told from multiple viewpoints into a fast-moving page-turner.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jade City (The Green Bone Saga, 1)

Most of us hear the Cinderella story in childhood: a mean stepmother favors her own daughters and controls her hapless husband, turning the sweet and innocent Cinderella into a scullery maid and refusing to let her attend the royal ball, only to be thwarted by a fairy godmother and Cinderella’s own beauty and charm. Cinderella marries Prince Charming and lives happily ever after, while the stepmother and stepsisters get their just deserts.

But Danielle Teller has a different take on this familiar story. In All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother (William Morrow, 2018), her heroine, Agnes, starts life as a serf and through a combination of hard work, good luck, and a stubborn refusal to break under adversity works her way up to the position of lady of the manor. There she finds herself dealing with a somewhat difficult girl named Ella, whose life of privilege so far exceeds that of Agnes and her two beloved daughters that the usual difficulties attending the stepmother/stepchild relationship are magnified by mutual incomprehension.

With a delightfully playful approach, Danielle Teller recasts the magical elements of the fairy tale and weaves them into a much richer exploration of social contrasts and constraints of the medieval world, especially as those boundaries affected women. And as becomes clear from the opening page, Prince Charming may not have been such a catch after all….

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions(The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella's Stepmother

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and begin the long the often perilous road to becoming a full-time working musician. The book is part memoir, part music criticism, part social history, and a vivid tale of life lived on the periphery of a vibrant era in British cultural history.

Originally a musician and songwriter, James Cook released two albums with his band Flamingoes: the acclaimed “Plastic Jewels” in 1995 and “Street Noise Invades the House” in 2007. Present from the start of the Britpop boom, The Flamingoes toured the UK and Europe extensively, selling 20,000 records worldwide. In 2009, one of James’ short stories was featured in the collection Vagabond Holes alongside work by Nick Cave and ManBooker winner D. B. C . Pierre. James has written about music for The Guardian and Litromagazine among others, and is currently working on a new book. He lives in London.

Stephen Lee Naish is a writer, independent researcher, and cultural critic. Originally from Leicester, UK, he now resides in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s

The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to that hypothetical moment when an artificial superintelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to runaway—and unpredictable—advances in technology.

Among the biggest unknowns is whether or not the superintelligence will turn out to be benign of malevolent.

“All sorts of visions arise, one of which might be the total annihilation of humanity by [artificial intelligences] and robots. Another might be that we all get to live forever as the robots and A.I.s overcome aging and help us launch into space,” Douglas Lain says.

To some, Lain’s vision of the singularity in Bash Bash Revolution (Night Shade Books, 2018) might sound benign. It involves an idealistic government scientist, who designs an artificial intelligence named Bucky to prevent the apocalypse; in short order, Bucky decides the best way to do so is by enticing people to play augmented-reality video games.

But things turn dark when people abandon their ordinary lives—including jobs and families—to don virtual-reality headsets and become their favorite characters in retro video and arcade games.

Told through the social media posts of the son of Bucky’s inventor, Bash Bash Revolution is set in today’s America, with Donald Trump serving as Bucky’s most urgent problem. “It’s a race between Trump’s stupidity and the A.I.’s ability to transform society to make Trump irrelevant. That was certainly how [Bucky’s inventor] conceived of it. His task was to help the A.I save us from ourselves and save us from Trump,” Lain says.

Lain was a guest on New Books in Science Fiction in 2016 to talk about After the Saucers Landed, which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. He is also the publisher of Zero Books, which specializes in books about philosophy and political theory.

A student of philosophy, Lain was partially inspired to write Bash Bash Revolution by philosopher and Marxist Guy Debord who argued in The Society of the Spectacle that images had become the ultimate commodity. “I thought ‘What if you really took that to heart?’” Lain says. “This concept of the singularity and being absorbed into virtual reality and video games and augmented video games is what I came up with—what the society of the spectacle would really be.”

Another inspiration for the book was his frustration with always losing to his son at video games. “I wanted to tell a story about a middle-aged father who could beat his son at Super Smash Bros. Melee,” he says.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bash Bash Revolution

When Annie Rushton heads west to keep house for her older brother on his Montana homestead, she expects to leave marriage and motherhood behind her. After all, the husband she walked out on at twenty, after the birth of their daughter sent her into a spiral of panic and depression, has divorced her and forbidden contact with their baby, citing fears for his own and the child’s safety. In 1911, a record like that should keep most men at bay.

Adam Fielding also has no interest in marriage, but he’s drawn to Annie from the start, despite the frequent clashes of will between them. When her older brother sells them the homestead and skips town, Annie and Adam settle into a partnership that is as economically successful as it is romantic. But fate intervenes to prevent them from having a child, and with each disaster the return of Annie’s depression drives her farther apart from the husband she loves. In a world that understands psychological conditions as lapses in morality, the judgment passed on Annie is harsh and unyielding. Yet somehow she manages to hold on to hope.

Ellen Notbohm’s thought-provoking and beautifully written debut novel, The River by Starlight (She Writes Press, 2018), dives into the depths of family life and individual psychosis and uncovers a cast of complex and compelling characters that will keep you entranced to the last page.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The River by Starlight: A Novel

Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti‘s Low-Fat Love Stories (Sense Publishers, 2017) is a collection of short stories and artistic portraits focusing on women’s dissatisfying relationships. What makes these stories different from conventional fictions is that all the stories are based on extensive interviews with women of different ages and from different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds across the United States. In the book, readers will read extremely candid and moving personal stories, identity struggles, and painstaking self-reflection. As a product of art-based research, the book also critically interrogates how popular culture shapes women’s self-perception, influences their understanding of romantic relationship, and eventually contributes to their sufferings of low self-esteem, depression, or anxiety. A methodological conversation and an interview guide are attached at the end of the book to reflect on the rigorous research that the authors have conducted.

The book is very versatile in the sense that it will attract not only social science researchers but also general audience. In addition, the authors provide several innovative approaches to engage with the stories and encourage course instructors from various social science disciplines to use this book as teaching material.

Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitative research methodology, youth culture, identity formation, and comparative sociological and educational studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript studying the coming of age experience of rural Chinese youth during and right after the Cultural Revolution.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Low-Fat Love Stories (Social Fictions Series)

Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new productivity pill, corporate bosses hire a team of assassins to silence her.

Annalee Newitz’s novel Autonomous (Tor, 2017) isn’t only a fast-paced cat-and-mouse story. It’s also an exploration of the rapaciousness of capitalism and its ability to turn everything, even freedom, into a commodity.

Her first novel, Autonomous has been widely acclaimed, receiving Nebula and Lambda Literary award nominations. “I’ve written a lot about patents and how they affect innovation and how companies use patents to screw customers over,” Newitz, a journalist and founder of io9, says in her New Books interview with Rob Wolf. In Autonomous, she highlights how “something dry and wonky like patent law has a life or death hold over us.”

Newitz also turns the idea of robot rebellion on its head. “I wanted to tweak this idea that is such a big cliché in science fiction about a society that builds a bunch of robots to be their slaves, and these slave robots rise up and enslave humanity.” In Autonomous, which is set 150 years in the future, robots and human are in the same boat—both subject to servitude. “As soon as we can quantify something that we’re saying is equivalent to human life—we’re saying these robots are human equivalents—it’s super easy legally and ethically … to put a dollar value on human life.” And when that happens, “everyone will end up being enslaved,” she says.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe.

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Autonomous: A Novel

We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exception of the pitcher, are all visually impaired. Founded by the National Beep Ball Association in 1976, there are now more than 200 teams in the United States alone with interest in the sport growing quickly among players abroad.

For his debut book of creative nonfiction, Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind (Swallow Press, 2018), author David Wanczyk spent over three years interviewing dozens of Beep baseball players, coaches, volunteers, and fans in order to create a living profile of the sport and many of its star athletes.

A diehard baseball fan himself, Wanczyk takes the reader deep into the culture of Beep Ball, traveling across the United States, Taiwan, and the Dominican Republic, to follow teams like the Austin Blackhawks, the Athens Timberwolves, the Indy Thunder, the Boston Renegades and Taiwan Homerun for a chance to hear their stories and share their passion for the sport with the world in one of the first-ever books written on contemporary Beep baseball.

Here to discuss Beep on the New Books Network today, please welcome David Wanczyk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind

Paris has a way of resisting history, absorbing change gradually instead of being transformed by it. The same can be said of Hallie, the protagonist of E.J. Swift’s Paris Adrift (Solaris, 2018), who is compelled by the threat of a future apocalypse to travel through time to key moments in history—and manages to do so without losing herself.

Swift’s novel is both a suspenseful chrono-adventure and a portrait of Hallie, a young British woman running from an unhappy life. When she gets a job in current-day Paris as a waitress at a bar, she makes intense friendships among the staff of hard-drinking ex-pats. She also finds a time portal in the keg room.

Hallie’s brilliance is in her economy of effort. For instance, with a simple suggestion whispered in the ear of architect Paul Abadie, she prevents the construction of Paris’ famous Sacré-Cœur Basilica (and thereby carries out an important leg of her mission). In a delightful twist, the church becomes a massive green windmill, turning into a symbol for an “Occupy Wall Street”-like movement that will give Marine Le Pen’s right-wing nationalist party a run for its money (and require another corrective intervention from Hallie).

It’s easy to imagine that traveling through time would become addictive, and Swift explores that possibility, turning the portal into an organic consciousness that literally seduces Hallie, as similar portals have done with other travelers, literally turning them into disembodied spirits. Paris Adrift becomes not just a race to save humanity but a struggle to save Hallie from the portal’s seductions.

In her conversation with Rob Wolf and Aubrey Fox, Swift discusses, among other things, her personal connection to Paris and the city’s allure, the challenge of making the plot of a time-travel story hold together, the power of small gestures to change history, and some of the authors she admires.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. Aubrey Fox is the author of Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Trial and Error in Criminal Justice Reform: Learning from Failure (Urban Institute Press)

Paris Adrift

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth century, her work was dismissed as derivate and was erased by intellectuals until black feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Hazel Carby undertook the crucial work of recuperating Harper’s writings and highlighting her important contributions to African American literature and history. Koritha Mitchell’s new critical edition of the book–Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted (Broadview Editions, 2018)—makes a timely contribution to the study of black literary and political history by contextualizing Harper’s life and work. In our contemporary moment where black women spearhead international movements for justice and equality such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too, but continue to be erased from public discourse and recognition, Mitchell’s foregrounding of Watkins Harper makes a crucial intervention in redressing the skewed narrative. Mitchell draws on the most recent scholarship and archival discoveries to provide a clearer picture of Watkins Harper and the importance of her novel then and now.

Koritha Mitchell specializes in African American literature, racial violence throughout U.S. literature and contemporary culture, and black drama and performance. She examines how texts, both written and performed, have helped terrorized families and communities survive and thrive. Her study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930 (University of Illinois Press, 2011) won book awards from the American Theatre and Drama Society and from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Her essay “James Baldwin, Performance Theorist, Sings the Blues for Mister Charlie” appears in the March 2012 issue of American Quarterly and her Callaloo journal article “Love in Action” draws parallels between racial violence at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. She recently completed a book manuscript, “From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture.” For the most comprehensive picture of her current projects and activities, please visit Mitchell’s website.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Resistance in the Francophone World, examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Iola Leroy: or, Shadows Uplifted (Broadview Editions)

There is something almost sweetly Victorian about the new fantasy novel, The Sisters Mederos (Angry Robot, 2018), by Patrice Sarath, which concerns two young sisters enduring misfortune. The opening chapters reminded me of the childhood classic, The Little Princess, published in 1905. Yvienne and her magical sister, Tesera, daughters of a once rich trading family, are sent to a school for paupers, when their family is accused by creditors hungry for their downfall. In the traditional of some YA novels, Yvienne and Tesera’s parents are inept and depressed, and their uncle is a foolish lecher, forcing the young girls to shoulder responsibility for each other. Into their miserable lives comes Mathilde, a cheery housekeeper who knows how to do much on a shoestring budget, and is capable of putting Uncle Samwell in his place.

This charming novel avoids disturbing and tragic scenes: the worst that happens is that one heroine is forced to serve some merchants dinner while wearing a maid’s uniform and being mocked. Amorous adventures are discreetly referred to as sparking, without more graphic details. We may have come up with the analogue of the cozy mystery here; a tale gripping enough to keep you reading at night, and hoping for exposure of the villain, but a story that takes place in a familiar and nostalgic setting, even if it is an imaginary one.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Sisters Mederos (Tales of Port Saint Frey)

At six, Esme Wells has never attended school, but she has already learned how to take care of her father: accompany him to the racetrack, load up on hot dogs when asked, and keep an eye open for stray tickets that may turn out to be winning bets. When not watching the horses or accompanying her father to pawnshops to pay for his habit, more than once with his wife’s wedding ring, Esme hangs around the Hollywood back lots where her mother, Dina, seeks a screen test and stardom while dancing in Busby Berkeley musicals.

But Esme has dreams of her own. After her father’s criminal ties take them both to Las Vegas, still little more than a blip on the map, and she makes the acquaintance of the gangster Bugsy Siegel, Esme uses her talents as a performer and her considerable female charms to catapult her into a career as a showgirl, gangster’s moll, and burlesque dancer.

In this amoral universe, where the only unforgivable crime is to steal from the bosses, Esme struggles to find happiness while protecting her father from the consequences of his own shortsightedness. In The Magnificent Esme Wells (Harper, 2018)

Adrienne Sharp’s richly evocative prose pulls us into the sun-drenched, money-hungry world of Hollywood and Las Vegas in the 1930s and 1940s, with all its heroes, villains, and people just trying to get by. The consequences of the resulting clashes of personalities and ambitions will haunt you for days.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Magnificent Esme Wells: A Novel

Rob Wolf interviews Mur Lafferty about Six Wakes (Orbit, 2017), her novel about murdered clones that received nods for this year’s Philip K. Dick and Nebula awards—and, after the interview was recorded, the Hugo Award as well.

Lafferty is no stranger to awards, having won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2013. She has been podcasting since 2004, using the medium to serialize her fiction and host the shows I Should Be Writing and Ditch Diggers, the latter of which was also nominated this year for a Hugo in the Fancast category.

Lafferty talks about cloning laws, the risks of reading an unfinished novel in public, the lessons she learned from Agatha Christie, and the thrill of having her work nominated for science fiction’s most prestigious prizes.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Six Wakes

We all imagine that, when put to the test, we will end up on the right side of history, however we define it. Nowhere is that statement more true than in reference to World War II. But sometimes people end up on the wrong side for reasons outside their control—even on a side they don’t believe in. Such is the fate that confronts Tony Babic, the hero of John Richard Bell‘s debut novel, The Circumstantial Enemy (Endeavour Press, 2017) based on the true story of his father-in-law’s life during the war.

Tony, when we meet him, is a young pilot flying for the Croatian Air Force. His experience of causing one death and witnessing another—that of his commander—has left him eager to find a more peaceful way to exercise his talents. But his country, in an effort to escape both Serbian control and Nazi conquest, has chosen to ally with Germany in return for nominal independence as a puppet state. Tony has little choice but to fly for the Luftwaffe and is soon taking part in the Siege of Leningrad. Meanwhile, his best friend and the woman they both love (the daughter of Tony’s dead commander) become ever more deeply involved in a different epic battle: Josip Broz Tito’s campaign to unify all the Southern Slavic states under a single communist banner.

Tony eventually escapes his service to the Germans only to fall into the hands of the Americans. Soon he’s on his way to a POW camp in Illinois. But circumstances conspire to make him an enemy even there, not least in the eyes of the people he has left behind.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Circumstantial Enemy: An astounding, based-on-true-events WW2 thriller

Rob Wolf interviews Tim Pratt about his Philip K. Dick Award-nominated space opera The Wrong Stars.

Pratt is the author of over 20 novels, picking up a Hugo Award and nominations for the Nebula and many other awards over a productive and varied career. Until now, however, he’s written mostly contemporary fantasies, avoiding science fiction–even though he’s always been a fan of the genre. “I always thought I just wasn’t qualified to write science fiction,” he says. “I felt my grasp of the physics and orbital mechanics and the hard SF elements weren’t good enough.”

But after finishing his Marla Mason urban fantasy series, he was ready for something new–and no longer felt intimidated by the idea of writing science fiction. “I thought, ‘It’s not as if writing science fiction means I have to write utterly plausible, completely grounded, hard science fiction.’ There’s a continuum that at one end has hard SF and at the other end has Star Wars.”

The Wrong Stars is the first book in a planned three-part space opera that reveals Pratt to be a master storyteller. The novel has fascinating characters (including two colleagues who are sewed together into one entity by well-meaning aliens ignorant of human physiology). It’s got a plot of surprising twists that unfolds at a rapid clip. It’s got sufficient threats to the human race to keep the stakes high. It even has romance and humor.

And, of course, The Wrong Stars is full of the kind of mind-bending inventions and concepts that only an advanced alien species–or wildly inventive author–can devise.

“I actually literally made a list when I sat down and started thinking about making a space opera system—what are things I really love in science fiction? I like really interesting weird artificial intelligences. I like bizarre incomprehensible alien artifacts. I like talking squid from outer space. I like wormhole bridges and all the problems that come when you can travel places so quickly that you can violate causality. … I just wrote down all this stuff and I’m going to get most of it in the three books.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

From the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, the Catholic authorities in Spain and its colonies, including Mexico, took a hard line against the Jewish community. Those who would not convert were banished or killed; officially the community did not exist. But in fact, many conversos, as these forced Christians were called, continued to practice their ancient faith in secret. This historical tension between past and prudence forms the background of Claudia H. Long’s “Tendrils of the Inquisition” series, especially the most recent novel, Chains of Silver (Five Directions Press, 2018)

Marcela Leon belongs to one such Crypto-Jewish family. At fourteen, she sees her parents and grandfather dragged off to face the last gasp of the Inquisition in Mexico. Her relatives survive, but at great cost to their dignity and their fortune. To protect Marcela, her family sends her first to a nearby hacienda, then north into exile, where she becomes the housekeeper to a Catholic priest who sympathizes with her plight but is determined to force her into compliance, including what he perceives as her religious deviance. Through his efforts and those of her wealthy uncle, who lives in the same town, Marcela adjusts to her new situation—until a series of crises force her to reconsider both her heritage and the source of her mother’s strength.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Chains of Silver (Tendrils of the Inquisition)

Lean, mean, and a fighting machine. That could describe lovely Jessop, psychologically and physically scarred at the hands of a former Infinity Hunter with the catchy name of Falco Bane. Jessop plots her way into joining the all-male fraternity of the Infinity Hunters, waiting to rescue them at an opportune moment, and then accompanying wounded and noble Kohl back to the Glass Blade, where the Hunters spent their spare time wearing black uniforms, practicing fighting in a place called the Pit, and worrying about Falco, who was once one of them, and is now their worst enemy. Soon Kohl’s hazel-gold eyes and kind manner work on Jessop, who becomes his bed-partner, as well as sparring partner. Or does Jessop have a more sinister motivation?

In her book The Glass Blade (Kensington, 2018), first time author Ryan Wieser keeps us guessing about Jessop, along with Kohl and his mentor.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Glass Blade

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 to today’s routine procedures that controls anxiety, memory formation, pain relief, and more, anesthesia has come a long way. But it remains one of the most extraordinary, unexplored corners of the medical world.

In Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia (W. W. Norton and Company, 2017), Dr. Henry Jay Przybylo—a pediatric anesthesiologist with more than thirty years of experience—delivers an unforgettable account of the procedures, daily dramas, and fundamental mysteries. Przybylo has administered anesthesia more than 30,000 times in his career—erasing consciousness, denying memory, and immobilizing the body, and then reversing all of these effects—on newborn babies, screaming toddlers, sullen teenagers, even a gorilla. With compassion and candor, he weaves his experiences into an intimate exploration of the nature of consciousness, the politics of pain relief, and the wonder of modern medicine.

Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Counting Backwards: A Doctor's Notes on Anesthesia

Hello from Gabrielle at the NBN Fantasy and Adventure channel. This podcast will be about adventure, and what could be more adventurous than traveling to a far-away place thats hard to get to, and even more of a challenge to get around in.

The Germans have another descriptive word for the Anglicized word wanderlust: Fernweh, or the pain of the distant. In this context, I would interpret pain as more of a yearning, an ache. These days, traveling to most places is a relatively painless process, with the availability of the Internet and flights to even remote locations. Centuries ago, it was different. Explorers braved hunger, disease, frostbite or dehydration and hostile natives to fulfill their longing for distant places.

Books about explorers are like epic fantasy adventures without the magic and machinations. Most explorers had to learn from necessity to be team players, though some definitely leaned towards the limelight. A new work by Jo Woolf, The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration (Sandstone Press, 2018), features a varied palette of them, including some women. Amidst portraits of the well-known explorers, such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, Antarctic explorer, and Sir Edmund Hillary, who summited Everest along with Tenzing Norgay, a host of lesser explorers are introduced, such as Dame Freya Madeleine Stark, who explored the Middle East, beginning in 1928 and was still traveling when she was in her eighties.

The Great Horizon was published in association with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, which enabled Jo to use their archival material, including photographs, as well as travel journals and letters. We find out that Borge Ousland always packs an almond cake as a special treat for his solitary explorations of the polar regions. While we read an excerpt of a letter Himalayan explorer and plant collector Frank Kingdon Ward wrote, we can treat ourselves to a photograph of the Tsangpo Gorge that he reached and partially mapped back in 1924. And the photo of Fanny Bullock Workman on the Karakoram Siachen Glacier in 1912, holding a sign for the suffragette movement, is priceless.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration

Born into a world where men vastly outnumber women, Etta is expected to choose between two roles: mother or midwife.

And yet the protagonist of Meg Elison‘s eponymous second novel chooses a third: raider, a job that allows her to roam a sparsely populated Midwest, witnessing the myriad ways people have figured out how to survive.

The Book of Etta is among this year’s nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award, following in the footsteps of its predecessor, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, which earned Elison the Philip K. Dick Award in 2015.

In Midwife, Elison explored the dangers of being female in the aftermath of an apocalyptic illness that killed more women than men and rendered childbirth nearly always fatal.

Etta is set a century later. The midwife is now revered as the founder of Etta’s hometown, Nowhere, and the midwife’s diary is a bible of sorts, the subject of study and interpretation.

Thanks to the midwife’s influence, women wield power in Nowhere. They are the leaders and decision-makers, and family life is organized into Hives, with one woman free to choose multiple partners.

And yet even in a town where women are safe and respected, Etta feels out of place. She is most at ease on the road, where she assumes a male guise, calling herself Eddy. In her lone travels, of course, it is safer to pretend to be a man. But Eddy is more than mere disguise. Over time, Etta realizes that Eddy is a true expression of her identity.

“People like Etta often grow up feeling that the strictures imposed on them because of their assumed gender don’t suit them at all,” Elison explains in her New Books interview. “In Etta, I get to react to a lot of the gender roles that are imposed on women. … and explore what it looks like to pursue your own individual destiny.”

The Book of Etta has many layers. It is an adventure story, as its hero looks for useful relics among the ruins. It is a rescue story, as Etta/Eddy seeks to free women trapped in bondage. And it’s a story about memory and the power of writing, as reflected in the biblical resonance of Elison’s titles.

“I was really drawn to the idea of people without books, people without the ability to print books… People who don’t have books will come to rely on diaries,” Elison says.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

We’ve all participated in the rituals of the dead at some time or another in our lives, going to funerals and wakes, visiting loved ones in cemeteries. Some of us may even have a plan for when we pass away, ourselves. But few of us have considered the myriad of ways we memorialize our deceased, and what compels us to honor and remember our dead in ways we don’t often do for the living.

In his debut essay collection, The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead from Counterpoint Press, author Thomas Mira y Lopez examines how we memorialize those we’ve lost. In the wake of his fathers untimely death, Mira y Lopez navigates a complicated relationship with grief, taking the reader along on a walk through the memorial trees in Central Park, a drive over the Sonoran desert to Alcor’s Cryonics preservation facility, a trek across the ocean to the catacombs under Rome, the lonely canals of Venice, and countless cemeteries.

As with any good book of the dead, Mira y Lopez’s work serves as a kind of Memento Mori, concerned primarily with the living left behind—how we grieve those we’ve lost and come to terms with our own mortality and the inevitability of death.

Here to discuss his collection on the New Books Network today, please welcome Thomas Mira y Lopez.

Zoe Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBN interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiere or head to zoebossiere.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead

In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets.

In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Leni Shilton takes us back to Central Australia of the 1930s to tell the story of Bertha Strehlow, one of very few white women living among Aboriginal people at the time.

In her new collection, The Sky Runs Right Through Us: Poems from the Edge of the Indian Ocean (UWA Publishing, 2018), poet Renee Pettitt-Schipp recounts her time working with asylum seeker and islander students on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an experience that can never be forgotten, even after her return to the Australian mainland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, Rob Wolf interviews Robert J. Sawyer, the author of 23 novels, about his most recent book, Quantum Night (Ace, 2016).

Sawyer is considered, as he puts it, “an optimistic and upbeat science fiction writer.” But you wouldn’t know that from Quantum Night.The book explores the nature of evil, and its conclusion is alarming: the vast majority of humans are either psychopaths, lacking empathy for others, or mindless followers.

Sawyer is one of the rare science fiction authors to earn Nebula, Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial awards, and he deftly juggles multiple plots lines in Quantum Night, everything from his main character’s painful effort to reconstruct lost memories to geopolitical machinations, including the U.S.’s invasion of Canada.

The story focuses on Jim Marchuk, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, and his discovery (which his physicist girlfriend independently confirms) that psychopathy affects two-sevenths of the world’s population—and that it can be diagnosed by taking quantum measurements of the brain. What makes this idea particularly scary, is that Sawyer was inspired by real-life theories from a wide array of disciplines, including the work of psychologists Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, physicist Roger Penrose, anesthesiologist Stuart Hammerof, and philosopher David Chalmers. (Sawyer includes in an afterword a list of over 50 non-fiction books on which he bases the theories in Quantum Night.)

Like the work of Milgram and Zimbardo—who were attempting through now infamous experiments to understand the psychological underpinnings of the Holocaust—Sawyer, too, is trying to understand the origins of evil.

“Could the kind of evil that was Nazi Germany happen again?” Sawyer asks during the interview. “Well there are some signs in some countries… that it is happening again.”

By the time he’d finished writing Quantum Night, Sawyer had come to believe that the story he’d told was pretty close to the way the world actually works, and that humankind consists of “a large number of mindless followers and a very small number of people who are skilled at manipulating them.”

But he insists humanity shouldn’t give up hope. Fighting evil is hard work but good can still prevail. In support of this idea, he cites another expert, Star Trek’s Dr. Leonard McCoy, who famously said: “I found that evil usually triumphs unless good is very, very careful.”

Related link:

—Ursula K. LeGuin’s speech accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 65th National Book Awards on November 19, 2014.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Quantum Night

In Impossible Conversations: Imaginary Interviews with World-Famous Artists (Black Scat Books, 2015), Carla M. Wilson imagined discussions with (you guessed it) world-famous artists. In this book—Curious Impossibilities: Ten Cinematic Riffs (Black Scat Books, 2017)—Wilson applies the same imaginative technique to film. She “talks” to ten renowned directors, including Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and eight others. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Curious Impossibilities: Ten Cinematic Riffs

Valentina (Valka) Koroleva and her cousin Iskra share a dream: to fly in defense of their Soviet motherland against the Nazi forces that have launched a surprise invasion in violation of Hitler’s nonaggression pact with Stalin. So when Valka receives a telegram announcing the formation of all-female fighting and bomber units, the two of them set off for Moscow without hesitation.

The number of applicants far exceeds the slots available, and the competition proves tougher than Valka and her cousin anticipate. But while they do not in the end become elite fighter pilots, they do make the cut for the night bomber unit: Valka as a pilot and Iskra as her navigator. Soon they are flying a shaky biplane constructed of wood and canvas, liable to burst into flames or crash without warning, against the German forces. Meanwhile, Valka’s best friend, Pasha, has been drafted into a ground regiment where he operates a ham radio under harsh conditions. He and Valka exchange regular letters, expressing their different experiences of war.

But fighting for the Soviet Union means coping not only with the enemy but also with Stalin’s paranoia. Iskra’s parents, arrested even before the war, cast a long shadow on her prospects for success despite her willingness to sacrifice her life for her country. Some of Valka’s assigned targets turn out to be people on her own side. Pilots shot down in combat or soldiers captured in an ambush are declared traitors to the state. And she learns that those in authority—or even comrades in arms—are at times the most likely to denounce those suspected of disloyalty, a category that includes insubordination. So although Among the Red Stars is listed as Young Adult, in fact Gwen Katz has written a novel that, because it tackles difficult problems with honesty, will appeal to adults as well. It is also a riveting tale about women in combat, female friendship, and survival against the odds.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Among the Red Stars

Set 50-plus years in the future, Omar El Akkad‘s debut novel American War (Knopf, 2017) has been widely praised, becoming one of those rare books with science fiction themes to make numerous mainstream publications’ Best Books of the Year lists. It was, for example, among the 100 Most Notable Books in The New York Times, the Best Books of 2017 in GQ, and was the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s top pick for Canadian fiction.

El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, grew up in Qatar, eventually moved to Canada, and now lives in Oregon. He has worked as a journalist, covering everything from the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement. He also spent two years covering the terrorism trials of the Toronto 18, which gave him insight into how young minds are radicalized and provided partial inspiration for his depiction of American War’s protagonist, Sarat Chestnut.

We meet Sarat when she’s an appealing, headstrong six-year-old and follow her, via El Akkad’s nuanced writing, as she grows up in a refugee camp, sees her family destroyed, and is groomed to commit acts of terror. Ultimately, she plays a pivotal role in the outcome of the Second American Civil War, and yet, in a reflection of the true-to-life nature of El Akkad’s storytelling, her motives aren’t the black-and-white of Hollywood, but remain murky.

Despite the book’s title, El Akkad tells Rob Wolf that he doesn’t feel he’s writing about America. “To me if was never a book about America but about the universality of revenge… That any of us subjected to the injustice of being on the losing end of war, being on the losing end of violence, break down the same way and become damaged the same way and become wrathful the same way. The book is set in an allegorical America.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

American War: A novel

A modern morality tale lurks under this fast-paced horror novel. Jason Arnopp‘s The Last Days of Jack Sparks (Orbit, 2016) consists of the diary of a fictional character, Jack Sparks, along with a collection of interviews about him. Additional commentary by his surviving brother begins and ends the work.

Jack Sparks is well-known writer and personality, who scoffs at the idea of an afterlife, and would love to disprove hauntings and other supernatural encounters. Now that he’s gotten clean in rehab, he’s ready to concentrate on his new book, Jack Sparks on the Supernatural. Other than his love interest, his red-headed roommate, he’s disinterested in other people, unless he can exploit them in some way.

At least 50% of the information I just wrote turns out to be false. Jack is an unreliable narrator. The events he describes in his journal are framed by Alistair, his brother, who as it turns out, has his own motivation for presenting events a certain way. Let’s just say Jack and Alistair were not close.

Generally, I’m not a fan of horror novels. Despite that, this one kept my interest, with its echoes of Gone Girl. The main character creates a curated version of himself in his journal; in this case, Jack wants badly for us to believe he is cynical and self-confident, a Hunter S. Thompson type journalist on the prowl for people to ridicule. There’s no doubt that Jack is funny, though his cutting remarks are intended to provoke. As it turns out, that deflecting humor shields a deep well of pain, and that’s where the novel really gets interesting.

Denial of our own negative energy means it has to be projected onto something or somewhere. Jack has a great deal of neediness and anger built up behind his facade of arrogance. What happens with those emotions when they’re given free rein leads us to a frightening climax with tragic repercussions for those involved with Jack.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Last Days of Jack Sparks

Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Ziigwan (Spring) to Biboon (Winter), using episodes from her own life as illustrations of the central Anishinaabe concept of mino bimaadiziwin (To live a good life). Educational in the most profound sense, these essays in Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) range back and forth between ceremony and tradition, intergenerational trauma and revitalization, domestic pleasures and feasts, and a life well lived.

James Mackay is Assistant Professor of British and American Studies at European University Cyprus, and is one of the founding editors of the open access Indigenous Studies journal Transmotion. He can be reached at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year

Everyone knows that wild mushrooms can be dangerous, but David Walton in his new novel The Genius Plague (Pyr, 2017) raises the dangers to a new plane.

While victims of an unusual fungal infection enjoy skyrocketing I.Q.s, they also find themselves suddenly willing to sacrifice their own (and others’) lives to protect the Amazon rain forest, raising the possibility that the fungus—a species native to the Amazon—has hijacked their minds to advance its own ends.

In his interview with Rob Wolf, Walton discusses the wonders of fungi, how he finds time to write while juggling his responsibilities as both an engineer and father of seven, how he came to believe in evolution after growing up in a family that considered Darwin’s ideas “silly,” and the importance of shunning dogma.

The Wall Street Journal named The Genius Plague one of the best science fiction books of 2017. Walton’s first book, Terminal Mind, received the Philip K. Dick Award in 2008.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe. He worked for a decade as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. He now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Terminal Mind

The Genius Plague

Today I talked with Angela Davis-Gardner, an award-winning North Carolina-based novelist writing about Japan. Her book Butterfly’s Child (Random House, 2011) depicts the journey of a Japanese American boy Benji, who is plucked from the security of his home in Nagasaki to live with his American father, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, and stepmother, Kate, on their farm in Illinois. When the true that Benji’s true identity as a child born from a liaison between an officer and a geisha surfaces, Benji is set on a journey to uncover the truth about his mother’s tragic death. In this interview, Angela explains the conflicts, love, betrayal and redemption beautifully conceived and portrayed in her book.

Melody Yunzi Li, originally from Canton, China, is currently a visiting assistant professor at Transylvania University. She holds an MPhil in translation from the University of Hong Kong and is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St.Louis. She was also a visiting scholar at Harvard University 2015-2016. Her research areas include Asian American studies, modern Chinese literature, film and culture and diasporic Chinese literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Butterfly's Child: A Novel

When we first meet Thomas Harding in 1968, he is facing what he believes will be his last Christmas and mourning the loss of an unnamed woman who clearly meant a great deal to him. He carries with him bundles of letters, which he plans to re-read on his trip to Paris. The letters sweep us back to the very beginning of World War I, then trace the entire course of the conflict. One of them he has not yet seen.

Most of the correspondence takes place between Thomas and Evie Elliott, the younger sister of his best friend, Will. We see the early hope and idealism of the troops fade as the realities of trench warfare sink in. We watch from the inside the transformation of womens roles in society because of the absence of men. We become caught up in the developing love between Evie and Thomas, the grief suffered by families who lose their loved ones to war, the frustration of being left behind, unable to take part. We revel in the guilty pleasure of riffling through other peoples things, reading words not meant for our eyes.

Other voices fill in circumstances that Evie and Thomas take for granted or have no reason to know. And the drama slowly builds as Armistice Day approaches, and the war that was supposed to end all wars creeps to a close. The letters are vivid and real, each voice distinct. And by the end of Last Christmas in Paris (William Morrow, 2017), Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb have shepherded us along a journey through the tragedy of war and the triumph of survival, the experience of love lost and gained.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and forthcoming in December 2017, The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Last Christmas in Paris: A Novel of World War I

Rob Wolf interviews Becky Chambers, author of the Wayfarer series. The first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Harper Voyager, 2016), was originally self-published then quickly picked up by a traditional publisher, garnering numerous accolades. It was shortlisted for, among other things, the Kitschies, a British Fantasy Award, and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Her second book, A Closed and Common Orbit (Harper Voyager, 2017), was nominated this year for a Hugo for Best Novel and won the Prix Julia Verlanger.

Billed as a space opera, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet does the unexpected: rather than focus on battles or threats to civilization it offers an intimate portrait of the relationships among the nine members of the Wayfarer spacecraft’s multi-species crew. And with A Closed and Common Orbit, Chambers does the unexpected again: rather than follow the Wayfarer’s crew on a new adventure, it focuses on two of the lesser characters from the first book, offering poignant coming-of-age portraits in a far-flung corner of the universe.

In the interview, Chambers discusses how she creates new species and cultures in such convincing detail, why she decided to place humans in the humbling position of being a minor species in the universe, how being gay informs her sensibilities as an author, and the journey the The Long Way took to publication—from Kickstarter campaign to international acclaim.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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A Closed and Common Orbit (Wayfarers, 2)

Silver Hammer, Golden Cross (Pyewacket Press, 2017) is sixth in the series of the Circle of Ceridwen series. It begins by exploring the friendship of two young heirs, Ceric, of Saxon descent and Hrald, of Danish descent. Although the history of their families is complicated, involving revenge killings mandated by honor, the two young men feel close to each other, mainly because of the warm friendship their mothers maintained through various tribulations. This friendship endures, despite the fact that Ceric’s mother now lives with Hrald’s father, on the island of Gotland. Hrald’s father has effectively abandoned his Danish family, after beginning a new family in exile and taking an oath to kill no further men. Ceric wished to marry Hrald’s sister Ashild, both because he cares for her, and because it will allow him and Hrald to strengthen the bond between the two noble houses.

The headstrong Ashild, who emerges as the central character of Silver Hammer, Golden Cross, is conflicted. She likes Ceric well enough, but feels rooted to her family’s land. Marrying into Ceric’s house, which is far-away, would mean rare visits to the place she calls home. While she considers Ceric proposal, another suitor enters to complicate the picture, against the background of a coming war. How Ashild handles this challenge is central to the story, and always believable. Ashild embodies the multicultural lineage of England: though her Danish family has converted to Christianity, she wears her fathers silver hammer, a symbol of the pagan God Thor. At the same time, she treasures the Christian abbey where her grandmother lives as a place of safety for women. Ashild wears the golden cross as well.

Octavia Randolph never strikes a false note historically, and describes objects with the eye of a craftswoman. Her characters are given room to develop as the story unfolds. She refuses to pander to the Game of Thrones crowd. Most of the characters, including Hrald’s absent father, Sidroc, try to act with honor and integrity. It’s a world shadowed by betrayal and war, and the lust for spoils, but not a world without love, companionship, and loyalty. In the end, Ceric, Ashild, and Hrald, like their parents before them, have become the friends many readers would wish for, judging by the popularity of the series.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/.

You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Silver Hammer, Golden Cross: Book Six of The Circle of Ceridwen Saga

In her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Mindy Fried shares her experiences with providing care for her father at the end of his life. With rich stories and memories of her father, the book introduces the reader to Manny “Red” Fried, in addition to Mindy as a daughter as caregiver. The book really focuses on how families can preserve the dignity of older family members as they age, as well as how we can keep older family members active and engaged into their later years. Red’s personal history is important throughout the book—he was a labor organizer and once pursued by the government during the McCarthy era. This historical time influences not only Red’s life and experiences but also that of his family. By combining “activism with acting,” he led a rich life and was interested in being engaged until the end. With friends and family having “Mondays with Manny,” his community was able to provide support and continue to keep his tie to the theatre community. In this book, Fried also provides important insights into her role as a caregiving adult child, a common role for many Americans as their parents age. Fried takes a wide view of her father’s care and provides insights and stories into the assisted living facility in which he lived, as well as the role of a hired caregiver in their lives. Although this book is labeled a memoir, Fried is a sociologist and ties in many important ideas and theories into the book, including activity theory and continuity theory.

This book will be of interest to sociologists in general, but especially those in the area of aging and family caregiving. In addition, adult children currently providing care for a parent may find the book insightful and interesting, along with practitioners in the caregiving sector. The use of theory and a sociological lens throughout the book makes it accessible in many ways, and would be good for a graduate level Sociology class on Aging or Death and Dying.

Sarah E. Patterson is a Sociology post-doc at The University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Caring for Red: A Daughter's Memoir

It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue education. Media has portrayed the scenario in films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds with white teachers symbolizing the great white hope to a class of minority students. Well, Michelle Kuo is not the great white hope, but she becomes hope and maintains hope for young black students in Mississippi Delta, specifically Patrick.

Kuo writes about her journey in the memoir Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship (Random House, 2017). Her story focuses on race, justice and education in the rural south where she taught American History through black literature. Kuo, a Harvard graduate born to Taiwainese parents, wanted to work in a place where she was needed. Thus, she was assigned to an alternative school, which the local administration used as a dumping ground for the so-called “bad kids”—where rabble-rousers who had already been expelled from mainstream schools now given a final chance before being permanently ejected from the public education system. Her memoir navigates the terrain of teacher speaking to students through books and poems they can understand. Reading with Patrick points to a teacher who breaks the rule, choosing favorites. The memoir includes effective teaching tools Kuo used in the classroom. Most importantly, the memoir illustrates humanity when Kuo leaves Helena for a law school but returns after discovering her favorite student, Patrick, has gone to jail.

Michelle Kuo teaches in the History, Law and Society program at the American University of Paris. She and Patrick share the royalties from this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship

If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore or a library, scanning the shelves for some kind of guidance. Books on writing typically fall into two camps: some are more centered on writing as philosophy, a way of life. Less about how to write and more about the author, and their specific writing journey, like Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and Stephen King’s On Writing, which are both fascinating and inspiring, but not necessarily all that helpful if you’re looking for some quick and dirty tips on revising a story. Many other books on writing—I would venture to say even most—act as coaches: they preach writing regimens and keeping daily journals—finding the time and making the space. The strategy with these is often to write as much as you can as quickly as possible, because the goal is to get your foot in the door: to actually sit there and write something.

But what comes after that? You’ve sat and written and maybe you have enough for a novel, or a memoir. The story is all there, but still somethings not quite right, and you cant be sure how to diagnose the problem. The characters don’t relate to one another like real people, the dialogue feels stiff, the sentences just don’t flow the way you’ve seen them do in your favorite Annie Dillard or Stephen King books, and maybe by now the self-doubt is starting to set in, and you’re wondering, am I really cut out for this?

Enter Dinty W. Moore, the longtime editor of the online publication Brevity, a journal of concise literary nonfiction, and the author of numerous books on writing including his latest, called The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir (Ten Speed Press, 2016).

Often, Moore says, when people write their stories, they tend to place the blame for the writings shortcomings on themselves. The Book Doctor, however, believes that whatever is ailing a novel or memoir in progress is not about the writer, it is about the story: how well we understand it, how well we tell it, and how well we enable it to come alive in the reader’s mind. With my cohost Eric LeMay and I today on the New Books Network is Dinty W. Moore, dispeller of the pervasive myth that good writing should be effortless, and a staunch believer that anyone is capable of writing, and, with practice, of writing well.

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The Story Cure: A Book Doctor's Pain-Free Guide to Finishing Your Novel or Memoir

In this episode, Rob Wolf speaks with Stephen Baxter, author of The Massacre of Mankind (Crown, 2017), the alliteratively titled sequel to H. G. Wells‘ alliteratively titled classic, The War of the Worlds.

Baxter is the author of over 20 novels and dozens of short stories. He’s won the John W. Campbell Award, the Philip K. Dick Award twice, and numerous British Science Fiction Association awards.

Few books (science fiction or otherwise) have had as large an impact on the modern imagination as The War of the Worlds. Since it appeared as a serial in a British magazine in 1897, it has been adapted for movies (at least seven times), comics, television, video games and, most famously, in 1938 for a radio drama by Orson Welles that reportedly caused some listeners, who confused fictional news for real, to panic.

In The Massacre of Mankind, Baxter envisions new technologies adapted from salvaged Martian equipment, the takeover of much of Europe by Kaiser Wilhelm, and, of course, the eventual return of the Martians, now vaccinated against the Earth-bound bacteria that vanquished them the first time.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications at a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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The War of the Worlds

The Massacre of Mankind: Sequel to The War of the Worlds

For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors produce their finished products at more or less the same time. In this case, we decided to address the issues addressed by combining two shorter interviews into a single podcast. Both books explore the ramifications of Hitler’s decision to invade France, then attack Britain. Both examine the wartime leadership and postwar political defeat of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both are set in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, between 1938 and 1946. Beyond that, they tell very different stories.

In When It’s Over (She Writes Press, 2017), Barbara Ridley traces the experiences of Lena Kulkova, a young Czech woman who accompanies her socialist boyfriend from Prague to Paris, then follows him to Britain just before the Nazi forces invade the French capital. As Lena copes with life in a new country, itself threatened by war and increasingly suspicious of strangers, she yearns to reconnect with the family she left behind in Czechoslovakia. But only after the war, as socialism strengthens its hold on the British working class and threatens the political career of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, does Lena discover the fate of those she loves.

Wickwythe Hall (Black Opal Books, 2017), focuses on a crucial decision in the summer of 1940. When Hitler invaded France and the Vichy government agreed to collaborate with the Nazis, the British feared that the French navy would be coopted and turned against them. Churchill issued an ultimatum to the French: turn over their fleet, sail it to a distant port, or see it annihilated. When the French, insisting they would not hand over their ships to the Germans, refused to negotiate, the British navy destroyed the fleet at Marseilles, with great loss of life. Through three overlapping and intertwined narratives, Judithe Little reveals the short-term and long-term effects of this decision and the war of which it formed a part, on individual lives.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and forthcoming in December 2017—The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Wickwythe Hall

When It's Over: A Novel

For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors produce their finished products at more or less the same time. In this case, we decided to address the issues addressed by combining two shorter interviews into a single podcast. Both books explore the ramifications of Hitler’s decision to invade France, then attack Britain. Both examine the wartime leadership and postwar political defeat of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both are set in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, between 1938 and 1946. Beyond that, they tell very different stories.

In When It’s Over (She Writes Press, 2017), Barbara Ridley traces the experiences of Lena Kulkova, a young Czech woman who accompanies her socialist boyfriend from Prague to Paris, then follows him to Britain just before the Nazi forces invade the French capital. As Lena copes with life in a new country, itself threatened by war and increasingly suspicious of strangers, she yearns to reconnect with the family she left behind in Czechoslovakia. But only after the war, as socialism strengthens its hold on the British working class and threatens the political career of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, does Lena discover the fate of those she loves.

Wickwythe Hall (Black Opal Books, 2017), focuses on a crucial decision in the summer of 1940. When Hitler invaded France and the Vichy government agreed to collaborate with the Nazis, the British feared that the French navy would be coopted and turned against them. Churchill issued an ultimatum to the French: turn over their fleet, sail it to a distant port, or see it annihilated. When the French, insisting they would not hand over their ships to the Germans, refused to negotiate, the British navy destroyed the fleet at Marseilles, with great loss of life. Through three overlapping and intertwined narratives, Judithe Little reveals the short-term and long-term effects of this decision and the war of which it formed a part, on individual lives.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and—forthcoming in December 2017—The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When It's Over: A Novel

Wickwythe Hall

Since their establishment, the Nebula Awards have proven a trusty guide to what the next generation will consider a classic.

Take for example, the inaugural award for Best Novel, which went to Frank Herbert for Dune in 1965. Dune‘s impact can be measured in countless ways–not only in the loyalty of critics and fans (who have left in excess of half a million ratings on Goodreads) but in the proliferation of sequels, prequels, movies, TV shows, games, and more.

The 2015 Best Novel winner, Naomi Novik (for Uprooted), joins the ranks of science fiction and fantasy’s greatest authors, including Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, William Gibson, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson and many more.

But the Nebulas, voted on by the members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, recognize more than novels. Award categories include stories, poems, and dramatic presentation.

The abundance of categories and nominees posed a challenge for Julie E. Czerneda, the editor of the newly-released Nebula Awards Showcase 2017 (Pyr, 2017), which anthologizes the winners of the 2015 awards. Although Czerneda had free reign to decide what to include in the anthology, she still had to fit everything within a strict word count.

Fortunately, Czerneda knows a thing or two about getting a book to print. As an accomplished anthology editor and author–her ninth and final novel in The Clan Chronicles series, To Guard Against the Dark, is out this month–Czerneda relished the freedom she had as editor of the showcase.

Every editor gets to put their stamp on it. “I’m the first one to put in novel excerpts for all the novels nominated,” Czerneda says.

Another first for the current anthology: the winners in all the major categories are women. In addition to Novik for Best Novel, Alyssa Wong won for Best Short Story, Sarah Pinsker for Best Novelette, Nnedi Okorafor for Best Novella, and Fran Wilde received the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. The Damon Knight Grant Master, which recognizes a distinguished career, was C.J. Cherryh.

This year’s editor, of course, is also a woman. For Czerneda, editing the showcase allowed her to celebrate a field to which she herself has made significant contributions.

The publication of her new book, To Guard Against the Dark, marked to the exact day the launching of her career as a writer in 1987 with the publication of A Thousand Words for Stranger. As it turned out, A Thousand Words became the first book in The Clan Chronicles. “Nine books, 1.6 million words later, I’m finishing it,” Czerneda says. “I like to leave possibilities, but I like to get to a good ending.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

To Guard Against the Dark (Reunification Book 3)

A Thousand Words For Stranger (10th Anniversary Edition) (Trade Pact Universe Book 1)

Uprooted

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

Dune: Deluxe Edition

Pungently sensual, Claude Lalumiere‘s Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (Guernica Editions, 2017), is a carnal carnival ride, circling around the central conceit. There’s a city-state by the name of Venera, a place where an opium-like drug called vermillion grows. Lalumiere’s work is reminiscent of the French poet, Rimbaud, who write in his poem Larme, “What did I draw from the gourd of the wine? Some golden liquor, pale, which causes sweating.”

The novel consists of a collection of stories, linked by people’s experiences of Venera and its inhabitants. The stories are visceral, intense, and tinged with melancholy. Though almost uniformly erotic, the sexual configurations rarely seem based on romance or love, although love is alluded to. Instead there is an almost reflexive instinct in the various protagonists to give themselves over to their appetites. The regular values of a bourgeois society—the accumulation of property, the maintenance of family, the adherence to tradition—are so absent as motivation for any of the drifting travelers, that it’s noticeable. This is indeed a strange tribe, united only by their occult, amorous, and sometimes terrible experiences in Venera or at the hands of Venerans.

An interval piece, describing fantasy writers’ conventions, recalls Hunter S. Thompson, now swallowed into the looking glass all together. Lalumiere can be sardonic about the world of fantasy writers, and their work.

Does writing describe reality, or is it an ephemeral collection of impressions? Through reading about a series of bewildering and erotically charged encounters, we ourselves are challenged to find out the truth about Venera.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/.

You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (12) (Speculative Fiction)

Emilia Bassano loves many things: music, poetry, Latin, herbs. Born to a family of Italian musicians living in sixteenth-century London, Emilia benefits from early fostering in the household of a countess, where she acquires a love of books along with a top-flight education. A terrible assault leaves Emilia convinced she can never marry, and she becomes the mistress of a much older nobleman—Lord Hunsdon, the son of Mary Boleyn and King Henry VIII. Lord Hunsdon offers security, comfort, love, and protection from being dubbed a “masterless maid,” an illegal status in Elizabethan England. Emilia repays him with affection and respect, but it is when she meets the poet and playwright William Shakespeare that she discovers her passion: not only for the poet but for poetry itself.

In Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer (She Writes Press, 2017), Charlene Ball builds on the true story of a remarkable woman, one of Europe’s early feminists as well as the possible model for the “Dark Lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets—reimagining and enhancing Emilia’s biography with her own copious knowledge of the period and the literature. The result is a fascinating glimpse of a world that at times appears reassuringly past and at others all too jarringly present.

C. P. Lesley is the author of seven novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, and–forthcoming in December 2017–The Vermilion Bird), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer

Artificial intelligence has long been a favorite feature of science fiction. Every robot or talking computer or starship operating system has contributed to our idealized image of the bits-and-bytes brain.

In (ID)entity (47North, 2017), PJ Manney further expands our vision of A.I. by uploading her human protagonist to a server; from there, he is replicated and downloaded, re-emerging in everything from a sex-bot to a vegetative man.

Published this month by 47North, (ID)entity is the second book in Manney’s fast-paced, plot-twisting Phoenix Horizon series. As the follow-up to the Philip K. Dick Award-nominated (R)evolution, her new novel is both an exploration of transformative technology and a thriller, set in a world where nations (including the U.S.) have collapsed, swathes of humanity face enslavement, and the future of civilization hangs in the balance.

One of Manney’s ambitions as a writer (in addition to entertaining readers) is to prepare the public for the possible impacts of new technology. “If we know that these things are coming, we can start forming opinions about what to do,” she says. “Because here’s the thing: nothing gets banned. [If] it gets banned in one country, it doesn’t get banned in another country. There’s no way that technology stops from happening.”

Manney likens the idea of transforming a human incrementally–gradually swapping cells for bits–to the thought experiment known as Theseus’s paradox, which asks: if you restore every piece of Theseus’s ship with an entirely new piece, is the final result still Theseus’s ship?

“I’m positing, yes it is,” she says, with regard to her protagonist’s transformation from man to super-sophisticated CPU.

While (ID)entity is set in the near future, Manney doesn’t expect that people will be able to save themselves to their hard drives soon. “Uploading is farther off than we think.”

The third and final book in the series, (CON)science, is scheduled for release in November 2018.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Read his blog or follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

(CON)science: A Novel (Phoenix Horizon Book 3)

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon, 1)

(ID)entity (Phoenix Horizon, 2)

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle. Whether that’s true or not, it is hard to keep up with what’s going on in the White House, and each new uproar makes it difficult to remember what’s already happened. Take Trump’s first cabinet meeting, way back on June 12, 2017. Remember that? It began with Trump proclaiming, “Never has there been a president….with few exceptions…who’s passed more legislation, who’s done more things than I have.” This, despite the fact that he had yet to pass any major legislation through Congress.

Then it got odder. Trump listened as members of his Cabinet took turns praising him. Mike Pence started it off, saying, “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” Alexander Acosta, the Secretary of Labor, said, “I am privileged to be here–deeply honored–and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers.” And Reince (Rein-ze) Priebus, still then the President’s Chief of Staff, said, “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing to serve your agenda.” As all of the praise rained down on him, Trump just looked on, smiled, and nodded approvingly.

Whats going on? Not only here but in the endless praise disguised as press releases that’s coming from the White House and Trump’s own Twitter account? Is this just good old fashioned ass-kissing or is there something more sinister happening? In their new book, Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy (University of Virginia Press, 2017), Mark and Deborah Parker explore this phenomenon of excessive flattery–why people do it and how it alters the social world that we all must share. The Parkers look at examples from literature, politics, and other disciplines to give us a portrait of this false-faced, slickly tongued, morally odious character, the sycophant. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy

Rie is a more than a hundred years old, and sometimes she feels like it, even if she looks like any other human girl. After uncovering a plot to create war between the nine realms, she and her friends are hunted, and her mentor, a distant faery relative who remains on earth to maintain peace, is seriously wounded. While the High Elves want segregation and dominance, half-human Rie has a network of alliances which span the realms. In Megan Haskell‘s Sanyare: The Rebel Apprentice (Trabuco Ridge Press, 2017)–the third installment of this engaging series–we find her on the run with hunky strawberry-blonde Prince Daenor, her own personal troop of three-inch pixie warriors, a horse-dragon, and her friend, a water fae, who almost dries up and dies during the course of their journey. Rie’s challenges include finding out which high faery was behind experiments that turned fae and elves into killers, rescuing heartthrob Prince Daenor from his own grandmother, and making an alliance with the Daemon world, a place where restless ghosts roam.

You can jump into Haskell’s series with this book, but it’s helpful to know some background. The current Truthseeker, Sanyaro, Rie’s teacher and ancestor, who uses the human name Greg, is a mediator. Rie is his apprentice. She’s also a warrior, but one who’s still doubtful of her leadership abilities. Rie’s universe consists of nine worlds, including the human one, which seems to be a handy place to escape to, when you have hordes of faery warriors on your trail. There is an autumn realm, a summer realm, and a Daemon realm, among others. Fans of Sarah Maas will appreciate Haskell’s world-building, and her feisty sword-wielding heroine.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.)

She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sanyare: The Rebel Apprentice (The Sanyare Chronicles)

Malka Older‘s Centenal Cycle is set in the latter half of the 21st century and yet, like all good science fiction, it speaks to the current moment.

Null States (Tor, 2017), the second book in her series, builds on the first, Infomacracy, which introduced readers to a near future in which the Earth is crisscrossed by a network of small but stable democracies. But in Null States, efforts to strengthen and expand this world order are threatened by unknown plotters.

What makes Older’s books so timely is that they address some of the most vexing challenges of the Trump era, including the difficulty of separating truth from lies and the uphill effort to foster trust in government.

Drawing on more than a decade of experience working for organizations that provide humanitarian aid and development, Older’s books introduce the idea of mini-nations known as microdemocracies. These tiny states are capped at 100,000 citizens in an effort to ensure that the minority always has a voice. Each microdemocracy can vote for any government around the world, so that coalitions of micro-sovereignties are not massed in one geographic location but scattered around the globe. In a dense city, this means that different microdemocracies can arise every few blocks, with one (for example) under-girded by Rastafarianism and the next guided by the principles of Chabad.

In order to ensure the efficient and fair administration of this system, an organization called Information provides expert advice, education and resources. Older describes Information as a cross between Google and the United Nations. Perhaps Information’s most important function is to constantly stream verified, annotated facts to every citizen as an antidote to fake news, a term that has grown increasingly popular in recent years even though the underlying problem, as Older points out, has been “going on probably for as long as we can trace history and politics.”

For Older, science fiction is an opportunity to explore neither dystopia nor utopia but the real world in between — a place where her policy-minded imagination can explore practical solutions.

“I wanted to show some ideas I’d been thinking about that would improve things in some ways, but they could also make some things worse,” she says in her New Books interview. “There is no perfect system. We’re not aiming to find some system that will work for every case and every country and every group of people and then we’re done. I think what’s really important is the process and the struggle.”

Related links:

Older’s short story Narrative Disorder and her essay The Narrative Spectrum appear in Fireside Fiction.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema. Follow him on Twitter @RobWolfBooks

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Null States: Book Two of the Centenal Cycle

Infomocracy: Book One of the Centenal Cycle

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Even a novelist with thirty-five books under her belt would find it difficult to finish someone else’s series, set in a relatively unfamiliar part of the world and a century earlier than the fictional world one has created for oneself. More difficult still if the author was a close friend. So it’s no surprise that Joan Hess initially said no when the agent she shared with Elizabeth Peters suggested that Hess complete the manuscript for The Painted Queen (William Morrow, 2017). Fortunately for fans of Amelia Peabody, Radcliffe Emerson, and their numerous and ever-expanding family, the agent supplied enough vodka and carrot cake to swing the deal.

In this last adventure, set in 1912, Peabody and Emerson have barely set foot in Cairo before the first death occurs: an unknown man wearing a monocle who collapses just inside the door of the bathroom where Peabody is soaking off the grime of her train ride from Alexandria. There is no question that the death is murder, and discovering the identity of the corpse, the reason for his carrying a card bearing the single word Judas, and the hand behind the knife that has dispatched the unwanted visitor consumes Peabody and Emerson even as they devote some of their attention to the excavation that has brought them to Egypt. The culprit could be the Master Criminal, defending Peabody from harm. Or it could be the representative of a secret society of monocle wearers.

As Peabody and Emerson, with help from the junior members of their extended family, strive to figure out what’s going on, they must also deal with less deadly intrusions from a missionary named Dullard and the ineffable Ermintrude de Vere Smith, writer of racy romance novels, as well as a disappearing archeologist and an apparently nonstop succession of forgeries purporting to be statues of Nefertiti–the Painted Queen. It all makes for a deliciously entertaining sendoff to a much beloved series, one that Peabody and Emerson fans should not miss.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Painted Queen: An Amelia Peabody Novel of Suspense (Amelia Peabody Series, 20)

Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. In an alternative world, a gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He’s got plenty of work.

This may sound like a story from the United States of today, but in this version of America, slavery continues in four states called the Hard Four. On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn’t right with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

Choosing to ignore his past, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of an abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he’s hot on the trail. But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who wont reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw’s case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor’s salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.

Author Ben H. Winters, the author of nine novels, grew up in suburban Maryland and attended Washington University in St. Louis. Beyond Underground Airlines, his other works include the highly-regarded Last Policeman trilogy. Winters is the winner of numerous literary awards, including a NPR Best Book of 2013, the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, and the Edgar Award. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife Diana, a law professor, and their three children.

James P. Stancil II is an educator, multimedia journalist, and writer. He is also the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area NGO dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. He can be reached most easily through his LinkedIn page or at james.stancil@intellectuwell.org.

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Underground Airlines

The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas, there’s never a dull day. After a horrendous storm, Gemma finds a young boy and his little sister walking on the side of the road. She takes them in and quickly falls in love with the orphaned siblings. But when Gemma contacts Social Services to try to become their foster mother, she’s told a white woman cannot foster African-American children.

Tamar July has never had a great relationship with certain members of her family. In fact, she’d characterize it as a “hate/hate relationship.” But when her cousin calls her with the news that she’s dying and wants Tamar to plan the funeral, she’s shocked but is willing to drop everything for her.

In the midst of these trials, Jack and Rocky are trying to plan their wedding. The entire town comes together to lend a helping hand. Although the residents of Henry Adams face seemingly insurmountable obstacles, each of them discovers family comes in many forms, especially during the most trying of times.

Beverly Jenkins is the recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for historical romance. She has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award in Literature, was featured both in the documentary Love Between the Covers and on CBS Sunday Morning. Since the publication of Night Song in 1994, she has been leading the charge for multicultural romance, and has been a constant darling of reviewers, fans, and her peers alike, garnering accolades for her work from the likes of The Wall Street Journal, People Magazine, and NPR. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Chasing Down a Dream: A Blessings Novel (Blessings, 8)

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose dramatic literary career offers insights not only into the nature of writing but also into the contextual environments that happen to shape writers’ reputations. Born and educated in Ukraine, Vynnycheko had to leave his homeland shortly after the emergence of the Soviet Union: his political vision considerably differed from the developments introduced and supported by the Soviet leaders. Extensively traveling across Europe, Vynnychenko was trying to maintain a fragile connection with his homeland: this connection was primarily constructed and nourished by the writers imagination. In spite of persecution, Vynnychenko ventured a few intermittent returns to Soviet Ukraine; however, he never had a chance to settle down in his home country again. France became one of the places where he attempted to develop a new sense of home and belonging; but this attempt was always imbued with the writers longing and nostalgia for Ukraine.

Detailing the trajectory of Vynnychenko’s traveling/wandering, Mykola Soroka introduces the concepts of homeland and hostland, contributing to the discussion of exile literature. Negotiating the notions of exile, expatriate, nomad, diaspora, Soroka’s research offers a notion that includes different shadows of writers and the works they produce outside their homelands–displacement. Vynnychenko’s life and literary career exemplifies displacement that, in fact, can hardly be described as stable and concrete. Although inherently including some negative connotations (displacement hints at leaving a comfort zone), displacement is also nourished by change, movement, and transformation. As Soroka’s research demonstrates, Vynnycheko’s style changes and develops as he travels and as he attempts to adjust to new environments. Faces of Displacement is structured around two major stages of Vynnycheko’s balancing between his homeland and hostland(s): 1907-1914 and 1920-1951. Soroka provides detailed accounts of the writer’s negotiations with his multiple selves that arise as the external environments change. Astute artistic and psychological observations are accompanied by historical and political considerations that contribute to the proliferation of the research discussion. Reconstructing an intricate system of overlapping layers, Faces of Displacement offers new perspectives for the exploration of Vynnychenko’s works and for the investigation of literature that emerges on the edges of consciousness when homelands and hostlands intersect.

In addition to an insightful analysis of works that establish Vynnychenko’s literary reputation (The Black Panther and the Polar Bear (1911), The Solar Machine (1928), The Leprosarium (1938), to name but a few), Faces of Displacement also considers the writer’s political activity and love of painting as one of significant factors. This consideration allows to present Vynnychenko’s works in the context of interdisciplinary investigations: Vynnychenko’s political aspirations appear to have been informed by his ethic and aesthetic principles; conversely, political and ideological nuances are part of the writer’s literary vision.

In Ukraine, Vynnychenko’s works were banned for a few decades. His final novel, Take the Floor, Stalin! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko

The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) is the third novel by Claudia Casper and her first work of science fiction. Set in 2047, it tells the story of Allen Quincy through his journals. Quincy–nicknamed Mercy–is a former soldier struggling with memories of his long-lost family and the traumas he suffered during the third World War.

The story touches on complex issues such as genocide, climate change, and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it’s largely a book about one man’s struggle for survival and his attempt to find meaning in a world turned upside down.

The Mercy Journals won the coveted Philip K. Dick Award, which means it’s destined to be a classic, read for years to come.

Related to the interview:

Claudia Casper’s essay, “Attending a Literary Award Ceremony in an Alternate Universe,” was published on Literary Hub.

Rob Wolf is the author of the science fiction novels The Alternate Universe and The Escape. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, from The New York Times to the literary journal Thema, and his work has been singled out for excellence by the New York Public Library, The Missouri Review, and the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Mercy Journals

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Ragnvald Eysteinsson is returning from years raiding in Ireland under the leadership of Solvi and focused on winning a contest with his fellow sailors when Solvi attacks. Ragnvald falls into the fjord and is given up for dead. But a fisherman pulls him out, and when Ragnvald recovers enough from his wounds and near-drowning to reach his home in southern Norway, he learns that his own stepfather paid Solvi to ensure that Ragnvald would never survive to reclaim the lands left him by his father. Cut off from home and family, denied the bride he was promised, Ragnvald sets out to recoup his fortunes and avenge his wrongs by swearing service for a year to Hakon, lord of a neighboring kingdom.

Meanwhile, Ragnvald’s sister has her own issues with their stepfather–most notably, his plans to marry her off to a rich elderly neighbor. A handsome young seafarer catches her eye. Unfortunately for them both, the seafarer is Solvi…

In The Half-Drowned King (Harper, 2017),the first book in a trilogy, Linnea Hartsuyker provides a richly detailed and captivating portrait of three young people whose hearts war with their loyalties in the turbulent period leading up to the establishment of the first united Norwegian kingdom.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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The Half-Drowned King: A Novel (The Golden Wolf Saga, 1)

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the disciplinary framework of world literature levels the differences between different types of literature. He uses colonial Egypt as a geographic focus of inquiry and demonstrates how literary traditions changed the act of reading: his examples include the Rosetta Stone and translations of the Qur’an. He thus demonstrates that literary reading (to be distinguished from how reading was conceptualized in Egypt before the colonial period) requires different ethical capacities and sensibilities and how they were gradually institutionalized by different genres of texts.

NA Mansour is a graduate student at Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies working on the global intellectual history of the Arabic-language press. She tweets @NAMansour26 and produces another Middle-East and North Africa-related podcast: Reintroducing.

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The Asylum of Dr. Caligari (Tachyon Publications, 2017) is a deft little novel, is a perfect fit for people who are not just interested in fantasy, but also history, art, geography and linguistics. If you are a man, and appreciate an elegant woman wearing lace and jewelry more than a bronze bikini-clad babe with a vacuous stare, you might also appreciate the work of James Morrow.

Like T. Coraghessan Boyle, but with more palatable characters, and less heft, James Morrow draws on actual historical figures in his novel. While there was no country of Weizenstaat, which would mean ‘Wheat State,’ there was certainly a Blue period for Pablo Picasso, and a painting by Duchamp called ‘Nude Descending a Staircase.’ As a German speaker, and someone who grew up in an apartment filled with my father’s art books, I got a lot of knowing chuckles out of terms such as Farbenmensch which refers to a man who comes to life out of a painting, or the description of Picasso throwing the narrator, an aspiring artist, down the stairs.

I would say this is less a fantasy novel, in the usual modern sense, than an allegory about war and the patriotic frenzy that inspires men to lay down their life. Set at the outbreak of World War I, the novel contrasts those who see the true horror of war, including the narrator, a lunatic, and a gay couple, with those who wish to profit from it. Its clear that Morrow, an elderly gentleman, has strong pacifist leanings which were probably exercised as far back as the Vietnam war. The famous poet Wilfred Owen implied ironically in his anti-war poem ‘Dulce e Decorum est,’ that it was sweet to die for ones country in the trenches, choking on chlorine gas. That Morrow seems to agree is indicated in passages such as this rant ascribed to Caligari, the villain: at long last the architects of the Great War can look back on their many accomplishments: a devastated France, a demoralized Britain, a ransacked Germany, a receiving line of corpses stretching from Armentires to Zanzibar. The construction of the sentences is often intricate, like the example above. Many phrases are a delight, and I was amused, edified, and illumined. Be aware the pleasures in this book are more to be found in the musings on art, history, and philosophy. The plot is an elegant scaffolding on which to hang these gems of observation.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more: @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari

Fiona Helmsley‘s Girls Gone Old (We Heard You Like Books, 2017) is wildly honest, intense in its personal and cultural inquiry, and often brilliantly hilarious. Helmsley uses her keen eye, rich life experience, and incredible humor to get readers to consider and swallow hard truths, while also considering the wider cultural implications. A friend’s questions regarding the subject matter of her work (often continued reflection upon the complexity of her youth), posed on the night before her 40th birthday, acted as a springboard for this collection, and the 2016 presidential election results of cemented the deal. Helmsley has crafted sophisticated essays about the confluence of the late 20th-century television, art, and sexual fantasy; addiction and illness; school shootings and serial killers; family; Andy Warhol; ‘Mork and Mindy’; and the sleazy (yet sexy) misogyny of Axl Rose…” She stares down what many would avert our eyes from, and probes, with curiosity and openness the many contours of shame, until it becomes a terrain of connection for her readers.

Fiona Helmsley’s writing can be found online at websites like The Rumpus, Jezebel, The Weeklings, The Hairpin, PANK and in various anthologies like Ladyland and The Best Sex Writing of the Year. A multiple Pushcart nominee, her book of essays and stories, My Body Would be the Kindest of Strangers was released in 2015.

Barbara Lawhorn is an Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University. She’s into literacy activism, walking Banjo (the best dog in the history of the universe), running, baking and eating bread, and finding the wild places, within and in the world. Her most recent work can be found at The Longleaf Pine, BLYNKT, Nebo: A Literary Magazine, and Naugatuck River Review. Her favorite creative endeavors are her kids, Annaleigh and Jack.

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Girls Gone Old

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic phenomena. Drawing particular attention to the texts that emerge under the influence of burgeoning Soviet ideology, Jacob Emery discusses aesthetic developments and repercussions caused and initiated by the programs aimed at the redefinition of economy and society. The spheres of family and economy appear to not only absorb changes and transformations instigated by the strengthening of communist rhetoric, but also to exercise influences on the formation and on the development of Soviet literature, reshaping the aesthetic continuum and revealing the collision of paradigms and epistemes.

While focusing on the texts that illuminate the peculiarities of Russian Modernism (Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, Yuri Olesha’s Envy), Alternative Kinships also includes a detailed discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Miroslav Krleza’s The Return of Filip Latinovicz, and Isak Dinesen’s stories. This comparative attempt discloses intricate interconnections not only between literatures and cultures but between ideologies and political programs as well. Jacob Emery points out, “Like the authors of Russian modernism, Hawthorne, Krlea, and Dinesen are concerned with alternative kinships that take shape at a moment of crisis in the history of hereditary castes: the rise of Jeffersonian democracy, the fall of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, and, in Dinesen’s historical fiction, a preoccupation with inheritance mechanisms in the period just before and after the French Revolution “(10-11). Literature appears to respond to political developments, which bring forth crucial shifts, redefining the areas of the familiar and of the conventional.

As Alternative Kinships demonstrates, Soviet literature offers an array of intriguing possibilities for reshaping family relationships. In addition, these experiments are inextricably connected with the Soviet economic endeavors. One of the fascinating family experiments that Jacob Emery extensively comments on is “milk kinship,” which, under the Soviet regime,” aimed to replac[e] traditional ideas of kinship” (113). State-run milk banks, Emery argues, is “the metaphor of a transcendental mother supplying a universal family” (115). Russian modernism generates a number of scenarios, portraying not only the redefinition of social and economic relations but also the transformation of the individual: alternative kinships call for New Men and Women.

Alongside family relationships, which respond to economic, political, ideological modifications, Alternative Kinships also touches upon hereditary memory: family is inseparable from the memory that reveals itself in multiple ways. Aesthetic and literary interconnections that Jacob Emery outlines through the analysis of gothic and modernist texts initiate a conversation about cultural memory: literary texts demonstrate the interconnectedness of the aesthetics, history, society, and the individual. Literature as a complex construct that incorporates a number of components and fragments, which establish a variety of relationships, can be illustrated with the image of mirror, which is closely analyzed in Alternative Kinships. Mirror is actively employed to show family relationships and to reveal the potential of a literary text to absorb and to respond to the environment.

Revealing the dynamics of family and economy relationships across times and cultures, Alternative Kinships contributes to the discussion of international modernism(s), Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies)

The State of Florida might have been designed for Prohibition. Its long coastline, its proximity to the Caribbean sources of rum, and (in 1922) its vast stretches of undeveloped coastline made it a perfect target for smuggling. No wonder that lines of ships lay just outside US waters waiting for the intrepid and criminally minded to ferry each cargo of illicit liquor to land.

So Virginia Fitzwilliam discovers firsthand when she travels to the town of Cocoa Beach, then called simply Cocoa, with her two-year-old daughter, Evelyn. Virginia has received news that her estranged husband, Simon, has died in a fire and left his estate and business to her. But when she reaches Cocoa, she soon discovers that Simon’s executors agree on one thing: widows should collect checks and not ask awkward questions, including what really goes on in the company warehouse after dark. Only her sister-in-law shows the slightest sympathy for Virginia and her struggle to understand not only what happened to Simon but what his legacy means for her and their daughter.

Told in overlapping narratives that contrast Virginia’s past as an ambulance driver in World War I and her early history with Simon to her troubling reintroduction to the man she thought she loved, Beatriz Williams creates in Cocoa Beach: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2017) what she describes as a Gothic novel in a new, more modern setting. I would describe it more as a psychological thriller, one dominated by a rich and complex cast of characters whose all too human interactions never fail to pull the reader along.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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Cocoa Beach: A Novel

In The Last Good Man (Mythic Island Press, 2017), Linda Nagata uses a brisk and bracing writing style to immerse us into the lives of private military contractors, in the near future. The team, basically moral individuals, work in conjunction with individually guided, robotic weapons and surveillance equipment. If Katheryn Bigelow, the director of Zero Dark Thirty, wrote a speculative fiction novel, it might be something like this. Wasting no words, the story stays right on track, concentrating on army veteran True Brighton as she and her teammates undertake a dangerous mission, which wakes old wounds.

For True, painful memories of her son’s death resurface, while her boss, Lincoln, must come to terms with a past decision he made for the greater good of the unit. True’s anguish and her questions about right action are absorbing and affecting. On another level, the story works as speculative fiction, inviting us to consider a future where AI combat replaces human soldiering more and more. The point of direct AI involvement is to spare the lives of soldiers, but as the novel shows, that goal isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Last Good Man

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press, 2016), is an excellent addition to the larger, and ever-expanding, genre of Nigerian literature. The novella begins slowly, teasing out details of the main character’s life as she interacts with the people of her San Francisco neighborhood. Morayao Da Silva, the main protagonist, is an elderly Nigerian woman, who is positive, youthful and independent. A fall interrupts her independence and forces her to become dependent on others, which exposes to the reader a hidden loneliness to her cheer and allows Morayo to reflect back on her life of world travel and eventual limitations brought about by age. Each character in this book, from the young mother named Sunshine, to the older African American man visiting his dementia-afflicted wife at the rehabilitation center, allows the reader to get deeper insight into the world of Morayo, while also exploring other character’s insights on the protagonist from an outside perspective. Overall this is a complex and nuanced read. The meandering pace is a testament to the lived experience, and the reader is rewarded for their patience with a thoughtful and satisfying character study. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun

It’s A Love Story.

Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Although a slave, Bo is educated. When he gets his freedom, he becomes a property owner of a farm. He purchases slaves only to grant them their freedom. As a man of God and widower, his life changes when the proud and hard-hearted slave girl, Ruth, appears.

Ruth has never known a man like Bo. She wants freedom from slavery, from men and from her past. She is drawn to Bo but not to his Godly devotion. Bo is unwillingly attracted to Ruth. Can their relationship and love push through the personal and cultural hardships? Does love really heal all wounds? A gripping novel, Ruth’s Redemption is a story of love, forgiveness, and redemption. Surrounding the events of the Nat Turner Rebellion the light of God’s unconditional love shines into the darkness of a woman’s heart, a mans violent mission and a cultures cruel and socially accepted inhumanity.

Banks creates a love story between, woman and self, woman and God as well as man and woman.

Marlene considers herself a Kingdom Writer/Word Warrior with a style of storytelling that does not box comfortably in the usual categories. She blends engaging plots, stand out characters with memorable historical events through a Christian lens. Although known for her historical storytelling with a romantic edge, she writes multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. Storytelling is a gift from God, a passion she uses for His glory and Kingdom purposes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ruth's Redemption

Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D and D (Nation Books, 2017) by David Kushner and illustrated by Koren Shadmi is a gorgeous depiction of the late E. Gary Gygax’s life and times. Gygax’s story and the tale of D and D’s genesis is ideally suited to the graphic novel format, and Kushner — who met and even gamed with Gygax — conveys these twin narratives well. Shadmi’s illustrations blend the mundane with the fantastical, and the striking cover art alone is sure to win Rise of the Dungeon Master a place on many comic collectors’ shelves. I happily recommend it to anyone looking for a short overview of the subject, and certainly anyone with a love of both comic books and D and D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D

Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The country meanders through new ideas brought about by the Civil Rights movement. And the perfect childhood Jaybird treasured is shattered. The narrative alternates between Josie’s childhood and thirty-five years later when her grandmother, Annie Jo, dies. A family secret brings a new heartache for Josie as she struggles to rise against tragedy with grace while maintaining family loyalty.

Not only does Jaybird’s Song (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) have strong female characters, but also the turbulent 1960s South is its own character. Additionally, for the modern woman, Jaybird’s Song grapples with sexuality and aggression from the opposite sex in a time before trigger warnings and rape culture awareness. Florence notes she too dealt with an embarrassing sexual incident as a child which she has not told her parents, even as an adult. “Why do girls feel guilt and not tell?” Florence’s novel tackles the perplexity of coming to age and the obstacles in the maternal matrix of mothers and daughters.

Kathy Wilson Florence lives in Dunwoody, Georgia with her husband and two daughters. She is a full-time Realtor with her husband. Durning her off hours, Florence runs her own graphic design, copywriting and marketing business, Right Brain Communications, and writes novels. She was a weekly columnist for the Dunwoody Crier newspaper for 16 years where she penned Over the Picket Fence. A collection of favorite columns can be found in her first book, You’ve Got a Wedgie Cha Cha Cha. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jaybird's Song

Peppa Mueller has a lot going for her. The daughter of a deceased Harvard professor who gave her an eclectic upbringing, she is heir to his fortune, and Radcliffe has accepted her application for undergraduate study in chemistry–her gift and her passion. Too bad that her conventional Swiss relatives cannot imagine why any young lady would want a college education in 1957.

Sick of their constraints, she runs away from their home in Basel, even though she cannot collect her inheritance for another two weeks. A house-sitting job draws her to a remote Alpine town, where she becomes the subject of a terrible experiment. Wanted for murder, accused of insanity, and beset by visions of herself as a fierce peregrine falcon, Peppa decides to go after Ludwig Unruh, the man who has victimized her and now holds her precious German Shepherd hostage to force Peppa to participate in his ongoing research into psychedelic plants.

But Unruh has far more experience with both chemistry and life than Peppa does, not to mention far fewer scruples. And as time goes on, she discovers that her past and his are inextricably intertwined. She wants to stop him, she wants to get herself and her dog out of his hands, but to do either, she must first survive his experiment. In The Falcon Flies Alone (Five Directions Press, 2016) Gabrielle Mathieu, the host of New Books in Fantasy and Adventure, creates a compelling, fast-moving novel that straddles the line between reality and the world of the imagination.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Falcon Flies Alone (Falcon Trilogy)

The Prey of the Gods, published by Harper Voyager on June 13th, is Nicky Drayden‘s debut novel, though she’s published many short stories. It’s a compassionate work, despite a neglected blood-thirsty goddess and an ancient spirit who assaults women in their dreams, in order to father his brood. Though set in 2064, boys are still boys, impulsive, playful, and needing to be brave. Families are still families, with traditional grandfathers hoping to share their ways with their descendants, although elders and parents often pose the greatest danger. Boisterously mixing mythology and science fiction, the novel moves along from multiple perspectives, keeping the ball rolling. Be sure to pay attention to the old man’s story about the mythological offspring he had; it serves as a framework to understand various characters and their newly acquired powers. Between cross-dressing politicians, a fashion-obsessed demon, and a bot revolution, there’s never a dull moment in Cape Elizabeth. An extravaganza of monstrous hybrid beasts, theatrical costumes, and riotous battles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Prey of Gods

Whether you’re on the right or the left of the political spectrum, I’ll bet that lately the Office of the President isn’t far from your mind. Every day, it seems, I encounter one, two, three, four stories about President Trump, which includes those on Twitter that he posts himself. For me, as the stories keep coming, so do the questions. Who is this guy? How is this guy President? And, by extension, just who can be President–what kind of character or lack of character makes a person right for the Office?

My questions aren’t new, even if our current President raises them in new and, for me at least, disturbing ways. Theres an entire subgenre of literature devoted to them. The presidential biography aims to give readers a sense of who a given President is, of the man behind–and before–the Office. These biographies are usually cradle-to-grave tomes or at least cradle-to-end-of-term, written with the idea that a President’s early life somehow shapes his political destiny. Theres even a version of this subgenre written for children, so kids can learn how to be like the young George Washington or the young Abe Lincoln, confessing about a chopped cherry tree or returning a penny to an old lady. Here the idea is that, if our kids model themselves on the early characters of these Presidents, they too might someday hold our nation’s highest office.

In his latest book, Forty-Four American Boys: Short Histories of Presidential Childhoods (Outpost19, 2017), William Walsh explores not only these assumptions, but also the literature that’s built upon them. To create it, he read through hundreds and hundreds of presidential biographies, from Washington to Trump, and out of that experience assembled a singular book, one that takes us across 285 years of American history and into the boyhoods of forty-four men who shaped it, since 1801, from The White House. The result is fascinating: Walsh didn’t write a single word of it, and yet his book is clearly the result of a consummate literary talent. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Forty-four American Boys: Short Histories of Presidential Childhoods

The Gibbs Smith motto is “to enrich and inspire mankind.” Since 1969, the publishing house has become known for creating smart, stylish, sophisticated books. This has included books on architecture and design as well as cooking, holiday and children’s books.

Among their most popular series are the BabyLit books, designed to foster a love of great literature at a an early age. Imagine sharing classics like Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and The Odyssey with the very youngest kids hard to envision, but the BabyLit books do it amazingly well, fulfilling the company’s objective “to create things for brilliant babies.”

Publisher Suzanne Gibbs Taylor talks about inspiration for that line and their other books for children.

Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Board on Books for Young People, and bestselling authors and illustrators. Susan is marketing advisor for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI). She’s also a journalist reporting on publishing, education and human rights. Her work as a broadcast correspondent has been hosted by the University of Connecticut, and by the University of Florida’s Recess Radio, a program syndicated to 500 public radio stations. Her many interviews, including with Art Spiegelman, Jon Scieszka, Norton Juster, Laurie Halse Anderson and many others talking about art and literature can be heard here. Follow Susan at: https://twitter.com/sraab18

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The Odyssey: A BabyLit® Monsters Primer (BabyLit Primers)

It’s January 1935. Prohibition has just ended, but the Great Depression has not, and much of Chicago remains under the grip of the crime lords who profited from the trade in illegal liquor. Eighteen-year-old Henrietta von Harmon, despite her aristocratic name, struggles to keep food on the table for her overwhelmed mother and seven younger siblings. After too many evenings spent cleaning, peddling drinks, and keeping score for dicers at a local bar, Henrietta jumps at the chance to double her income by taking a new job at a nightclub, where she dances with customers for hours. Too bad she cannot share the story with her family, who would be scandalized at the potential damage to her reputation if they knew. Then her boss turns up dead, and the customer to whom she is most attracted reveals that he works as a detective for the Chicago Police. The search for the murderer leads Henrietta into even more unsavory circumstances, and soon she’s wondering whether even the police can keep her safe.

In A Girl Like You: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel (She Writes Press, 2017) and its sequel, A Ring of Truth, Michelle Cox introduces a rich cast of characters and a lovable heroine just trying to make her way in a cold and unforgiving world.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com.

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A Girl Like You (A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel, 1)

Assaph Mehr‘s Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) is Egretia, a town in a fantasy world modeled on the Roman Empire, and the occasion is the crime of murder. Felix the Fox, our narrator, is a detective with some extra talents. Not only is he good at winkling out information, watching people and drawing conclusions, but he’s also familiar with magic–both the kind thats allowed in his homeland, and the more dangerous, forbidden kind. Magic can be dangerous. Felix’s former best friend, now an uncanny beggar with frightening eyes, was a talented sorcerer, before things went wrong. When Felix investigates a secret ring of sorcerers that he suspects are responsible for the horrific death of a rich mans son, he is forced to rely on his old friend, as well as a network of associates, his loyal servant, and an alluring damsel or two. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Murder In Absentia (Stories of Togas, Daggers, and Magic)

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, affect studies, and more, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (University of Washington Press, 2017) considers how time was transformed with the rise of capitalist modernity, and illustrates the significance of a language of dreams and dreaming as writers sought to cope with this transformation and its consequences. Chan offers careful readings of the work of several writers as a way to tell this story, from Lu Xun’s prose poetry to fiction by Mao Dun, Yang Mo, and Zong Pu. Chan concludes by reflecting on how this context might inform how we understand the notion of the Chinese Dream, and arguing that paying attention to the materiality of literary texts can help us discover the aesthetic resources for articulating hope. It’s a fascinating study that makes significant contributions to how we understand the relationship between time, dreaming, and materiality in modern literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (Modern Language Initiative Books xx)

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds to the richness and diversity of our national literary culture.

Now you might be thinking that I’m about to ask you for a donation. I’m not. Though if you want to contribute to the New Books Network and its public mission to widen the intellectual life of America, by all means please do so. We’d appreciate it. No, what I want to do is make the point that, while books from small literary presses are one place that our literary culture thrives, it’s not the only one. Crucial to our national literature are the small journals and reviews that publish our writers. These venues–and there are hundreds of them in print and, increasingly, online–foster our younger writers and promote the work of our established one, especially work that is non-commercial or experimental. Literary journals and reviews offer readers diverse voices and diverse aesthetics. They’re the forum through which our literary culture thrives and expands and reinvigorates itself. And they are usually run by editors who work for almost nothing, on almost-nothing budgets, editors who believe in literature as much as the authors they publish.

Today I talk to one of those editors. Tommy Mira y Lopez is the co-founder and co-editor of Territory, a new venue that has not only taken up the time-honored task of providing readers with new work from newer writers, but that’s also creating something like a new micro-genre of literature, one that combines visual maps and literary text. If you’ve ever found yourself looking at an old map and thinking how intriguing it is or, when reading a story, if you’ve ever imagined yourself picturing its imaginary landscape, you’ll be excited to explore Territory and the new terrains of literature its fostering.

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As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride–formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood.

Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parents fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family’s financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated when her mother comes to retrieve her and take her back to a home she has never known. There, she is shocked and confused to encounter strange signs that read “colored only” and to be told for the first time that black people must behave a certain way around white people and accept their lot as second class citizens.

“The point of any successful memoir is to discover what the speaker learns on their journey,” writes Kevin Pilkington, author of Ready to Eat the Sky and The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree, in his foreword to Primary Lessons. “[I]t is a trip worth taking when it teaches and enlightens and encourages me to revisit and solidify profound truths I already know to be true. Sarah Bracey Whites journey is a continuous struggle to find her way, a struggle I found both difficult and inspirational. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ Young Sarah becomes aware of this at an early age, realizing being born poor and black is not the measure of a persons value.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Primary Lessons (Memoir)

So many people hope to find the perfect soul mate, but suppose you do, only to lose the person you love just as your life together is getting off to a beautiful start? Faye Morgan reacts by tumbling into a new marriage with her first husband’s best friend. After all, the bills pile ever higher, and her husband’s unborn child can’t come into the world without health insurance. The best friend is eager to help, but as time goes by, they both realize it takes more than need and a shared but unexpressed grief to make a partnership. Faye leaps at the chance to resume her career as a photographer, and as she travels around South Carolina’s coastal island, her mourning finds an outlet and hope creeps back into her life.

In the old town of Beaufort, she encounters the legend of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who drowned as a young woman. Compelled to learn more, Faye finds a photograph in the town archives and discovers that the lighthouse keeper looked just like her first, lost husband. She feels drawn to the lighthouse, and while visiting it at night, she is literally pulled into the past. But the year 1921 poses many challenges to a girl from the future accustomed to buying her food in plastic packages from the supermarket, storing it in a refrigerator, and cooking it on modern appliances. No antibiotics, no traffic laws, no electricity on the island, no equal treatment for women or people of color. Yet there is the lighthouse keeper, with his resemblance to Faye’s lost love. Will she stay? Can she stay? And what difficult tasks must she perform before she really has a choice?

In The Night Mark (Mira Books, 2017), Tiffany Reisz has created a beautiful tale of love, loss, and recovery when life seems to offer nothing but shoals except for that steady, pulsing beam of light in the dark.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Night Mark: A Novel

The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, 2017), Aliette de Bodard‘s novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, is the follow up to The House of Shattered Wings, which won the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award. The books are set in an alternate Paris, where dragons and other sea-creatures drawn from Vietnamese mythology control the river Seine, and the Fallen, ruthless angels expelled from heaven, control everything else. The reader is enveloped in gossamer threads of dread, as she reads about the struggles of various characters to escape domination and cruelty. Both the dragon kingdom and the Houses of the Fallen offer nuanced gradients of aggression; there is no refuge for the powerless. A pregnant Vietnamese woman, an immortal from Asia who lost most of his power, and a French woman who is addicted to the magic found in angel bones, all try to find their way among the shifting alliances, subterfuges, and occasional rewards of a decaying and rotting city. This is low fantasy: magic mixed with political machinations, the ethereal mixed with the pain of labor. With the plot occasionally taking a backseat to setting, there is nothing for it but to give yourself over to the heavy, evocative atmosphere, and let it subjugate you with its hypnotic cloud of magic. Ms. de Bodard’s observant eye captures the subtleties of various cultures, genders, and fantastical creatures in a believable and visceral way. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The House of Binding Thorns

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series Son of a Preacher Man and Greenwood and Archer. Son of a Preacher Man takes place in 1920 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a strictly segregated oil boomtown. The preacher’s son, Billy Ray Matthias and Benny Freeman, daughter of an oil-rich rancher, befriend each other when both want to escape the shadows of their past. Billy Ray’s heart is open for love but Benny’s is fearfully shut. After the devastating race riot, Banks continues the narrative of restoration in the sequel Greenwood and Archer. Lives have been drastically changed since the riot and its citizens defiantly rebuild their piece of prosperity. Tulsa, Oklahoma is as segregated as ever but doesn’t want the whole nation watching. Additional tension festers as prohibition brings Chicago gangsters to settle in wealthy Tulsa. Now, Benny and Billy must navigate hurdles in their relationship. Marlene Banks is Kingdom writer/novelist with a unique style of storytelling. She blends engaging plots, standout characters, and memorable events from a Kingdom perspective. Although known for her historical romances, she likes to write multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. ind out more about Banks’ novels here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Greenwood and Archer: After The Riot

Son of a Preacherman

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, but it captures an idea that goes back to Aristotle. And this is the idea: a poem–at least a good poem–is a finally crafted work of art, and the way its crafted, the way its words are structured, is intrinsic to its meaning. You can’t paraphrase a poem. You can’t say it really means or basically means this or that, like you can with other sorts of communication, without distorting it, because how a poem uses language is as important as what its language conveys. In a poem, form and content are inseparable.

This view of poetry is the reason those of us who love poetry end up running to our bookshelves in the middle of a dinner party and pulling down our favorite poems and reading them aloud to our unsuspecting guests, because once you mention a poem you love, it doesn’t only feel inaccurate to say its about this or that, it feels like a kind of heresy, like your clumsy paraphrase is damaging it. And that’s exactly how I feel about the poet I’m interviewing today. Leia Penina Wilson’s new book is called i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) (Red Hen Press, 2014). And if your ear or your mind popped a little when I said that title, that’s because even her titles are poetry. Here’s another title: “she eats his heart she has two hearts she doesn’t know which one to use she begins to call the second heart ‘little baby’ or ‘blitzkrieg.'”

As you can hear, the sheer verbal energy, the grammatical verve and irreverent jolts, of her language are dazzling, surprising, unparaphrasable, and if you happened to find yourself at my house for dinner, you’d be hearing me read it over more than one glass of wine. Fortunately, we have her here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown)

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in the wake of the events at Chernobyl. Lola has gone through the Bolshevik revolution, the Civil War, the Stalinist purges, deportation to Kazakhstan, and the Chernobyl disaster and these are her real-life memoirs that lay the foundation for the novel. The chapters telling Lola’s story are alternated with shorter interludes from the contemporary life of the second protagonist, Julia, a representative of the generation of millennials, who are struggling to come to terms with their idealistic views on life and politics amidst the changing world order.

Alekseyeva, who is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, works on avant-garde cinema in the USSR, Japan, and France, and her academic interest in visual narrative techniques has deeply affected her work on the graphic novel. The story-telling in Soviet Daughter is rich and intense, and also full of supplementary comments and explanations of various aspects of Soviet everyday life; however, the novel is very easy to read and grasps the readers attention from the very first pages. To this, the sincerity of Alekseyeva’s intonation contributes greatly. She does not shy away from being very honest about issues such as inter-generational misunderstanding, conflicts within family, and difficulties of the migrant experience yet at the same time she persistently maintains the tactful balance between a personal story-telling and a nearly academic inquiry into the experience of several generations of Soviet Jewish immigrants in America.

The precursors of Alekseyeva’s novel are works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Another major influence on Alekseyeva is actually Vladimir Mayakovsky, especially his work in Okna ROSTA. Soviet Daughter does, in fact, open by a quote from Mayakovsky.

Julia Alekseyeva’s novel will be of much interest both to the broad readers audience, and also to the scholars of Soviet history, Jewish identity, and immigration. Into all of these themes it provides a fascinating insight.

Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution (Comix Journalism)

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Columbia University Press, 2016) collects and translates a range of works by Li Zhi, a fascinating and significant figure in the history of China and its literatures. His most famous books, A Book to Burn (likely first pub in 1590) and Another Book to Burn (first published posthumously in 1618), make up the focus of the work translated for this volume, which also includes other materials. In the course of our conversation we talked both about the volume and its wonderful collected contents, and also about practices of and approaches to translation more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Book to Burn and a Book to Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Translations from the Asian Classics)

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offering a compelling story and a peek into various ways of making a life from encounters with dislocation. Readers explore Ningyuan (in Hunan) along with two very different though perhaps not so different(?) figures in the teachers (Thomas) Guillard and Daniel. As their stories and lives intersect the distinctions between these men begin to blur, as do the distinctions between notions of home and away, self and other, and much more. In the course of our conversation, Carroll and I spoke about the book, the experiences that helped inspire the novel, and his experience publishing fiction with Inkshares. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.”

When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment.

Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance.

Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9).

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood

Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 2016). In this collection, Polly channels her experiences into rich stories that capture the essence of mental illness and the humans who deal with it. She speaks with me about the healing that can come from writing–and reading–these stories and about her unique views on life, writing, and consciousness. If you’re a writer, psychologist, or someone who’s interested in how other people experience the world differently, this interview is a do-not-miss.

Polly Buckingham teaches at Eastern Washington University and is director of its Willow Springs Books. She is also founding editor at SpringTown Press, and her previous book is entitled A Year of Silence.

Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Expense of a View (Volume 15) (Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction)

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community.

All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings of inferiority, fear and lack of esteem. Velvet is series of vignettes that chronicles poignant conversations and pivotal moments in the lives of four generations of women, all connected by blood, circumstance and the common tug-of-war that exists between mother and daughter.

Holly Charles was raised just north of Chicago and attended Purdue University for her undergraduate studies. She later earned a graduate degree in English from Prairie View A&M University. Writing has been a therapeutic outlet for her since childhood, whether through music, poetry or prose. Her personal journey to find herself as a woman and as a writer became her graduate thesis: Velvet: the Burden of Melanin and Motherhood, which has now been transformed into her first book, Velvet. In addition to her work as a writer, Charles teaches English to high school students through a Houston-area community college. She will debut her first stage play, In All Thy Getting, this spring at Houston’s Ensemble Theater.

James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people.

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Velvet

Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of “the essayification of everything.” She noted how not only the genre, but also the genres inventor, Michel de Montaigne, seemed to be popping up everywhere and she saw the essay “a talisman of our times.” Why? What about the essay struck her as so current, so important? Wampole thought that “the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America.” The essay is the opposite of the rant, the polemic, the click-bait, the crude headline, and the stupid sound-byte. The essay invites complexity, contradiction, nuance–all of those qualities that mark the real experience of our public and private lives. Essays want to reckon with the rich immensity that is in us and is us.

Now, if you’re like me and feel despair about the degree of dogmatic thinking that now dominates our social and political life in 2017, if you hate the fact that, say, a hastily composed tweet by a recently elected official can clog our public debate and prevent us from addressing issues that demand attention to complexity, contradiction, and nuance, then I encourage you to check out a new collection of essays edited by Marcia Aldrich. Its entitled Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and includes many of the best essayists in America. In essays by Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Dana Tommasino, and Aldrich herself, the essay achieves its fullest potential as Wampole described it in 2013. The essay’s spirit, she proclaimed, “resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the worlds inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.”

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Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die, these questions are personal ones. Suddenly were faced with an emptiness we cant fill and, at the same time, an often overwhelming abundance of memory and emotion.

And yet the questions are not only personal, because, when we become mourners, we fall back on the cultural practices of mourning that our society offers us. Here in America, visiting hours, funerals, eulogies, obituaries, and wakes are a few of the ways we reckon with our dead. Unsurprisingly, other cultures have other practices. In Madagascar, for example, the Malagasy people have a ritual called famadihana, where once every five or seven years families celebrate their ancestral crypts by exhuming the corpses and spraying them with wine or perfume. Its a celebration of their past, full of music and dancing, in which some of the living ask for blessing from the dead and others tell stories about them. As strange as such a ritual might seem to us, it also raises the question of whether our practices do our dead and ourselves justice? Is the way we mourn enough to help us through those we’ve lost?

These are just the sort of questions, both personal and cultural, that Ashaki Jackson takes up in her poetry collection, Language Lesson (Miel Books, 2016). Inspired by the death of her grandmother, these poems begin on an intensely personal note, where loss is felt in the body and the bones. Gradually, that note deepens and expands to encompass other losses and other ways of mourning, eventually creating a poetic music that captures our collective losses and collects us in love.

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Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Harry Potter’s pageantry, Game of Thrones‘ swordplay, the Renaissance Faire, York’s mystery plays, America’s jousts, and Chaucer translated into a panoply languages: the European medieval endures in the global postmodern. In Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture (Bloomsbury Academic; Hardcover 2015, Paperback 2017), Gail Ashton collects the work of 29 scholars studying the ongoing power and pleasure to be found in the ways that we resuscitate and remix remnants of the medieval world. This wide-ranging introduction to the study of contemporary medievalisms engages the questions of authority in interpretation, authenticity in translation and adaptation, and the accessibility of the past that inhere in the many ways that we engage the middle ages in the twenty-first century.

Do we think of the medieval, medievalism, and medievalists as a great premodern Other, or do we recognize within the medieval the roots and rhythms of speech and performance that still live in our own time and in our own tongues? How do we arrive at our ideas of the medieval, at the cultural markers we recognize as our own or as someone else’s based on time and distance? What does our ongoing reinterpretation of what makes something “medieval” reveal about how we produce and consume texts, create an identity based on historical claims, and come to feel that we belong to a community with a shared past? Through Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture, Gail Ashton and the scholars that have contributed to this collection invite readers, writers, researchers, and educators to engage these questions by looking at our shared life today through the various ways that we play and replay a medieval past as a present to ourselves.

Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture

Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-budget film featuring zombie hordes. I also love those rarer literary takes on the undead, such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, and I even published my own riff on the genre entitled The Cliffs, which imagines what those familiar zombies might do in the Appalachian foothills where I live. If you share my enthusiasm for people not quite alive and not quite dead and, well, not quite people, you’re in for a post-Halloween treat. Medieval historian and former grave-digger Scott Bruce has assembled an anthology of tales about the undead that shows were not alone. Readers have been fascinated by spirits, ghosts, apparitions, demons, and zombies since the start of Western literature. Bruce’s anthology, The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (Penguin, 2016) begins with Homer’s Odyssey and ends with Hamlet, but between those classic stories, he gives us selections from a vast and surprising range of sources: histories, hagiography, personal letters, theological treaties, sagas, and collections of miracles and marvels. In these selections, which are by turns fascinating, surprising, heartbreaking and sometimes freaky, the undead have never been so fresh, so lively. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters (Penguin Classics)

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–produced by Edith Eaton, the writer whose literary status seems to escape the limitations of definitions and categorizations. Sui Sin Far is one of the pseudonyms Eaton invented: this gesture can also be presented as an attempt to escape the limitations of, so to speak, one life. Through compiling Eaton’s diverse oeuvre, Mary Chapman, the editor of the collection, presents her vision of Eaton, initiating the reconsideration of the stereotypical reading of Eaton as the writer who was interested predominantly in the exploration of the themes connected with Chinese immigrants in Canada and in the US.

The current edition includes four main parts that present the trajectory of Eaton’s writing: “Early Montreal Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Sketches (1888-1891)”;” Selected Early Journalism: Montreal (1890-1896)”; “Selected Early Journalism: Jamaica (1897-1897)”; “Selected Later Fiction (1896-1906)”; “Cross-Continental Writing (1904)”. Having conducted a careful and detailed investigative work, Chapman not only adds new details to the existing portrait of Eaton but also pinpoints aspects that highlight sides–literary, cultural, sociological, political–that have been dismissed or disregarded before. Thus, as the collection demonstrates, Eaton can be characterized by an exclusive ability of curiosity and constant exploration of diverse themes, ranging from observations of trivial life situations to acute insights into the individual’s psychology and ironic remarks concerning social, economic, political issues that were accompanying the era which Eaton happened to witness. Whichever episode Eaton may write, she seems to be indefatigably pursuing the topic that can be claimed to be a link connecting a diversity of fiction and/or journalistic pieces: individuality. The first part of the collection opens with an eloquent statement: “After all I have no nationality and am not anxious to claim any. Individuality is more that nationality (“Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian, 230″).” Eaton’s diverse writing can be interpreted as an attempt to explore her own individuality and to discover writing as traveling: through writing Eaton obtains access to unlimited space of imagination, subverting the boundaries of national, gender, racial, social, political, or literary conventions.

Highlighting Eaton’s diverse oeuvre, Chapman shifts an emphasis from national topics (American, Chinese, or Canadian) to transnationalism and transculturalism, contributing to the decoding of Eaton’s understanding of individuality. In the introduction that accompanies the collection, Chapman argues for Eaton’s in-betweeness: Eaton surpasses the boundaries of Asian American and Asian Canadian literature. Chapman’s discussion of Eaton that emphasizes the blurry boundaries of nationhood and invites the conversation about nation formation from the stand point of shifting concepts contributes to the reconsideration of literary canons.

Dr. Mary Chapman is Professor of English and Acting Chair of Arts Studies in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Chapman is the author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and US Modernism; and a co-editor of Treacherous Texts: An Anthology of US Suffrage Literature. She also has numerous publications in academic journals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton

Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thirty-year period. Organized chronologically as a series of portraits, the book’s chapters deal with the literary (and filmic) output of an impressive number of writers, including Mehdi Charef, Azouz Begag, Farida Belghoul, Soraya Nini, Samira Bellil, Rachid Djaidani,Faiza Guene, and Sabri Loutah. Considering literary works themselves, as well as the audio-visual media representation of texts and authors on French TV and radio, Kleppinger’s analysis pushes back against the tendency to understand “beur” literature in exclusively social and political terms at the expense of aesthetic or artistic readings.

Drawing on a range of sources, from literature to television and radio archives, to interviews Kleppinger conducted with the authors themselves, the book weaves together the analysis of form and content, spoken word and gesture, personal and professional biography, representational and political strategies and effects. Exploring the categories that have simultaneously gained these authors and texts attention and limited the ways they have been understood, Branding the Beur Author moves across three decades of tremendous change in contemporary France. Its pages explore the work of both men and women writing, reading, and interrogating the “beur”as a social and literary identity in a nation engaged both historically and currently in crucial debates regarding the meanings of difference.

Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. A historian of culture and politics in the twentieth century, her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. Please drop her a line at panchasi@sfu.ca if you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Branding the 'Beur' Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP)

Admiring books that appeal to our hearts and souls, rather often we want to know more about the writers who create them. If a book is a dialogical and communal entity–as readers we also participate in interpreting what we read, adding to and/or subtracting from the meanings of, so to speak, “original” texts and sharing our ideas with others–a portrait of the writer takes the audience to a somewhat different realm. Who creates writers’ portraits? What sides of writers’ lives get exposed, and which ones remain silenced, hushed-hushed, discreet? Who decides what portrait should be (or even must be) produced? And for what purpose? Readers rather often want to know more about people who wrote stories with which they fell in love; stories that they would like to share with their loved ones; stories that inspire them or, although it may sound cliched, change the way they look at life.

Biographies are one of the sources to receive at least some access to the lives of others. But what is a biography? The answer may seem to be rather obvious: it is a persons story. Giving it a second thought, the obviousness of the answer gets blurry. If a person does not share his/her story, how is it reconstructed? If they are willing to share their lives with the public, what fragments are included into a personal narrative, and which ones remain secrets and mysteries? How are the lives, which happened to revolve around the one that develops into a book, managed? How does a diversity of pieces connect and combine? And what kind of a story emerges in the end: a “true”story, a “fictionalized story,” or both?

A well-accomplished biographer, Dr. Scott Donaldson shares his experience and his vision of biography as a genre in his recent publication, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). Arising at the boundary of a personal story and research exploration, The Impossible Craft includes chapters that provides insights into Scott Donaldson’s career, his journey to his craft suggesting valuable tips for those who may decide to pursue the same path. In “Topics in Literary Biography,” the author comments on those items that seem to be vital for completing a reliable biography: “Fact and Fiction; Writers as Subjects;” “Ethical Issues;” “Source: Letters;” “Sources: Interviews.” As Dr. Donaldson narrates his cases, it becomes rather prominent that it is hardly possible to speak about either an ideal biographer, “an ideal biography,” or “an ideal recipe” for writing a biography. While the notion of a good biography remains blurred, it is worthwhile looking into reasons for choosing a life that one would like to reconstruct and narrate: being honest with the subjects, audiences, and ones own self can guide through complexities that a task of collecting a life story out of multiple fragments may involve.

A particularly intriguing part of The Impossible Craft is Scott Donaldson’s account of cases that this way or another change his perceptions and understandings of his profession: “Writing the Cheever,” “The Lawsuit,” “A Dual Biography of Fitz and Hem,” etc. In the Cheever section, for example, Dr. Donaldson provides some self-analysis: what has been done and what could have been differently. Again, aspiring biographers will find these parts very helpful. This book also bears a touching moment that emerges out of Dr. Donaldson’s reflections concerning his cases, his path, and the lives he happened to enter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography (Penn State Series in the History of the Book)

Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a Southern female writer over the years evolved into her status of great American writer. The subtitle of the book–Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers–hints at a variety of details contributing to a literary multilayered portrait. In his research, Dr. Moran considers a number of critical reviews, readers reactions, and publishers commercial decisions while following the trajectory of O’Connor’s reputation. In the introduction, Dr. Moran notes that his book is “less a work of literary criticism than of a book history and cultural analysis” (9). His research invites a discussion of how the perception of literary texts is (or can be) shaped through conversations about them. Creating Flannery O’Connor draws on the theory of “rules of notice”–readers are supplied with keys to read and understand literary works and instigates a number of questions, which Dr. Moran addresses while de-constructing O’Connor’s portrait. Who identifies” rules of notice?” How, if at all, do they change? What do they inform about texts and their authors?

If the initial reputation of O’Connor was primarily shaped by critical reviews, as years and decades elapsed since the publication of her early writings the environment that surrounds, absorbs, and modifies O’Connor’s works has, undoubtedly, significantly changed. To his survey of reputation production media, Dr. Moran adds the film industry and online resources: each domain presents O’Connor’s works from a different perspective. Through the de-construction of O’Connor’s literary portrait that has been created over decades through a number of venues, Dr. Moran re-creates a new version: elusive, fluid, and changing.

Daniel Moran teaches history at Monmouth University; he has taught English at Rutgers University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Creating Flannery O'Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers

We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way. “I hear America singing” he famously wrote in the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass. What’s less commonly know is that Whitman had a very clear idea as to how a poet should create this song. In his preface to the very first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book he would add to and enhance throughout his life, he describes his vision of the poetic process:

“The sailor and traveler . . . . the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.”

For Whitman, it’s the craftsmen and scientists who lay down the laws, and the poets must follow them. Now, if your ear got caught in that list on a few odd inclusions–astronomer and geologist make sense, but spiritualist and phrenologist?you’re not alone. In her new book, Intended American Dictionary (Miel Press, 2016), Kate Partridge not only notices, but also explores some of the more unusual and surprising elements of Whitman’s poetry and life, such as the fact that he was fascinated by phrenology, a 19th century pseudoscience that was very popular in his moment. Phrenologists claimed to be able to describe a person’s nature from the bumps on the skull. In fact, that first edition of Leaves of Grass, that book Whitman would rewrite all his life, it was published by two famous phrenologists named Fowler and Wells. It’s this Whitman that Partridge sings and celebrates in her engaging, intimate, and keenly humorous new book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy (Doubleday, 2016), traces the existential crisis of an international backgammon hustler who thinks he’s psychic and who, while plying his trade in Berlin, discovers a rare kind of tumor growing behind his face. His search for a physical cure, seemingly at odds with his spiritual quest for identity, takes him to California, where he becomes embroiled in conspiratorial circumstances which become increasingly indistinguishable from his growing inner turmoil.

JONATHAN LETHEM is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including Dissident Gardens, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn; three short story collections; and two essay collections, including The Ecstasy of Influence, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Lethem’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and The New York Times, among other publications.

The second part of this interview can be found at: http://auticulture.com/liminalist-78-5-termite-elephant-unknown-face-jonathan-lethem/

Jasun Horsley is the author of Seen & Not Seen: Confessions of a Movie Autist and several other books on extra-consensual perceptions. He has a weekly podcast called The Liminalist: The Podcast Between and a blog. For more info, go to http://auticulture.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Gambler's Anatomy: A Novel

Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that, a little over a decade later, she published a book about Dickinson’s spiritual life. What that meant for me–in addition to admiring her writing–was that for over a decade Dickinson was more or less a member of our household, readily quoted by my wife on almost any occasion. “If your Nerve, deny you,” she might advise me as I tried to parallel park, “Go above your Nerve.” Or, on a winter morning, she might suddenly reflect on the “polar privacy of a soul admitted to itself.” A number of times I had to remind her that not all of us speak Dickinson. And yet, even if I don’t speak Dickinson, I, too, admire the poet’s work, as well as the spiritual struggles she undertook.

So I was delighted to come across Kristen Case’s new book, Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self (Essay Press, 2015), which takes up many of Dickinson’s great themes. What does it mean to be a self? And how can one fail or lose oneself? How does one approach or perhaps even dissolve before God or infinity or finitude? Why do our absences, longings, and emptiness sometimes define us more than what’s actually there, before us, as us? These are dense and weighty questions, and Case takes up with a keen intelligence and deft attention to language, her own and Dickinson’s. Case is, indeed, a writer who speaks Dickinson and a writer worth hearing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Eric Gardner’s new study Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the development and voice of the Christian Recorder during the years leading up to and immediately after the American Civil War. As the house organ of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Recorder held a national reach among free African Americans and became an integral part of broader nineteenth-century black print networks. Through recovering the paper’s history, Black Print Unbound offers an important intervention into the study of African American literary history and American print culture.

Eric’s teaching and research interests center on African American literature and culture and American literary history, and he is currently a professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University. His first monograph, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature was published in 2009 by the University Press of Mississippi and was awarded the Research Society for American Periodicals annual book prize. His work can be found in edited collections and journals such as American Literary History and Legacy: a Journal of American Women Writers. To find out more about Eric’s research visit his personal website: http://www.blackprintculture.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture

Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period. He wrote three popular novels Family, Spring, and Autumn, collectively known as the Turbulent Stream trilogy set in the reformist 1920s and in his hometown of Chengdu. Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family (Stanford University Press, 2016) focuses on one of them–Family– in order to look carefully at the ways that Chengdu in the May Fourth era inspired Ba Jin’s fiction. Each chapter takes one or more characters in the trilogy as its starting point, and the chapters collectively explore some central themes, including the physical transformation of Chinese cities in the early twentieth century, patriarchy and the Confucian family, militarist politics and Chinese cities in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the effects of revolutions in cultural values and social structure in the early twentieth-century on Chinese families and cities. Stapleton pays careful attention to many different kinds of members of the urban community in 1920s Chengdu: laborers, entrepreneurs, beggars and slaves, merchants, soldiers, students, the foreign community. The result is not only a pleasure to read, but will also be exceptionally useful to teach with! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin's Family

It’s 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it from the nightclubs and speakeasies of Chicago, where bathtub gin mingles with homemade bourbon distilled from trainloads of corn sugar shipped up from Southern farms. A young man named Al Capone is on his way up, the bar owners squabble over control of the sugar trade, and the police know to turn a blind eye. So when a drive-by shooting ends in murder, two young women–Eve, a black jazz pianist, and Lena, a white nurse–band together to find Eves missing stepsister and the killer of Lena’s brother in Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery (Noontime Books, 2016) a fast-paced, twisty, riveting journey through the seedy back alleys of the Windy City, where the Great Migration has only just begun to break down the barriers of racial segregation. Out of these disparate elements Martha Conway–the winner of numerous awards for her previous historical novel, Thieving Forest–blends a scintillating cocktail set to the thumping rhythms of jazz, directed by a mysterious kingpin known only as the Walnut.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sugarland

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark Andryczyk’s research offers an insightful analysis of Ukrainian literature that was taking shape right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the emergence of Ukraine as an independent state. The Ukrainian literary scene of the 1990s was to some extent responding to a new political and social environment, revealing, and at times instigating, paradigmatic transformations. Becoming open to the West after almost seventy years of international isolation, Ukraine appeared to be building dialogues that involved identity and self-identification concerns locally and globally. In this process of awakened nationalconsciousness, which undoubtedly entailed a number of controversies, Andryczyk identifies a hero that communicates a diversity of searches and pursuits in the realm of ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, politics, etc. The intellectual, as the author argues, is a hero that gives a unique tint to the Ukrainian literature of the 1990s: although present in the literary scenes of other time periods, the intellectual acquires a stronger and a more eloquent voice in the 1990s.

In his research, Andryczyk discerns a few types of the intellectual: The Swashbuckling Performer, The Ambassador to the West, The Sick Soul. Although distinct, their voices intermingle and echo each other: they may agree and/or argue with each other but they all mark an unrestrained impetus to make themselves heard. After decades of propaganda control, establishment suppression, and Communist Party’s directions for artists, in post-Soviet Ukraine writers were seeking ways to exercise their freedom to write and to think. The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction is an in-depth investigation of how a text/narrative responds to a changing environment; how an artist finds a way amidst a captivating chaos in order to discover his/her truth and create a world of subtle harmony–fragile and yet vital.

Mark R. Andryczyk teaches Ukrainian literature at the Slavic Department at Columbia University. He also administers the Ukrainian Studies at the Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies (Columbia University). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers and traces a transnational post-Holocaust network. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of Yiddish and Jewish cultures in the post-War era.

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) looks carefully at the work of Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, brothers and late-Qing writers of fiction and other forms. Widmer contextualizes that work within a larger frame of the lives and writing of their parents, associates, and (in one case) children, weaving together seemingly-disparate literary and historical threads in order to create a richly detailed and evocative account from sometimes-fragmentary evidence. The result is a riveting contribution to the studies of women, gender, fiction, and reform in modern China. Over the course of our conversation we spoke of the particular challenges and opportunities offered by the kinds of sources that Widmer worked with. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series)

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers. She examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with topics such as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences. By bringing an in depth look at ideas of Jewishness into dialogue with postcolonial analysis this book makes an important intellectual contribution.

Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing)

Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K. Elder lives in Oak Park, and for the colorful and interesting Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (Kent State University Press, 2016), he and his co-authors Aaron Vetch and Mark Cirino dug into multiple locations of the Hemingway archives. The legendary author’s life was as big as his fiction, and Elder and the documents preserved in the writer’s hometown help tell his story. Garrison Keillor said of the book, “Ernest Hemingway was the genuine literary giant of my youth: we groundlings studied him closely, we imitated and then we parodied him, we admired the fine figure he cut and envied his celebrity, and now fifty years later, it’s a privilege to look through his closet and read his stuff and discover him as a mortal man.” From ancestral documents and photos to Hemingway’s early prose, love letters, yearbook pages and more, a thorough picture of the writer emerges.

Elder and podcast host Gael Fashingbauer Cooper discuss the most enlightening, surprising and shocking archival discoveries, as well as how Hemingway’s most famous dig at his hometown was probably never said by him at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park

John Jodzio, oft and rightly compared to George Saunders, is lauded by Chuck Klosterman as “the best best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” It’s no wonder this hilarious and profound Minneapolis writer has cultivated a cult following who flock to his reading events. His most recent collection Knock Out: Stories (Soft Skull Press, 2016) features a cast of complex, compelling, and strange characters (an alcoholic bed and breakfast owner, a recovering meth addict and a kidnapped tiger, an agoraphobic mother raising her baby completely indoors, a former soap opera star paralyzed in a human cannon ball stunt gone bad, and a son trying to keep the opium den family business afloat– just to name a few) who ultimately reveal their own raw humanity, as well as our shared emotional experience without the baggage of sentimentality. Jodzio walks a tightrope between comedic gold and hitting the sweet spot of crack-your-ribcage-open-and-shatter-your-heart-like-a-geode. These artfully crafted stories are difficult to put down, and Jodzio’s plotting and pacing are so spot on that it’s a deceptively quick read. It’s only on rereading that we see how hard each sentence is working to reveal the world anew to us as readers.

Barbara Harroun is an Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University. Her work can be found at Fiction Southeast, Watershed Review, Rappahannock Review and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. She can be found at barbaraharroun.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Knockout: Stories

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom.

In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, and her poems, which she calls Cracker Sonnets (BrickRoad Poetry Press, 2016), bring this region and its characters to life. Jax Ovie, Virginia Leabus, Coralee Robins, Leda Burke, Belle Neely, and Edna Culpepper, these are just a few of the folks whose daily grinds and deep affections fill Wright’s poems. And as you can tell from these names alone, Wright portrays her people with what you’d hope from a poet: lyric delight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cracker Sonnets

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) explores the entanglement of literature, religion, and community in China. Thunder rituals were used to capture unruly and uncanonical spirits that enthrall local communities and to transform them into sacred beings aligned with cultural institutions that transcend any single locality or region. These rituals were part of a Daoist liturgical structure that was supported by early Ming emperors, and they helped shape the story and significance of Canonization of the Gods. Meulenbeld situates this focused case within larger contexts of Ming imperial politics and culture, and explores larger themes that include the history and nature of modern conceptions of the novel and of fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel

In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward. The central focus of the book examines the tension between the theories posited by scholars of assimilation sociology and Chicano/a writers whose literary works, focusing on the Mexican American experience, have advanced rival interpretations of the process of assimilation and immigrant incorporation into American society. Whereas the founders of assimilation sociology (Robert Park and Ernest Burgess among others) characterized American culture as homogenously Anglo-Saxon and presumed assimilation was a desirable and natural social process, Cutler shows how Chicano/a literary works have depicted culture as dynamic, multi-faceted, and uncircumscribed by static notions of authenticity or national unity. More than mere anti-assimilationist, Cutler argues that Chicano/a literary works elucidate the productive disjuncture between Chicano/a literature and the sociology of assimilation. Thus, Chicano/a literature is not merely an attempt at cultural resistance or preservation, it is a mode of cultural production as well as cultural representation rooted in the lived experience of racialization. Cutler is also adept at critiquing the evolution of assimilation sociology by illuminating the literary devices (metaphor and allusion) and cultural assumptions/blind spots (race, gender, and sexuality) that undergird attempts to define and describe a scientific process. Indeed, this lends a mystical or spectral quality to if/how assimilation occurs, who desires it, and if/how it can be measured. By illuminating how the two genres of assimilation sociology and Chicano/a literature have intersected and evolved over the latter half of the twentieth-century, Ends of Assimilation makes a significant contribution to both disciplines, while highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the field of Latino/a studies.

David-James Gonzales (DJ) is a Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of Southern California. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Civil Rights, and Latino Identity & Politics. DJs dissertation examines the influence of Mexican American civic engagement and political activism on the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA from 1930 to 1965. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature

What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. In this personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with the authors own mid-life journey to lock his hair, Ashe addresses the significance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an engaging and humorous literary style. Professor Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as post-blackness or the post-soul aesthetic), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storytelling in African-American Fiction (Routledge, 2002) tracks the development of the African American frame text, from Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman through John Edgar Wideman’s Doc’s Story. Dr. Bert Ashe is Associate Professor of English at the University of Richmond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles

Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era.

As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.”

This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption.

With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully present in their responsibility to broadly represent the politics of identity, this anthology is unafraid. It refuses to apologize and instead insists that it is owed some genuflection.

Unified in their disparate realities, these 65 poets sing, perform, and present their versions of life, love, and loss across spectrums and time lines. Listen here for four of these exceptional poets to share their work.

This anthology, these poets, and these editors understand that literature has a responsibility to reinforce or establish empathy; it is not merely a mirror or means of self-appraisal, it has a responsibility to act as connective tissue.

Pick up a copy of this anthology today. Share it, give it as a gift, teach it–let these poems flex and stretch throughout the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity

The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour (Brill, 2015) makes the collection available for English-language readers in a volume that contributes to how we understand both early modern China and the history of humor. In the course of our conversation we talked about the craft and challenges of translation, Feng Menglong’s approach to morality, and the linguistic textures of the collection, among many other things. Pi-Ching was generous enough to read some of her translated jokes for us, so stay tuned until the end! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Feng Menglong's Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour (Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia) (English and Chinese Edition)

In the fictional battles between humans and machines, the divide between good and bad is usually clear. Humans, despite their foibles (greed, impulsiveness, and lust for revenge, to name just a few), tend to find redemption, proving mankind’s basic goodness through love, friendship and loyalty. Machines, on the other hand, despite their superior physical and mental capacities, usually prove themselves to be (largely through the absence of the aforesaid capacity for love) to be dangerous and unworthy of the empires they seek to rule. But what if the humans and machines were combined – not merely cyborg-like in a jigsaw mix of man and robot but more elegantly, through a perfect blending of mind and matter? Ramez Naam does just that in his Nexus trilogy by wedding a human being’s soul – her memories, feelings and intellect – to the most powerful computer ever built.

In Apex (Angry Robot, 2015), the trilogy’s third installment and winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, things go awry. Su-Yong Shu, the brilliant Chinese scientist whose consciousness has been folded into a massive quantum computer deep under Shanghai, isn’t feeling so hot. In fact, she’s gone insane. It may seem, at first, as if Naam’s message is the same – that any artificial intelligence, when it gets smart enough (and even when it’s the result of a machine-human blend) craves power and will lead to mankind’s destruction. But Naam’s message is more complex: while the original computerized version of Su-Yong Shu goes on a destructive rampage, a copy of her consciousness in India finds its way back to sanity.

And through the journeys of these identical twins, we realize that Su-Yong Shu is neither human nor machine. She is something new, a powerful and mysterious being who has all the best and worst qualities of both man and machine – seemingly infinite capacities of intellect, strength, fear, paranoia and love. In his New Books in Science Fiction interview, Naam discusses the pluses and minuses of human enhancement, why he’s remained steadfastly optimistic about transformative technology since the 2005 publication of his non-fiction book More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, and the extensive outlines he develops before sitting down to write. This is the second time Naam has appeared on the podcast. Dan Nexon interviewed him in 2013 about the first book in the trilogy, Nexus.

From the Interview:

“I have contact lenses in. I have a smart phone. I have a Fitbit. My fiance is on birth control. We have already upgraded ourselves quite a lot. My view in reality is that generally when you give someone the option of technology that improves their life in some way, and it’s safe enough and it’s cheap enough and enough people have done it already … people are just going to do it because people want these things. But everything is a little bit of a double-edged sword. No technology ever comes with zero downsides. So my phone means – the digital world means – that hackers can steal my identity or steal from my accounts, or it lets child porn go wild, or the NSA can spy on all of us far more easily.” –Ramez Naam

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Apex: Nexus Trilogy Book 3 (Nexus Arc)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Sara Thibault and her new husband, Philippe Lemieux, grew up in Vouvray, amid the French vineyards that dot the Loire Valley. But when the phylloxera blight of the 1870s devastates their families business, Philippe decides to try his luck in California. Sara soon follows, driven by a tragic series of events detailed in The Vintner’s Daughter. The California Wife (She Writes Press, 2016),the stand-alone sequel to that earlier novel, traces the later history of Sara, Philippe, and the group of wholly or partially orphaned children whose care they undertake.

The California wine industry, although somewhat healthier than the French, has also suffered from the blight. Its reputation is less secure than that of its European rival, and the existence of too few outlets has driven prices down to the point where many vintners can hardly afford to harvest their crops. Meanwhile, Sara fears for the survival of the vines on her childhood estate, and Philippe worries about the cost of developing his current lands. Into this seething mix of competing loyalties steps, all unaware, Philippe’s former mistress, sharing a secret that he cannot hope to keep from the ears of his new bride.

Kristen Harnisch does a wonderful job of creating warm, believable characters who struggle for their future against catastrophe and crisis and the pull of their own pasts. If you have ever wondered who stands behind those labels at the local liquor store, this book will give you insight into their origins. Listen in as we explore winemaking now and then, including how, in the end, California put itself on the map as an essential part of the worlds viniculture.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The California Wife

“Poems of Nomadic Dispersal”

This latter phrase in the title of Janice A. Lowe‘s new book–LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press, 2016)– has hung around me, following me through my home, around the rural town where I live and have not yet become fully accustomed. The insistence on “landing somewhere” has resonated with me. The notion of understanding that place enough to call it home has altered the way I see myself geographically. The poems themselves have hung around me, in their narrative, in their varied terrain of verse topography.

And then I heard the poet read her work, and the lines that had been trailing me rose up to eye and ear level. I understood the many levels on which these poems are operating.

my House was small her secrets

full of wildflower memory of Hungarian

table wines her backyard of mint

and rose breath singing through

humble cracks a milk chute

for bottles no longer delivered

her garage a sentry box

weary from Black sightings the

inevitable advance of Color

How fitting that this poet is also a musician, that the open-ended movement through states she sought to capture, is also expressed in the small rooms of a musical movement.

These movements, like poems, work separately, but need to be played in succession for the performance to be complete and for totality of expression. At the end of the interview, we feature one of these tracks. Of this process, Janice writes, “When Leaving CLE started to grow, to become an entity of text, the words of the book started to sing and drum. In getting out of the way of the music coming through, I’ve set four poems from Leaving CLE. Resistance Girl T is one of those insistent tunes. Am I composing a song cycle or musical? Parameters don’t matter. There will be more of whatever this flow is.”

Track Credits:

Resistance Girl T (6:02am)

Written, Composed and Produced by Janice A. Lowe

Keyboards and flute-Janice A. Lowe

Bass-Yohann Potico Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Leaving Cle: poems of nomadic dispersal

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then react to and converse with itself?

Rodrigo Toscano is a poet who trusts his creative impulse, trusts the place in time, space, and his mind where art is born allows this wave to carry the poet where it will. It is this ceding of will that permits a collection like Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) to fully realize itself.

How can we better understand how a mid-day, multi-structure gas explosion took no lives?

But this is isn’t about the explosion that took no lives.

This has everything to do with the explosion that took no lives. And everything to do with dialogue, and the cosmos, and ancient civilizations. Interconnectedness is expressed at its most fundamental level. How can we better understand the philosophical impact of each word, each turn of phrase, each image it conjures, and how this language is language?

The text casts you out to the furthest reaches of what could possibly be derived, and then reels you back in to “The Friday Evening Gas Explosion in Springfield Leveled a Strip Club Next To a Day Care.”

This refrain, this text is artifice. After it has pulled you back into itself, it intersects:

The Liberty Box checked to spec as did the Libidinal Lines at the

Thought Crossers.

Strange thing was the Gonad Gauge didn’t register the Need Switches.

Good Thing the Big O Override tripped the Care Breakers right then.

I’m sure that’s what kicked the Ego Ventilator, eventually firing up

a Poetic Alarm.

The Locked Out/Tagged Out American that’s the working title.

Toscano treats the line as sheet music, elevated beyond communication to artifice. Musicality, philosophy, composition. He pulls from everything in his reach: musical composition, philosophy, ancient history, and anthropology. This book needs to be experienced as an entity. Allow it to register on all levels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Explosion Rocks Springfield

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read, “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit.” From a chance look at this photo, a project that spanned several years and many months in Japan and South Korea was born. The resulting book, The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Koreas Abduction Project (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), is an fascinatingly and compellingly written account of a series of abductions from Japan (as well as other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East) from the late 1970s through the their contemporary after-effects. Boynton’s book weaves the story of the abductees and abductors together with a modern history of Japanese/Korean relations that contextualizes the abduction story within a broader frame of colonialism and its histories. This is an important story that is also a joy to read, featuring some unforgettable figures the Japanese Indiana Jones! a super-rockin’ sushi chef! and is highly recommended! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea's Abduction Project

Padma Mehta, the hero of Adam Rakunas’ Philip K. Dick Award-nominated novel Windswept, is part Philip Marlow, part Norma Rae, part Jessica Jones.

Theres no question that Mehta needs the skills of a union leader, noirish sleuth and action hero. Without them, how could she manage both the day-to-day machinations of helping run a blue-collar planet and simultaneously battle an interstellar corporate conspiracy?

Windswept is a fun book, full of action, plot twists and humor. But that doesn’t mean it shies away from grappling with important issues, including a looming environmental disaster — specifically a crop-killing plague that threatens to destroy the monoculture crop that the entire universe depends on.

Just as Mehta jumped through numerous hoops to save her world, so did Rakunas to get Windswept published. After working on the novel for several years, he sent the manuscript to 65 agents, and was rejected by 64 of them. The wisdom of the 65th to take him on was vindicated this past January, when Windswept was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. Although it didn’t win top honors (which went to Ramez Nam, who will be featured in the next New Books in Science Fiction podcast), Rakunas is well on his way to establishing himself as a science fiction writer with a unique voice and vision.

Windswept‘s sequel, Like a Boss, will be published June 7.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the harbor from June to September had to stop while those aboard were checked for signs of infectious disease. In a city already known for its diversity by the mid-nineteenth century, the Lazaretto represented both openness to and fear of the outsider. This deep ambivalence, to change and to the other, forms the heart of Lazaretto (Harper, 2016), the sparkling new novel by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, who already has five acclaimed works of fiction to her credit.

The US Civil War has just ended. In the home of a well-respected midwife, a white attorney has brought his young black servant, Meda, to abort the child he has fathered on her. But the pregnancy is too far along for such a solution, and the child arrives that very night. The father takes the child, ordering the midwife to tell his servant that her daughter is dead. Distraught, Meda takes temporary refuge at a nearby orphanage as soon as she has recovered from childbirth. There she acts as a wet nurse to two newborn boys, whom she christens Bram and Lincoln after her hero, President Abraham Lincoln assassinated on the same night as her own baby died. When she returns to her employers home, the boys come with her for part of every week. Meda raises them as brothers. As the boys grow older, they move back and forth among the affluent white community, the orphanage, and Medas mostly warm and welcoming friends and family, until a series of drastic events brings them to the Lazaretto. There old questions at last find answers.

C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lazaretto: A Novel

A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she's just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even though she mostly rearranges the scenery rather than clanking chains or leaping out and scaring people. Her name is Olive Thomas, and she is one of the first silent movie stars, although her early death means that she is much less famous than her sister-in-law, Mary Pickford.

Born near Pittsburgh, Olive moves to New York to escape a teen marriage and a life raised in poverty. After winning a contest as the Most Beautiful Girl in New York, she becomes an artist's model before securing a position with Flo Ziegfeld, the mogul behind the Follies. Ziegfeld takes a shine to Olive, and soon she is not only dancing for him but has become a regular in the much racier Midnight Follies. Soon she and Ziegfeld are involved in an affair, but when Ziegfeld goes back to his wife, Olive takes off for Hollywood. In Santa Monica, she runs into Jack Pickford, Mary's younger brother, and discovers her kindred spirit. To the great distress of his family, the two of them drink and party their way around movie sets on both coasts. Over the course of four years, Olive makes twenty films, including The Flapper—the film that introduced that term into the national lingo. Then she and Jack decide to vacation in Paris …

The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas (Sepia Stories, 2015) brings this forgotten actress back to life. Laini Giles vividly captures both the culture of those early days when films were still called "flickers" and Olive Thomas's complex, charming, and compelling personality. The ostrich scene alone is—dare we say it?—unforgettable.

C. P. Lesley is the author of Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and, as of April 2016, The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas (Forgotten Actresses) (Volume 1)

The next time you head to the beach or settle in for a long plane ride, you may not want your imagination filling with images of rogue operatives planting traps or terrorist organizations plotting against unsuspecting victims. You wouldn't want to imagine explosions, assassinations, or .50 caliber rounds ripping through steel. No way. We get enough of those worries from the news. And yet there is an experience where these things go from worrisome to worry-free, where watching men and women fight for their lives is—yes—fraught and nail-biting, but also a lot of fun. And that experience happens when you're reading a good military thriller.

Today I chat with Matthew Quirk, who's written a great one. It's entitled Cold Barrel Zero (Mulholland Books, 2016), and I'm afraid I can share with you much of its plot. It's so full of twists and turns, reversals and surprises, that just about any description of it will result in a spoiler, so I'll just ask Quirk to take on that descriptive challenge himself. What I can say is that Quirk takes us inside the genre and shares with us how a writer goes about mixing cutting-edge military technology, political intrigue, and haunted characters to create a plot with all velocity of an Apache Assault helicopter and all the intelligence of a Black Ops mission behind enemy lines.

One quick thing: about a fourth of the way into the interview, there's some low-level background noise that goes on for a few minutes. Given Matthew's book, I'd like to say it's the result of NSA surveillance or a drone hovering nearby, but I'm afraid it's not that glamorous. However, please don't let an unwelcome and unexpected lawnmower throw you off. It's over soon enough, and, odds are, you'll be too engaged with Quirk's insights for it to bother you. My apologies. One of the many things I learned from Quirk's thriller is that I certainly don't possess the techno-prowess to make it as a military operative. Nope, I'll stick to reading about them on the beach.

Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cold Barrel Zero (John Hayes Series, 1)

Minsoo Kang's new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the "single most important work of classic…prose fiction of Korea." Though Hong Gildong is a popular figure in modern Korean culture – a kind of Robin Hood character, "Hong Gildong" is also used as a generic name on instruction forms, in the manner of "John Doe" – the story that made him famous has not been widely read and enjoyed for English-language audiences. Not only will Kang's book change that, but it's an absolute pleasure to read as well. In these pages readers will follow along with this trickster figure in a tale that that features storytelling about Joseon society and its illegitimate sons, a realistic portrayal of life in a nobleman's household, sorcery, physiognomy, lies, love, more sorcery, thievery, politics, monsters, kidnapping, and even more sorcery. In the course of our conversation, we also talked about the craft of translation and the challenges and joys of translating this particular work. Get your hands on a copy: not only is it extremely readable, but also will make an excellent, fun, short primary source reading to assign in a wide range of undergraduate courses! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics)

Marguerite Reed‘s Archangel (Arche Press, 2015) introduces a hero not often found at the center of science fiction: a mother, who takes cuddling responsibilities as seriously as she does the fate of her planet.

Of course, Vashti Loren plays many roles besides Mom. She’s also a hunter, a scientist, a tour guide and the widow of a revered early settler. But Reed spotlights her relationship with her toddler, offering a protagonist who’s not only good with a gun but manages to get her kid to daycare on time.

“So many protagonists, whether in science fiction or fantasy or adventure fiction or film are disconnected or separate or isolated from family ties, and I wanted to see if I could write something where people did have family ties, where they were connected, as we so often are in the real world,” Reed says.

When Loren discovers that a genetically-enhanced and potentially dangerous human soldier has been illegally smuggled onto the planet, she must decide whether he is friend or foe. The former means she can enlist his aid to protect her world, a lush colony faced with the threat of massive – and potentially destructive – immigration; the latter means she must kill him. Ultimately, like a number of books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, Reed takes readers on an adventure that explores what it means to be human.

Archangel was one of six books nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. It received a special citation on March 25 at Norwescon.

The winner of this year’s award is Apex by Ramez Nam; I hope to have Nam as a guest on the podcast in the coming weeks.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Archangel (The Chronicles of Ubastis)

In four thousand years of Chinese history, Empress Wu stands alone as the only woman to rule in her own name. She died in her eighties after decades of successful governance, but her sons could not hold the kingdom she established for them and the dynasty she founded soon fell from power. The Confucian scholars who recorded her history—outraged by the idea of a woman ordering men—depicted a murderous, manipulative harlot that has ever since obscured her achievements. In The Moon in the Palace (Sourcebooks, 2016), Weina Dai Randel seeks to polish Empress Wu's tarnished reputation, offering a new look at her and her times, the obstacles she faced and the gifts that enabled her to overcome them.

Wu Mei is five years old when a Buddhist monk predicts her future as the mother of emperors and bearer of the mandate of Heaven. By thirteen, she has already entered the Imperial Palace as a Select, one of a small group of maidens chosen to serve the Taizong Emperor. But the palace is a vast and complex hierarchy, and Mei one untried girl among the two thousand women it contains. Her first friend betrays her trust, her emperor has little use for her, and his youngest son seems all too willing to pay her the attention that his father withholds. Meanwhile, intrigue within the palace threatens the emperor and all those who depend on him. In this poisonous atmosphere, even a junior concubine may find it difficult to keep her head. Mei, capable and smart, is not easily daunted, but she worries that she will soon find herself out of her depth.

Mei's story continues in The Empress of Bright Moon (Sourcebooks, 2016), due for release in early April 2016. In both novels, Randel paints in rich and compelling prose a wonderfully believable and nuanced portrait of a long-vanished court and the young woman who must navigate its treacherous paths.

C. P. Lesley is the author of Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and, soon, The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Moon in the Palace (The Empress of Bright Moon Duology)

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel, and Tina Chen about Volume 1, Issue 2: Collecting Asias (Fall 2015), which includes – among several fascinating essays – a portfolio of Akamatsu Toshiko’s sketches of Micronesia, an interview about Mughal collections, an introduction to three wonderful digital projects, and a field trip to collaboratively-curated exhibition. In addition to exploring the particular contributions of this special issue, we talked about some of the features of the journal that really excitingly push the boundaries of what an academic journal can be, considering aspects of the innovative forms that are curated in the Convergence section of Verge and reflected in its essays. Highly recommended, both for reading and for teaching!

Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Her research and writing concern the histories of science, medicine, materiality, and their translations in early modern China. You can find out more about her work by visiting www.carlanappi.com. She can be reach at carlanappi@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

PJ Manney‘s fast-action novel (R)evolution (47North, 2015) has all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller: a terrorist attack using nanotechnology, a military-industrial conspiracy, a scientist who augments his brain – plus, of course, romance, betrayal, and rapid-fire plot twists.

The movie-style storytelling comes naturally for Manney, who spent most of her career in Hollywood, developing films and writing for television. “I don’t see myself as a literary stylist or as a great wordsmith. I see myself as a Hollywood-influenced storyteller,” she says.

A first-time novelist, Manney says she was “flabbergasted” when she was nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. “I ended up melding genres and ignoring people’s advice,” she explains. “It doesn’t really fit neatly into any boxes and people who like boxes have a hard time with it…I thought it was just me and my editor who liked it.”

(R)evolution explores transformative technology – a brain-computer interface that relies on nano-materials to create a prosthetic hippocampus and cortex. Manney’s protagonist, Peter Bernhardt, seeks to use the technology for good–to aid brains destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, but business and political forces try to grab the science for their own nefarious ends. Eventually, Bernhardt experiments on himself, pursuing super-human capacities to literally outsmart his enemies.

Manney had envisioned (R)evolution as a next-generation e-book: one with active Web links to provide context and background information and a soundtrack that allowed readers to hear the music that helps Bernhardt make connections and solve problems. “I wanted you to be able to play the music so you could actually experience his mental process. I wanted people to really have that sense of having a hacked and jacked brain. If you did have a quirkily wired brain to begin with and this ability to pull from endless amounts of data, what would that feel like?”

Yet while Manney’s imagination rushes headlong into the future, e-book technology moves at a slower pace. The e-book version of (R)evolution has no links or music. But Manney hasn’t given up. She is working furiously on the next installment, (ID)entity. That gives e-book designers a chance to up their game and, I hope, design an e-book format worthy of Peter Bernhardt.

(It’s not too late to sign up for a giveaway of the six books nominated for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award. Entries will be accepted until midnight Pacific Daylight Time on March 22, 2016.)

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

(R)evolution (Phoenix Horizon, 1)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

After I read Patrick Madden's fascinating new collection of essays, entitled Sublime Physick: Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), I found myself struggling with the best way to describe it. Madden's subjects range from the nature of time to spitting—yes, spitting, as when you spit on the ground or, worse, at someone—to the almost inevitable way that artists and writers, even as they attempt to be original, end up repeating, reusing, and rearranging the work of other artists and writers.

Madden studied physics before coming to the essay, so he tries to grapple with fundamental principles and questions, not quite seeking any grand unified theory (he doesn't really believe one exists, nor would he want one), but always dimly aware of it right outside the periphery. Though his essays are personal, there are plenty of externalities. There are even some mathematics. But there aren't any equations. The essays all derive, in some way, from the physical world, and all reach toward the sublime.

I'm beginning to believe that, for Madden, everything we know is a kind of sublime physick, an abstraction that we think we know in two distinct forms, yet which is really a unity: matter-energy, space-time, mind-body, emotion-intellect, self-others, inside-outside, nonfiction-fiction. I could go on listing these apparently opposed terms, and yet, where they meet Madden's work, he always finds beauty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sublime Physick: Essays

The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemblance to the brawling, boozy refuge for every Civil War-displaced vagabond, seeker of gold (copper, tin, silver, oil), and would-be financier that once constituted the US frontier. In two novels about Doc Holliday and his friends the Earps, Mary Doria Russell pulls back the curtain to reveal the social, economic, and political divides that in the 1870s and 1880s kept the land beyond the Mississippi a hotbed of lawlessness and vice mixed with occasional acts of heroism. Doc begins the story in Dodge City, Kansas, in 1878. Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral (Ecco Books, 2015) continues it a few years later in the Arizona Territory, focusing on the events leading up to and the aftermath of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Tombstone, Arizona, is an example of everything right and wrong on the frontier. The silver mines have made huge fortunes for the businessmen and speculators who have flocked to town, especially in the aftermath of the Panic of 1873—a recession as, if not more, dramatic than that of 2008. The flood of money into politics has had its usual corrupting effect, and tension is brewing between those from the postbellum South seeking a better future and entrepreneurs arriving from the North. Cattlemen and gamblers, miners and ladies of the evening, thieves and lawmen—Tombstone has them all. So when the Clantons and their friends the McLaurys decide that the Earps and Doc Holliday are the source of their troubles and, after a long night of drinking, set out to even the score, thirty seconds of violence become a touchstone for both sides of what was wrong with the other.

But that was not the end of the story. Tombstone had "legs," as journalists say, becoming a symbol of the Wild West at its wildest. Here, in Epitaph, Mary Doria Russell recovers the story behind and beyond the gunfight, with compassion for those who saw their lives changed by it, whether they stood with the Earps or against them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral

Romance. Crime. Mathematics. These things do not go together. Or do they? James D. Stein thinks they do, and he admirably shows us how in his wonderful collection of stories L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels (Princeton University Press, 2016). Jim’s a mathematician, but don’t let that put you off: he’s the author of several popular books and an excellent writer at that. In this interview we talk about writing “clean”, math-phobia, and what everyone should really know, math-wise. Listen in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) collects 64 stories, one for each hexagram in the Yijing. Each story is introduced by a brief commentary that frames it, and these commentaries offer fascinating insights into the significance and genesis of the stories: they relate to aspects of the hexagrams that inspired them, Buckingham’s own travels and experience, research into Yijing scholarship and other aspects of Chinese studies, a broader universe of storytellers and their stories, and more. The pages of Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) are full of amazing characters – emperors! Leibniz! windowsill gods! a bear on a bicycle! a smile artist! Fu Xi! – and it is difficult to put down once you start reading. The stories themselves are wonderful to read on their own, and Will generously read three of them for us on the podcast. Go get yourself a copy: not only is it a great read, but it would make a great addition to a syllabus for university instructor who’s interested in assigning an example of a really inventive way to read and work with a classical Chinese text. Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes

This episode features author and futurist Brenda Cooper and is the second of my conversations with nominees for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award.

Cooper’s novel Edge of Dark (Pyr, 2015) is set in a solar system where human are forced to confront a civilization they’d long ago banished: a race of super-beings who evolved from humans into cyborgs.

The idea of implanting human intelligence into an artificial body is not new. But Cooper gives it a fresh twist by making the ethics of human-robot blending the central theme of her book. The super-beings (called variously ice pirates and the Next) are returning uninvited from their banishment and, in addition to seeking access to natural resources, are offering immortality to anyone who wants it.

Cooper sees Edge of Dark as part of a conversation about the evolution of the human race. “I’m fascinated by transhumanism – what we’re going to become,” Cooper says. “I do think that we’re becoming something different… I’m exploring what the human soul might be about.”

All six PDK-nominated authors are participating in a book giveaway. To enter, visit this site. The authors also participated in a joint podcast where they interview each other. It’s available here.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Tina Escaja‘s, Free Fall/Caida libre, translated by Mark Eisner (Fomite Press, 2015), is an exceptional example of poetry in translation as artistic collaboration. Poetry exists outside of the margins, and this often creates an insurmountable task for those seeking to relay emotion, realization, and epiphany across language barriers. The nuances and inflections of colloquialism and historical, cultural understandings can be lost.

We, as readers of translation often wonder, what is kept of the music and what is kept of the intent? Translations can only bring us to the precipice–language allows us to take the plunge. We must trust our translators to be lovers of verse.

Escaja works in an experimental form that is most likened to the cycle inherent in life, death, and rebirth. Even throughout the lines and stanzas, there is a stopping and starting again, a dropping off and returning.

Recuperarnos quiero.

Aprender a nacerme de otra en ti.

Sin vuelta posible.

Sin colchon salvavidas,

sin suturas.

Caidalibre.

I want to recover us.

To learn to be born of another in you.

Impossible to turn back.

No life vests,

no sutures.

Free fall.

Beyond translating language, Eisner has taken on the task of translating experience. This is unabashedly a feminist text and a challenge that Eisner understood better as an opportunity. The least likely combination of writer/translator is a woman writer and a male translator (http://womenintranslation.tumblr.com/).

These two have also collected, translated, edited, and complied (with the help of other talented folks) an anthology of Latin American Poetry of Resistance, furthering this work of artistic collaboration while focusing on social justice. Find out more information about these writers and projects at www.RedPoppy.net

To the poet about to be translated, Escaja offers, “You must be open, patient, and generous.”

To the translator about to embark on their first project, Eisner offers, “Think of it as an art and embrace it as a creative challenge.”

Listen here for Tina’s readings of her pieces in their native tongue, and Mark’s reading of his translations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Caida libre/Free Fall

In 1530, Babur the Tiger, the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan, moved south and conquered the northwest section of what was then known as Hindustan. Babur, although accepted as padishah and emperor, never much cared for India, but his descendants flourished there until the British moved in more than three centuries later.

Faint Promise of Rain (She Writes Press, 2014) explores the early part of this transition. Two years before the death of Babur’s son Humayun, a girl child is born to the temple dance master near Jaisalmer, a citadel in present-day Rajasthan. Adhira’s birth is considered auspicious, because it takes place during one of this desert area’s rare rainstorms. To Adhira’s father, the divine blessing placed on his child means that she will finally be the one to carry on the kathak dance tradition that has defined his life. Adhira’s mother worries that no little girl should carry the burden of such great expectations. And Adhira’s older brother Mahendra cannot sustain his own service to the temple in the face of the increasing strength and influence wielded by the armies of Emperor Akbar, Babur’s grandson. Mahendra, although a dancer by instinct and by training, becomes convinced that his duty to protect his family requires him to fight.

Against this backdrop of religious, cultural, and military conflict, Anjali Mitter Duva paints a richly colored, exquisitely detailed picture of a world in flux. At the heart of the painting stands Adhira, who through her love for Krishna and the dance slowly finds a pathway to a future that is all her own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Faint Promise of Rain: A Novel

In today’s episode, I talk with Douglas Lain, one of six authors whose works were nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award.

Lain’s novel, After the Saucers Landed (Night Shade Books, 2015) is set in the early 1990s, when aliens, with the theatrical sense of B-movie directors, land flying saucers on the White House lawn.

At first, the visitors seem fit for a Las Vegas chorus line; they’re tall, attractive and never leave their spaceships without donning sequined jumpsuits. Even the name of their leader–Ralph Reality–is marquee-ready.

But is Reality as real as he seems?

That’s the question that Lain poses for readers and his first-person narrator, Brian Johnson, who confronts the alien invasion head-on when one of the interstellar travelers assumes the identity of his wife. This propels Johnson into an examination of reality through various prisms: popular culture, science, philosophy, art, and even fiction.

A kaleidoscope of personalities, artists and thinkers are name-checked as Johnson and his colleagues search for the ultimate truth. There are as many nods to mainstream culture (think Elvis Presley, Arsenio Hall and David Letterman) as there are to high-brow (e.g., Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Baudrillard). And topping it off are the writings of ufologists, including the work of one of the characters, Harold Flint, who is so disappointed by the aliens’ tackiness that he decides to stop studying UFOs altogether.

“The big challenge is try and take sometimes abstract ideas and philosophical concepts and bring them to life in the story while not losing any of their complexity,” Lain says. Far easier, he found, was conveying the narrator’s sense of unease and growing paranoia as he learns more about the aliens. “I’ve spent far too much of my life in that kind of state, so it comes naturally me to write about that feeling.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

After the Saucers Landed

Long before Genghis Khan set off to conquer the known world, the pattern of steppe warriors attacking–and often defeating–settled empires was well established. Only a few names of those who led these effective but mostly short-lived campaigns have become cultural references familiar to a general audience, but Attila the Hun looms large in that group–almost as large as Genghis himself. In the fifth century, the period covered by The Last Wife of Attila the Hun (Booktrope Editions, 2015), Attila kept both the eastern and the western Roman empires on their figurative toes, despite their vastly greater military and economic resources.

Into this charged atmosphere comes Gudrun, a young Burgundian noblewoman determined to exact vengeance for the destruction of her people at Attila’s hands. She offers him a golden sword of magical power that, according to legend, inflicts a curse on its owner. She hopes Attila will become its next victim. But as the days turn into weeks and Gudrun becomes first a prisoner, then a servant, in the Huns’ camp, she fears that even the sword’s magic may not be strong enough to defeat Attila. Then he decides to marry her …

Joan Schweighardt effortlessly interweaves the history surrounding the turbulent end of the western Roman Empire with the legends that sparked Wagner’s Ring Cycle. The result is a rich and complex tapestry that will draw readers into a long-forgotten world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Last Wife of Attila the Hun

David B. Coe just finished a busy year in which he published three novels, two of which we discuss in this episode of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

His Father’s Eyes (Baen, 2015) is the second book (the first, Spell Blind, was also published in 2015) to follow the adventures of P.I. Justis Fearsson, a weremyste whose investigations are interrupted once a month during the full moon when he slips into psychosis. Dead Man’s Reach (Tor, 2015) written under the pen name D.B. Jackson, is the fourth book in the The Thieftaker Chronicles and focuses on Ethan Kaille, an 18th century version of a private detective (known poetically as a thieftaker) who also happens to be a conjurer.

While both protagonists share a number of traits (they’re both crime-solvers and both have magic powers) the series are quite different.

The Thieftaker books are partly historical novel, ones in which Coe (aka Jackson) interweaves real people (e.g., Samuel Adams) and events of pre-Revolutionary Boston (e.g., the Stamp Act Riots, the Boston Massacre) with mysteries that Kaille is trying to solve.

“I spend an enormous amount of time searching for these tiny historical details to bring the verisimilitude to my story,” Coe says.

Kaille’s opponents (who include those who would like Kaille to meet the same end as the alleged witches of Salem) are external. But the eponymous protagonist of Coe’s Case Files of Justis Fearsson series faces an internal enemy: the monthly psychosis that accompanies the full moon. These episodes are gradually making Fearsson permanently insane, as they did his weremyste father.

Related link:

Here is a blog post in which Coe interviews his two protagonists from the separate series, Justis Fearsson and Ethan Kaille.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

His Father's Eyes (The Case Files of Justis Fearsson Book 2)

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

None

Every poet has their obsessions and for James Franco they are childhood, gender, sex, innocence, and the work place he knows best: the film industry. Within these poetic frames we’re introduced to various voices, landscapes nearly worn out with elegy, and a repertoire of imagery that is both tender and violent. Franco is our poet of earnest grotesquerie, favoring clarity to vagueness as he depicts the bizarre zones of early experience that crash against poems of adulthood that occupy spaces most readers do not have access to: film and celebrity. However, Franco’s poems seem to argue that a kinship exists between the world of the adolescent and the world of a movie set. In his poems, we see the intersection of both and the distinctions between sincerity and artifice are blurred and complicated by a speaker who seems simultaneously anchored in both of these perceptual districts. In addition to Franco’s fidelity to the bramble of childhood memory and glittering industrial complex of show business, his poems are deceptively musical, employing internal rhymes and capturing the tiny voltage of music inside every syllable, creating a sonic landscape one might miss if you don’t read the poems aloud. When the book Directing Herbert White (Graywolf Press, 2014) was first published, it made a big splash in the otherwise small pond of the poetry world, and it reminded me of what Franco does best: challenges society’s notions of the artist and the dynamic – and at times rigid communities – they inhabit. During out chat we talk about the relationship between childhood and violence, the creative writing workshop as a site of instruction, his various poetic influences, and so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Directing Herbert White: Poems

J. Robert Lennon is a novelist, actually–better known for his longer work (Mailman, Familiar, Happyland). His most recent book, though, collects his short stories from the past 15 years: See You In Paradise (Graywolf Press, 2014): shorter glimpses into smaller headspaces, offshoots: sundries and etcetera from over a decade of writing fiction. This is sort of a long time, if you think about it. In point of fact, the oldest story in this collection was written circa ’99, maybe 2000. It was typed in amber text on a machine running DOS, in the art museum where its author had been working his first job out of grad school. (It’s “The Accursed Items,” by the way, if you were wondering, like I was.)

Of course, Lennon is a slightly different person from the person he was then. At the museum, he had been rethinking himself as a writer (and a student of writing) outside his big graduate workshop; he’d have to assign his own assignments (in “a school of one”). At the time of our interview, he was a tired professor after finals, with students and workshops of his own. But do the stories read like they were written by different people?

Here’s what I think I’ll say: the stories and characters in this collection certainly exhibit variation (maybe from their longer history, and maybe not); and yet throughout, it feels like there’s a substantial through-line in their tone and perspective and what-is-normal-to-us-as-we-share-this-experience. There is, put in another way, a sense of the same ubiety the jacket copy calls “Lennon’s America” in his albeit varying characters, with their own, idiosyncratic movements through time. And if you were wondering what Lennon’s America is like, I’ll tell you: it’s intriguing. And it’s pretty funny, too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

See You in Paradise: Stories

In Lady of the Moon (Headmistress Press, 2015), the reader is graced not only with the poetry of Amy Lowell, but with sonnets in response and a scholarly essay on the poet’s life, love, and work. Amy Lowell lived and wrote in a time when she could not be entirely herself, could not fully claim her rightful space among the great writers of love poetry and celebrations of the beloved. She had to reveal her truths by hiding them. As much as she cloaked her work, shifted genders of speaker and beloved, the truth of the poems resonate now as unabashed declarations of love and desire for her partner, Ada Russel. This collection places the relationship with Russel at the forefront in such a way that it honors what could not be honored before. But this is true of most of the work published by Headmistress Press: necessary voices are given the mic before it is too late, a safe space is offered for rumination on gender, sexuality, and all spectrums of identification, and the work of poets like Amy Lowell is given the truthful and critical analysis it deserved while the poet was living. We know that Amy Lowell wanted to be understood better as a poet. She did not want to hide her love, her body, or her desires but knew that it would only be safe to be fully realized after her death. She left the door open for us, as readers. You will sit here, some quiet Summer night, Listening to the puffing trains, But you will not be lonely, For these things are a part of me. And my love will go on speaking to you Through the chairs, and the tables, and the pictures, As it does now through my voice, And the quick, necessary touch of my hand. (From “Penumbra” by Amy Lowell) As scholars and poets, Mary and Lillian came together to create this homage not only to Amy Lowell but to her long-time relationship with Ada Russel. So much care was paid to this union that it is Ada’s photo that graces the cover. In Mary’s 27 response sonnets, the reader is offered an opportunity to have the veil lifted somewhat– maybe even to afford Lowell the transparency she craved. Who among us does not want to celebrate our love for another person? Who does not want to jump up, yell it from the rooftops? Maybe Lowell trusted that her poetry memorialized their relationship and that her declarations of love would truly be understood long after she and Russel were gone from the physical world. And even in the daylight sky, your streams Of light show through the ruling blue, and give, Making the world more hopeful than it seems. Inside my lines, your love and beauty live, Etched in my books, with nothing to forgive Or be forgiven for, an ancient light That lasts forever. You should know, I give My fortune, house, and heart, to keep you bright When I am gone. (From “Sonnet 27” by Mary Meriam) For any who wished to understand more about Amy Lowell and her work, who felt the gaping holes in the teaching of her writing and life, should pick up this collection. The poet is honored by showing plainly her reverence and desire for Ada Russel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lady of the Moon

The reverberations of Henry VIII’s tumultuous reign continued to echo long after the monarch’s death. England teetered into Protestantism, then veered back into Catholicism before settling into an uneasy peace with the ascension of Elizabeth I. But for the survivors of the first two shifts, the approaching death of Mary Tudor in 1558 created great anxiety. No one knew, then, that Elizabeth would choose a path of compromise and (relative) tolerance. And Mary’s public burnings of Protestants gave much cause for concern that her sister might follow the same path with any Catholics who refused to recant.

Cade Badgley has served Mary well, even enduring imprisonment abroad for her sake. When he returns to England to discover his queen seriously ill and his own future changed by the death of his father and older brother, he has little choice but to manage the earldom dumped on his shoulders. But maintaining a crumbling estate without staff or money to hire them demands more resources than Cade can amass on his own. He turns to his nearest neighbor, who is happy to help–if Cade will return to the very court he has just abandoned, with the neighbor’s daughter in tow. Marrying off a lovely heiress will not strain Cade’s abilities much, but keeping her from pitchforking them both into trouble with her impetuosity proves a far more difficult task. As the weeks pass, Queen Mary’s health worsens, and the future of England’s Catholics becomes ever more tenuous, the court is the last place that Cade wants to be.

In Some Rise by Sin (Five Directions Press, 2015), Courtney J. Hall neatly juggles politics, history, art, and romance during England’s brief Counter-Reformation, a moment when the Elizabethan Age had not yet begun. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Some Rise by Sin

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled.

Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse.

Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies.

Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises

the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky.

We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness.

The cargo worth carrying across the distances.

There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family.

This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure.

Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festival next month: “Riding the Highline.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

At a time when science fiction is more likely to portray ecosystems collapsing rather than flourishing, Jane Lindskold‘s Artemis series is an anomaly. Its eponymous planet is not an ecological disaster but rather full of so many wonders that it was once a vacation paradise for a now vanished society.

Of course, like any good science fiction (or fiction, in general, for that matter) Lindskold’s Artemis is full of surprises. But Lindskold takes care not to bludgeon readers with messages about the dangers of science run amok or human interference in nature.

“I thought it was completely possible to tell a story without lecturing people,” she says in her New Books interview. “I wanted to put together an exotic and interesting world and let people go adventuring on it with me and if along the way they figured out that ecosystems don’t work if they’re exploited, great but I’m not going to write lectures.”

Artemis is a genuine character in the story, one with an evolving consciousness that communicates regularly with one of the main characters. Lindskold has been frustrated that some reviewers have mistaken Artemis for an artificial intelligence when, in fact, she’s a highly complex network made out of various forms of fungi. As Lindskold puts it, “Artemis is a living organism that happens to have a planet-sized body.”

Artemis Invaded, published in June, is the second book set on Artemis. The first, Artemis Awakening, came out in 2014. Whether there will be a third remains to be seen, but Lindskold is full of ideas if she gets a green light from the publisher.

“I think a lot about the people on Artemis and what they are doing and would be doing, and I would find it very easy to pick up again. And one thing I’ve promised myself I would do is if there was a delay between the publication of Book Two and Book Three is that I would write some short stories so that the readership would have something in between.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should read like, or effect in the reader. Ridge’s novella-length work is something more like a Lonely Planet travel guide, or the recovered fragments of some distant, arcane encyclopedia. But even Ridge isn’t quite sure what it is. It just is. American Homes. It starts at Part III and moves through a prose-schematic of domestic spaces: walls, windows, attics, blinds, roofs, porches, chimneys, doors.

American Homesoffers ontological conundra (“A Door is not a Door when Ajar.”) It offers sage statistical insights (the Front Door “…accumulates more Annual Knuckle Precipitation than both the Back Door and Side Door combined.”) It offers its own literary criticism, of itself (“The Porch Swing is a Post-Cynical literary device… It is also the symbol of freedom in the book American Homes.”)

But maybe “What category?” is the wrong question. Updike wrote, and was later quoted by Ryan Ridge in his book, American Homes: “What art offers is space.” And what Ryan Ridge does with the spaces his art allows him to explore, and substantiate, is unexpected, bright, and often, funny. What you slowly begin to suspect as you read, is that American homes are not just American homes.

As for the book, American Homes, there is at least what Ridge himself defines it as. “American Homes is targeted at affluent women with a flair for the unconventional. American Homes is aimed at men who are comfortable with their feelings about their feelings. American Homes is feeling much better. American Homes is never worse. American Homes is an obstacle course. American Homes is between shopping centers and the skeletons of factories. American Homes is distinctly American.”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common?

Answer: Melinda Snodgrass.

The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. But after studying opera in Vienna, she came to the conclusion that “I had a nice voice, [but] I didn’t have a world-class voice.”

She then went to law school and worked for several years as a lawyer. Unfortunately, “I loved the law but I didn’t love lawyers,” she explains on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Her first published books were romance novels, which taught her the “extremely valuable lesson of how to finish what you start. Because that actually is a real problem for people. They’ll have brilliant ideas and write the first three chapters and they’ll never finish.”

Her first science fiction novels, the Circuit Trilogy, drew on her knowledge of the law as she chronicled the adventures of a federal court judge riding circuit in the solar system. She also collaborated with George R.R. Martin to create the shared world series Wild Cards.

It was Martin who encouraged her to write a spec script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. That spec script, inspired by the Dred Scott decision, turned into the episode The Measure of a Man, and a job as story editor for the series.

Her newest contribution to science fiction is Edge of Dawn, the third book in the saga of Richard Oort, who leads a team seeking to destroy beings from an alternate dimension that use religion to create strife on earth.

The trilogy is in large part a battle between science and religion.

“Science is all about doubt. It’s about saying, ‘is this real and how can I test it?’ … Religion is about the opposite thing entirely. It’s about faith and acceptance of it without questioning, and I think that that can lead to very dangerous results and outcomes,” Snodgrass says.

The idea for the series came to her New Year’s Eve in 1999. “I thought to myself, why on the dawn of the 21st century are people putting more faith in guardian angels and crystal healing power and tarot card readings than they are in medicine and chemistry and science? … Why are we seemingly going backwards and becoming more superstitious?” she says. “I cooked up this idea about these creatures encouraging us to believe in fairytales and to fear each other and hate each other on the basis of externalities like the color of our skin, or gender, religion all these different things.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

In her first novel, The Lovers and the Leavers (Fourth Estate, 2015), Abeer Hoque undertakes a literary challenge that I suspect even the most seasoned writer would find daunting: how do you tell the stories of those people, old and young, cosmopolitan and rural, living throughout the world in the South Asian diaspora? She meets this challenge through a series of interconnected stories, in which the links among characters emerge subtly but inextricably, a web of family ties that reaches from Bangladesh and India around the globe. Moreover, she captures these stories not only in prose, but also in poetry and photography, making The Lovers and the Leavers a multimedia, multi-genre experience. It’s an ambitious undertaking, spirited and subtle. Yet for all of Hoque’s impressive artistry, she seeks very recognizable ends: to give us a vivid sense of place as rich as the people who inhabit it and to render the inner lives of those people, to let us feel their passions and their pains–those that mark them and make them sometimes beautiful, sometimes broken, but always always compelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Lovers and the Leavers

For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future.

Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead or takes place on other planets, a book about the near future presents a world that varies only incrementally from the present. The risk, of course, is that the author’s vision will all-too-quickly be proven wrong.

In his New Books interview, Cambias explains why he was drawn to the near future and how he navigated those tricky shoals in the writing of Corsair (Tor Books, 2015), which follows space pirates as they hunt and plunder treasure (hydrogen mined on the moon) using remote-controlled spacecraft.

Cambias is certain that space piracy will come to pass. “I absolutely expect that some point that space piracy or space hacking… will become a criminal enterprise. Space hardware is just too valuable,” he says.

Cambias also discusses the Hieroglyph Project, which is trying to get science fiction authors to write the kind of visionary fiction that has the capacity to spark brick-and-mortar innovation. Cambias contributed to the project’s collection of short stories but also penned a series of blog posts in which he declares the project a “failure.”

Related links:

This is Cambias’ second appearance on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His first interview, about his book A Darkling Sea, is available here.
An episode of New Books was also devoted to the Hieroglyph Project.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Corsair: A Science Fiction Novel

A Darkling Sea: A Novel

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking world through their contributions to Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep (Affront Publishing, 2015), a collection of short stories by Swedish authors.

Until recently, the world of science fiction in Sweden was so small that it was possible to keep up with everything that was published. But no more. The genre, thanks in part to self-publishing, is “blooming,” Lund says.

The few big Swedish publishers are starting to catch up. “The big publishing houses think [science fiction and fantasy] is something that stops with young adults… and there’s not any status for a writer to be writing science fiction or fantasy,” Lund says.

But Kallner says, “Game of Thrones is beginning to change that.”

Lund says writing a story in English provided a chance to use more ornate language. “As a Swedish writer … you do things a bit minimalistic.” But English allowed her a fresh take. “I [could] use a bit more adjectives than I usually allow myself.”

In one sign of the difference between the United States and Sweden, Kallner says he has had some of his most successful book signings in grocery stores. “I usually stand somewhere between the bananas and loaves of bread and smile,” he says.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks.

“The big event of my life was of course 9/11,” Khakpour says. “I experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from it and think about it constantly.”

It’s no surprise that the assault on the Twin Towers features prominently in her writing. Through non-fiction essays and two novels, the Iranian-born writer has tried to understand the tragedy’s impact on her, the nation, and the world.

But while her essays are rooted in facts, her fiction takes flight. In The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury USA, 2014) there are, in fact, multiple references to flight. The main character, an albino man named Zal, is raised by his abusive mother in a cage among a balcony full of birds. Although he cannot fly, he yearns to. Rescued by an American and brought to New York in the years before 9/11, he tries to unlearn his feral ways and finds himself drawn to visionaries–an artist who claims to see the future and a famous magician who aspires, in a feat of illusionist virtuosity, to make the then still-standing World Trade Center disappear.

The character of Zal is based on a Persian myth and Khakpour infuses the story with fabulous twists and turns.

“My biggest challenge was doing a mythic retelling of a summer before 9/11 and not just any summer but Y2K to the summer before 9/11… Luckily, what was great about the realism was that the realism was quite surreal. If you look at the Y2K narrative, not to mention the 9/11 narrative, it’s full of the magical, full of the fabulist, full of the kind of impossible.”

In her New Books interview, Khakpour discusses the impact of 9/11 on “everyone”:

“I’m kind of amazed when I meet people who think it didn’t really affect them or the event wasn’t that big a deal in their life. Maybe the actual day wasn’t but their lives have completely been altered, even just economically. Anyone who has a job today has been affected by it.”

She speculates about the trepidation publishers might have had about a book that uses myth and fantasy modes to tell a story about 9/11:

“It took over two and half years to sell this book whereas my first book only took a few months…. If I’d done a purely realistic take from say a Middle Eastern woman’s perspective, my guess is it would have sold faster but this idea that I was using a fabulous mode, a sort of speculative mode, and addressing this sensitive world event and then add to the fact that here I am, you know, a brown person addressing this–that caused I think some complications.

About her connection to her protagonist Zal, who, like her is an Iranian-born immigrant:

“I don’t think I’ve ever written a character that I’ve identified with more.”

Related links:

Khakpour’s magician in The Last Illusion was inspired by the real life example of David Copperfield, who made the Statue of Liberty “disappear” in a television special in the 1970s. Here’s a clip on YouTube.
Follow Porochista Khakpour on Twitter.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Last Illusion: A Novel

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

If you’re a reader, then you know the joy of discovering books. You also know that some of those discoveries stand out. Yes, there’s the pleasure of finding a good book. And there’s even those rare occasions where you find the right book: the right book at the right time in your life, the one that somehow shapes or bolsters who you are. And then there are those other moments, where the book you find feels more like you’ve uncovered a hidden gem. You’re Keats, on first looking into Chapman’s Homer, feeling “like stout Cortez” discovering a new world. In my case, the feeling resembles something less epic and more out of Indian Jones, as though, descending into the shelves of the Strand Bookstore in New York or Powell’s Books in Portland, I emerge with a lost treasure, a forgotten totem or relic. It’s a great feeling, one I love sharing with other readers.

And that was very much my experience with Mark Ehling‘s new collection, River Dead of Minneapolis Scavenged by Teens (New Carriage, 2015). Finding it was a matter of luck. I’d come across one of his pieces online months ago and I’d found both strange and compelling. And then a writer who knows us both invited us to speak about an emerging genre that she calls “the visual essay.” And, then, on the very weekend we spoke, after Ehling gave a performance of his work that was somehow hilarious and moving, I learned he was launching a new book. I immediately ordered a copy and I wasn’t not more than a few pages in before I heard that Indiana Jones theme resounding in my readerly brain. Ehling’s work is weird and rich and and intruguing and odd and wholly its own. And it’s a joy to say to readers like you: you have to check this out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails.”

In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his novelette Sauerkraut Station.

And now he is exploring new waters with the publication of his first novel, Flex (Angry Robot, 2015), which tells the story of a father desperate enough to use illegal magic to heal his badly burned daughter.

The title refers to crystalized magic that, when snorted, gives the user the power to manipulate objects for which he or she has a particular affinity. Cat ladies become felinemancers. Weightlifters become musclemancers. Graphic artists become illustromancers. And the protagonist, a paper-pushing bureaucrat by the name of Paul Tsabo, becomes a bureaucromancer, able to turn paperwork (with the help of flex) into a magical beast.

The only problem is that with flex comes flux–a pushback from the universe that re-balances any magic act with disaster.

Below are highlights from Steinmetz’s New Books interview.

On what he learned at Clarion Writers’ Workshop:

“Bit by bit they kind of stripped away my illusions and showed me how lazy I’d been and how much more effort I had to put to make my stories top notch. … I thought I was a one and a half draft person, but realistically I have to put in 5 drafts before the story starts to get good.”

On how paperwork can become magical in Paul Tsabo’s hands:

“He’s basically useless in a firefight but can send a SWAT team through your door by dropping a magically completed warrant for your arrest on a cop’s desk.”

On why he why a world with flex also needs flux:

“Flux evens out the odds of magic…. I really hate novels where magic is this thing you can do … without any kind of cost…. Frequently what I see is, ‘Oh, I’m a magician. I’ll raise an army of the dead and make my castle out of magic,’ and where is any challenge in that for your characters? Where do they have any stopping points to what they can do?… A big tension in the book as to whether the mancers should even use their magic.”

On his approach to writing:

“I’m what’s called a gardener writer in the business. There are plotters who basically sit down and plot out all their books beat by beat and know their ending the minute they start their first sentence. And Flex, like every story I’ve ever written– basically I wrote an interesting first paragraph and followed it randomly until the end of the book.”

On 9/11 as an inspiration for Flex:

“To a large extent the magic system in Flex is driven by a reaction to 9/11, where something really bad happened–and yes it really was bad… but we really overreacted that wasn’t helpful at all and in fact may have made it entirely worse for us.”

Related link:

Follow Ferrett Steinmetz on his blog or on Twitter.

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Flex

Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it.

First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, a stunning achievement for a first-time author with a small, independent press.

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press, 2014) is set in the American West after an epidemic has killed all but a fraction of humanity. Among the survivors, men vastly outnumber women, setting in motion a desperate journey of survival for the eponymous midwife. To avoid the serial rape and enslavement that threatens all females in this male-dominated landscape, the midwife sheds her name and even her sexuality, presenting herself as a man and continuously changing her moniker to suit the circumstance.

Communication falls apart too quickly for anyone to even know the name or nature of the illness that’s destroyed civilization and made childbirth a fatal event for female survivors. The midwife’s focus is on giving the few women she meets the hard-won power to prevent pregnancy. “I think the thing I wanted to come across most strongly was to explode notions of gender… And to really think about what your options would be like if you, like your grandmother, had no control over when you had children or how or by whom,” Elison says in her New Books interview.

Elison was raised on stories about the apocalypse–the fire and brimstone kind. “I grew up in some pretty crazy evangelical churches, and they hammered on us about the end of days and the Book of Revelation, and it gave me nightmares, and it made always think about the fact that the end was nigh and that it was going to be bad, and I think that stuck with me my whole life even though I shed the ideological parts of it.”

For the midwife, the apocalypse poses threats both dramatic and mundane. When not searching for food and a safe place to spend the night, she must negotiate the frustrating reality of spending time with people she doesn’t like. “I started thinking about what it would be like if the only people you could find were people you couldn’t stand, if they just irritated in you every way,” Elison says. “There’s nothing wrong with them and they’re not unsafe, you just don’t like being there. So I wanted to make a character who had to make choices between feeling safe in a group of people and feeling pissed off all the time.”

Elison is grateful for the editors at Sybaritic Press, who published her unagented manuscript. “They’re very good editors and publishers,” she says. But inevitably, she’s had to do a lot of marketing herself. “It’s good because I’ve learned a lot about the business doing that and it’s not good because no one listens to a writer on her own.”

Fortunately, the Philip K. Dick Award has made finding readers a whole lot easier. The award “has opened a lot of doors,” she says.

Related links:

An article in the Los Angeles Review of Books explores the book’s treatment of “Gender and the Apocalypse.” [Note: the article has spoilers].
Meg Elison shares her thoughts on her blog.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them all.

He is perhaps best known for short stories like The Paper Menagerie, which (according to his Wikipedia entry) was the first work of fiction to earn Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards.

But this year he’s making waves with two longer projects, which are the focus of his New Books interview: his translation of Cixin Liu‘s The Three-Body Problem and his debut novel The Grace of Kings.

The Three-Body Problem has been a break-out success in China for Cixin Liu, who has won China’s Galaxy Award for science fiction nine times. The Three-Body Problem is also the first hard science-fiction novel by an author from the People’s Republic of China to be translated into English.

Ken Liu (who is not related to Cixin Liu) says sales numbers for science fiction in China would be the envy of American publishers, but Chinese publishers have traditionally considered it a niche market. That is, until The Three-Body Problem and its two sequels came along. Officially, Chinese readers have bought about 400,000 copies of the three-volume series but Liu says the actual number of readers is far larger as books get passed among friends and family.

Liu anticipated it would be difficult to translate the language of science, but the cultural references proved more challenging. Ultimately, he decided to add concise footnotes to fill in some gaps without overwhelming readers with too much information. The success of his translation is reflected in the The Three-Body Problem‘s Nebula and Hugo nominations for best novel.

The Grace of Kings, the first book in Liu’s projected Dandelion Dynasty, is a very different project–an epic fantasy/science-fiction mashup that Liu calls “silkpunk.” Liu grew up in a Chinese speaking household. “Every culture has its own set of foundational narratives that are echoed and dialogued with and re-imagined over and over again… They’re stories about how a people embody their own values and see themselves as having meaning in the universe.” In the case of The Grace of Kings, Liu drew from an ancient historical struggle known as the Chu-Han Contention but reimagines it in a secondary world, using both classic Western and Chinese storytelling techniques.

“The result is this melding of everything into this fantastical universe that I call silkpunk,” Liu says. “So there are battle kites and mechanical contraptions of various sorts, underwater boats and airships that propel themselves with giant feathered oars that represent the kinds of things you see in Chinese block prints and historical romances [but] sort of blown up and extended into a new technology vocabulary that I had a lot fun playing with.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Grace of Kings (1) (The Dandelion Dynasty)

The Three-Body Problem (The Three-Body Problem Series, 1)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Despite being Germany's most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August).

InThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2006), Michael Gorra takes the reader on a reverse journey, for it is by slipping in "incognito" that we will begin to find Germany in all its imponderables. The result of a year's sabbatical residence in Hamburg, this book is a deep and discursive exploration of a country with millennia of history, and it explores how Germany's dark role during the twentieth century weaves in and out of the everyday in the twenty-first.

The travel companions Gorra invites along are an exceptional group: Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin. They all have looked at traveling through a kaleidoscopic lens and do not follow the linear as much as channel the essence of physical, historical, and cultural motion.

Gorra states the unlikelihood of there ever being a book called A Year in Schleswig-Holstein or Under the Nordrhein-Westfälische Sun. This is the land of school trips to war memorials commemorating the dead of all sides. Of burnt-out buildings that remain so and become part of the landscape. The fiercest debates now about outsiders may be about the East Germans whose integration into the reunited Germany began following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Even Berlin itself is hard to define because it is still in the throws of becoming. Since 1852, it has undergone almost constant change. City maps show nine different iterations between 1902 and 1949. And more momentous change is taking place now, for Berlin has become the newest "destination" global city.

Perhaps no German painting is more mysterious than "The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," the 1817 work by David Caspar Friedrich. In using it to open "The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany," Gorra suggests that for Germany, the quest is a more appropriate approach than a road map in the search for clarity.

A Pulitzer-Prize finalist in biography, Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work and a boon for scholars and teachers working in the field of modern Chinese studies. Waverings is the second work in the Eclipse trilogy, three books that were published serially in The Short Story Magazine beginning in 1927. These are the first works of fiction written by Shen Yanbing, the man who would later take on the pseudonym Mao Dun. Waverings offers readers a perspective on the 1926-1927 revolution – and problems of labor and women’s rights therein – but that perspective shifts depending on which version of the text that the reader encounters: while the first version was written very quickly in 1927 while the author was in hiding in Shanghai, another 1954 revision of the text is, in many ways, quite different. In his prefatory remarks, Hull thoughtfully reflects on how to navigate this and other challenges for the modern translator. Hull’s translation beautifully renders the powerful illusions and visions that recur throughout the story, and movingly give life to some extraordinarily powerful fictional characters. It’s a boon for lovers of stories, for teachers, and for scholars of the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live.

Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3).

“I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview.

In some respects, Elysium is simple: it tells a story of love and loss between two people. But Elysium is also complicated because those two people morph from scene to scene, changing from two brothers to father/daughter to husband/wife to boyfriend/boyfriend to girlfriend/girlfriend.

When imagining the future, conventional science fiction often focuses too much on gadgets and not enough on people, Brissett says. “We think [science fiction] is about … the new machines we’ll have, the little gadgets that will make our lives easier … but I think the civil rights movement is one of the most science-fictional things that could have probably happened, because all of a sudden this entire group of people that was totally ignored showed up at the table and said ‘We want in.'”

As a child, Brissett found the Wonder Bread future depicted in The Jetsons frightening. “I remember watching as a kid the Jetsons and thinking ‘That is an absolutely terrifying vision of the future. Where are all the black people?'” she says. “The future belongs to everybody. It doesn’t really belong to any one group. And yet when you see visions of the future, it’s usually mostly white heterosexual people wandering around.”

In the early 2000s, Brissett owned an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she experienced the publishing industry’s struggles firsthand. Rather that discourage her from becoming a writer herself, the experience seems to have solidified her desire to tell stories in the way she wants to tell them. “You have to love this field to be here. If you’re here for money, you are certifiably crazy,” she says.

Spoiler Alert

From 6:45 to 10:24 we talk about a major part of the plot, which is revealed on the book jacket but isn’t explained until near the end of the book. Listeners might want to skip this part (and not read the jacket copy) if they want to approach the story as a mystery whose answer lies in the book’s structure.

Related Links

Elysium was inspired, in part, by Roman Emperor Hadrian’s love of Antinous.
Brissett mentions her recently deceased friend, the writer Eugie Foster.
She also mentions a number of her teachers, including Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Elysium

While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past.

In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age.

Against this backdrop, Duncan introduces Elizabeth Barnabus, who outmaneuvers the restrictions placed on her as a single woman by pretending (with the help of quick-change-artist skills) to be her own brother. “Gender identity and gender presentation is a theme that runs through Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter because in order to do certain things in her world she needs at times to cross-dress and do it in a convincing way,” Duncan says.

Elizabeth’s mastery of disguise–and her knowledge of deception acquired from her circus-owning father–allow her to earn a living as a private investigator and accept an assignment that brings her face to face with agents of the dreaded International Patent Office, which maintains a choke hold on scientific advancement.

In January, The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award, validating Duncan’s decision to take a stab at science fiction. “I like to let ideas play in an imagined world and see what happens,” he says.

Asked if he found it difficult to write a first-person narrative in a woman’s voice, Duncan points out that all writers must overcome countless barriers to fully enter the minds of their characters.

“The book is about illusion and any writer trying to write from the point of view of someone different from themselves is trying to pull off some kind of illusion; they are trying with smoke and mirrors to seem as if they are realistically that person. … That person may be different in all kinds of … ways from the writer.”

Duncan explains that he is dyslexic. “So for me is it a bigger challenge to write from the view of someone who is not dyslexic or is it a bigger challenge to write from the point of view of someone who is from a different time or someone who is a different sex?”

In the end, Duncan says that all writers, like his protagonist Elizabeth, are cross-dressers “in a psychological sense because we have to put ourselves into the minds of other people.”

Related links:

The interview touches on the conjuring illusion “the bullet catch” from which the book derives its title.
Ned Ludd and the Luddites also come up.
The conversation concludes with a mention of Duncan’s role in the movie Zombie Undead. The trailer is on Rotten Tomatoes and the entire film in on YouTube.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel.

Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedonism, depression or suicide.

And then there’s Hank Palace, a detective on the Concord, N.H., police force and the eponymous star of Winter’s trilogy. Faced with the end of the world, Palace does the almost unthinkable: he keeps doing his job.

“He’s taken an oath to uphold the law … and to him an oath is an oath, a promise is a promise, and it doesn’t matter what the context is,” Winters says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview.

Palace remains dedicated to his job as he tries to: determine whether an apparent suicide is actually a murder (Book 1); track down a missing person (Book 2); and find his sister, who’s joined a group determined to save the planet (Book 3).

Throughout the trilogy, Winters demonstrates a mastery of two genres, a fact reflected in the awards the series has collected. The first book, The Last Policeman, earned an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, while the second book, Countdown City, was recognized for excellence in science fiction with the receipt of the Philip K. Dick Award, and the third book, World of Trouble, which was published in July 2014, is a finalist for (another!) Edgar Award (the winner will be announced in April).

Like his main character, Winters likes to be prepared while remaining flexible. “I always start with a pretty good outline and then by the time I’m really deep into the book that outline is more or less thrown away and replaced by a different one,” Winters says. “I have to allow the outline to be there but for it to always be provisional, to always be a work in progress.”

Among other topics tackled in the interview are Winters’ optimism about human nature, the art of telling a compelling mystery, and some hints about his next book (a mystery in an alternate or “counter-factual” America).

Related link:

Follow Ben H. Winters on his blog at http://benhwinters.com/, on Twitter at @BenHWinters or on Facebook.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and articulate presence on Twitter.

Hurley has lived with some of the concepts and characters in her newest novel, The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot, 2014) since she was 12. But it took patience and lots of hard work (including multiple revisions) for the story about mirror worlds on the brink of genocidal war to emerge.

Although her first book was a success, the other two books in the series, Infidel and Rapture, were hurt by the financial troubles of the publisher. Hurley rallied, finding a new agent and a new publisher, but the path wasn’t easy. As she says in her New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview, “You’re only as good as your last book. If your last book doesn’t sell, then you’re not going to sell other work. … This is an up and down business. It’s not a straight trajectory. You have to work very hard, and I think that’s very motivating for me to know I have to work very hard just to stay in the game.”

While writing is a solitary affair, Hurley has surrounded herself with a circle of supporters–and advises everyone to do the same. “If you’re going to have a goal in life… You want to be a CEO, you want to open your own business, you want to be a writer [then] you need to surround yourself with people who support what you are doing. And that’s everyone. If your family doesn’t support what you do then maybe don’t see them as much. I hate to say it. And if you have a partner who doesn’t support what you do, then maybe you should look at a different partner. If the agent that you have is not working out and your styles just do not work and you’re not getting what you need from that relationship then you need to find an agent that works.”

Related link:

Follow Kameron Hurley on her website and on Twitter.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Mirror Empire (The Worldbreaker Saga)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise.

London’s novels about class conflict, debt, and rebellion are set in a grim future. A significant portion of Proxy takes place in a city where the poorest citizens dwell in a violent shantytown known as the Valve while the wealthy thrive in well-guarded neighborhoods of private speedways, luxury homes, and high-tech toys. The sequel, Guardian, is set in a crumbling Detroit exponentially more decrepit than the Motor City of today.

As London explains, the horrors of the Valve are his “futuristic re-imagining” of slums outside of Nairobi, which he witnessed while researching one of his non-fiction books, One Day the Soldiers Came, about children affected by armed conflict. “For a lot of children all over the world caught up in wars and poverty and natural disaster … dystopia is not some kind of fantasy but the day-to-day reality of how they are living,” he tells me.

Although the books portray a dark future, the publisher avoids the word “dystopia” in its marketing of Proxy and Guardian. “They call it a ‘futuristic thriller,'” London says. The marketing department also shies away from the science fiction tag, fearing it’s too narrow. But London says he embraces the label. “Science fiction for me implies … an awareness of possibility.”

London himself is brimming with possibility. For one thing, he writes under three names. Proxy and Guardian, which are aimed at young adults, bear the name Alex London. But as Charles London, he’s published adult non-fiction about war and the survival of beleaguered Jewish communities around the world. And as C. Alexander London, he continues to write for middle-grade readers about real-life war experiences and fantastical adventures involving squids and dragons.

Like any good science fiction writer, London seeks to push boundaries. Proxy explores what would happen if wealthy transgressors rigged a system of debt and credit to avoid punishment for their crimes and instead made the poor (known as proxies) receive the punishment instead. London also pushes cultural boundaries: Proxy and Guardian‘s main character, Syd, is gay, which makes him unusual as the star of a science fiction series geared for young adults. As a result, London has received an outpouring of fan mail from young people seeking advice. “It’s been very touching to see kids who might not otherwise be drawn to explicitly queer books … find their way to Proxy,” he says. Because the books are primarily thrillers, some kids, especially those living in conservative communities, feel safer reading them than gay-themed books that focus on romance or coming out, he explains.

“I’ve been getting letters from a lot of actually straight boys writing about their friends and wondering how they can be better allies. Those are my favorite,” London says.

Related link:

–Keep track of Alex London on his website and tumblr

Spoiler alerts:

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Guardian (Proxy Book 2)

One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War

Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions.

In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows.

Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world where astronomy and astrology harmonize once again. The novel centers on two best friends (both astrologers), who conspire to raise their children (both astronomers) so that when they encounter each other as adults, they fall hopelessly in love.

All this takes place in the shadow of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, a “world renowned Mecca of learning and culture” that’s as fanciful as Netzer’s fictional Toledo, a city where “astronomers and mathematicians walk arm in arm down the street and discuss philosophy and cosmology,” she explains in her New Books interview.

For Netzer, writing is an opportunity to explore every cranny of her imagination. “Every time you write a book, you go into your kitchen and get everything you made, every dish in the oven, everything in the refrigerator, bring it all out, put it on the table because you might not get the chance to write another one, and you just want to say everything you can possibly say,” she says. “Holding back for me is a big mistake.”

Among the many topics Netzer addresses in the interview are lucid dreaming, which figures prominently in the novel. While her some of her protagonists gain mastery over their dreams, Netzer, in her own life, has met with less success. “One time … I was able to move a crate of lettuce closer to me in a dream grocery store, which was incredibly disappointing as an outcome. ‘Oh, you’ve managed to control your subconscious, and all you’re going to do is make it easier to buy produce.'”

She also discusses the various iterations of How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky, including a first draft without dialogue. “It was terrible, and I don’t have that draft anymore. Thankfully a very kind friend helped me to not share it with anyone else.”

Other topics include the mysteries of memory, the differences between first and second novels, homeschooling, and much more.

Related Link:

Follow Lydia Netzer on her website and her Facebook page.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Before Apollo 11, there was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Before the Internet, there was Mark Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904.

In other words, before the appearance of many spectacular technologies, a writer imagined it first. This truth underscores one of science fiction’s abiding strengths: its ability to test concepts, both technological and social, without spending vast sums on research and development.

The editors and writers behind Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (William Morrow, 2014) think many science fiction writers in recent years have lost their way in this regard. As evidence, they point to the proliferation of what Hieroglyph co-editor Kathryn Cramer calls “tired dystopias.” Rather than provide “cautionary tales that show us what to avoid,” she explains in her New Books interview, these novels use “dystopias as furniture”–backdrops for a plot centered on a central character’s adventures.

In contrast, Hieroglyph seeks something different. “We’re asking for a science fiction that actually addresses problems and tries to solve them,” Cramer says. “And what they [the authors of the 17 stories in Hieroglyph] thought of were the problems is almost as interesting as what they think the solutions are.”

Among the topics Cramer covers in her interview are how she overcame her initial skepticism about the Hieroglyph initiative, how she and co-editor Ed Finn selected the writers included in the volume, and how the authors worked with scientists and researchers at Arizona State University to postulate plausible technologies based on current scientific understandings.

Don’t forget to follow New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy on Facebook and Twitter, post a review on iTunes, and follow host Rob Wolf on Twitter and his blog.

Here are some links related to the interview:

Read more about Project Hieroglyph on its website.
Hieroglyph was inspired in part by Neal Stephenson’s essay “Innovation Starvation“. It was originally published by the World Policy Institute and now serves as a preface to the collection.
Cramer uses the term “neo-Gernsbackian,” which refers to Hugo Gernsback, who published the first science fiction magazine.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future

What does it take to be an emperor?

That question is at the heart of Brian Staveley‘s debut novel The Emperor’s Blades (Tor, 2014).

In this first of a projected trilogy, Staveley focuses on three siblings. They are the children of the assassinated emperor of Annur, a descendant of the Goddess of Fire whose irises look like flames.

Kaden, the designated heir, has spent the last eight years training in far off mountains with monks. He’s physically strong and he’s learned to withstand deprivation. He’s also an expert at drawing pictures, capturing images perfectly in his memory and suffering the abuse of his never-satisfied teachers without complaint. But is he ready to take on the responsibilities of emperor, a position that will require him to hold together alliances, manage a large-scale bureaucracy, and foster the admiration of citizens on two continents?

In his interview on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Staveley describes the three types of tension that power good storytelling: psychological, social, and environmental. “If you’re writing a mountaineering story,” he explains, “the psychological tension might be one character’s fear of heights, and the social tension might be that two of the characters on the expedition hate each other, and then the environmental tension would be that there are constant avalanches trying to destroy them. And I think the stories I like … combine all three of those.”

Staveley also discusses how his experiences teaching ancient history, world religion and comparative philosophy to high school students helped him with world-building, his method for keeping track of his numerous characters and storylines (lots and lots of Word files), and the difficult task his characters face of separating myth from historical fact.

Staveley’s vision is enormous. Not only is The Emperor’s Blades itself intricate and multi-layered, but the author had originally envisioned writing seven books. His editor at Tor limited him to three, and Staveley expects to wrap up the series (known as the Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne) with the final installment in 2016. But with four books on the chopping block, readers can expect eventually to hear more about the world in which these events take places.

“The world is a large place,” he says. “There are always other stories to tell.”

You can learn more about Brian Staveley via his website.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Emperor's Blades: Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, Book I

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Science Fiction: 101 (Roc, 2014) isn’t just an “exploration of the craft of science fiction” as its subtitle says; it’s also about the impact the stories in this anthology had on the imagination of a young boy.

That boy was Robert Silverberg, who was so inspired by the stories he found in pulpy magazines with names like Startling and Thrilling Wonder that he vowed he would one day become a science fiction writer himself.

He sold his first science fiction story in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia and never looked back. But lest anyone think the job of writer is easy, one of the messages of Science Fiction: 101 is that “hard work rather than superior genetic endowment is the basic component of most writers’ success.”

The collection contains 13 stories, most of which were published in the 1950s and from which Silverberg, in essays accompanying each story, draws lessons about the art of storytelling. The anthology was originally published under a different name in 1987 but has been out of print until this year when Roc re-issued it.

In his New Books interview, Silverberg touches on, among other things, his relationship with Isaac Asimov. At first, he knew and admired Asimov from his writing. But eventually, they became not only good friends but collaborators on several books, including the novelization of Asimov’s famous short story “Nightfall.”

Ever present in the interview are reminders of the wonder Silverberg felt as a boy reading science fiction. That wonder is all the more poignant now that Silverberg is in the autumn of his career (he says he doesn’t plan to publish any new novels although hasn’t ruled out writing an occasional essay or short story). “Science Fiction: 101 is aimed for the people who, like me, like Isaac [Asimov], like Ray Bradbury were beginners once.”

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Science Fiction: 101: Exploring the Craft of Science Fiction

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented characters, made-up dialogue, the filling in of vague or unknowable events and personalities. Through the more or less careful manipulation of historical truth, the novelist seeks to uncover a deeper emotional truth that speaks to both the reality of a past time and the needs of the present.

Before and During (Dedalus Books, 2014)–Vladimir Sharov's exploration of Soviet life and the revolutionary movement that preceded it, skillfully translated by Oliver Ready–pushes historical invention to its limits. Set in a Moscow psychiatric hospital circa 1965, the novel follows a patient identified only as Alyosha as he pursues his self-assigned quest to create a Memorial Book of the Dead, à la Ivan the Terrible, by recording the life stories of those around him and people of importance in his own past. One fellow-patient, Ifraimov, launches into a long and fantastical account of reincarnation, philosophy, revolution, free love, and incest that sweeps from Mme de Staël and Lev Tolstoy to Lenin and Stalin–assiduously recorded by Alyosha.

As Sharov's English-language publisher puts it, "Out of these intoxicating, darkly comic fantasies–all described in a serious, steady voice–Sharov seeks to retrieve the hidden connections and hidden strivings of the Russian past, its wild, lustful quest for justice, salvation, and God." It's quite a ride. But if you love Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, this book's for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Before and During (Dedalus Europe)

Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to gods and options for shareholders.

As he explains in the podcast, Gladstone traces his initial inspiration for his Craft Sequence to, among other things, his several years teaching English in rural China, where he saw children of subsistence farmers grow up to become engineers and international bankers. “The thought that that’s really the kind of range that exists in the modern world sort of blew my mind open,” he says.

When he came back to the U.S., Gladstone experienced a kind of culture shock. “Coming back to billboards and advertising campaigns and bank account statements and all of that was this huge shock so I was forced to fall back on interpretive tropes from fantasy and science fiction … to grok it all.”

Another influence on his writing was the financial collapse of 2008 where the image of governments and banks rushing to salvage failing investment firms inspired him to write about necromancers trying to resuscitate dying gods.

Also in the podcast, Gladstone discusses his affinity for female protagonists, the role numbers play in the titles of his books, the risks of hidden bias in world-building fiction, and his new text based game Choice of Deathless.

For more about Gladstone, visit his blog here.

Here are links to some of people, books and things mentioned in the podcast:

Author Ramez Naam.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Author Hannu Rajaniemi.
The Borders of Infinity by Lois McMaster Bujold
The quotation about escape from Ursula K. LeGuin comes from her book The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. The quote is cited in a post on The Tolkienist about escapism as an elevating quality of fantasy literature.
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, directed by Sophie Fiennes and written and presented by Slavoj Zizek.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Full Fathom Five: A Novel of the Craft Sequence (Craft Sequence, 3)

Ancillary Justice

Borders of Infinity

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Strand a man on Mars with only a fraction of the supplies he needs to survive and what do you get? A bestseller.

Andy Weir‘s The Martian (Crown, 2014) has been on a journey almost as remarkable as its protagonist, but instead of surviving on an airless, waterless planet, The Martian has survived the inhospitable environment known as publishing, floating near the top of bestseller lists since the moment it was published.

The overall plot is easy to summarize: A manned mission to Mars is scheduled to last 31 days but is aborted in the middle of a life-threatening windstorm. The crew’s botanist-engineer Mark Watney is left for dead as the crew rushes to escape. Watney spends the rest of the book figuring out how to survive while the experts at NASA spend their time figuring out if they can rescue him.

Describing Watney’s strategies for survival are a bit more complicated. Everything that remains from the aborted mission is fair game for Watney’s imaginative repurposing. One by one, he turns the supplies and equipment that had been designed for a month-long sedentary encampment into tools to help him last hundreds of days while traveling thousands of kilometers across an airless, foodless terrain.

Watney turns oxygen to water, sterile Martian dust into fertile Earth-like soil, a vehicle meant for short roving exploration into a cross-country tow-truck; these and other transformations draw on a deep knowledge of science that puts the “hard” in the genre known as hard science fiction.

“I’m pretty nit-picky when it comes to science,” Weir says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview. “What bothers me is when there are blatant science errors [in science fiction]… like when someone takes off his helmet and holds his breath when he’s on the surface of Mars.”

Just as Weir has infused real science into his fiction, his fiction has returned the favor by transforming his real life into the stuff of fantasy. The success of The Martian has allowed him to morph from a writer-hobbyist, who originally self-published The Martian with zero expectation of financial reward, into a full-time author-superstar whose book is being developed for film by Ridley Scott and Matt Damon.

Related links:

Here are links to some things mentioned in the interview:

The Egg, a short story by Andy Weir.
A Talk at Google, in which Andy Weir demonstrates a computer simulation he created to determine the precise route of the Hermes spacecraft in The Martian. The demonstration begins around 14:00.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Martian

History is shaped by cultures interacting either peacefully (through trade or art, for example) or violently, through war or colonialism. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid cultural intermixing–on Earth, at least.

Science fiction is another story. The crew of Star Trek was bound by the Prime Directive, the United Federation of Planets’ regulation that prohibited Starfleet personnel from interfering in the development of alien societies. James L. Cambias explores a similar idea in A Darkling Sea (Tor, 2014), but rather than accept the Prime Directive as an unexamined good, the narrative tackles the issue from a number of fresh perspectives–three perspectives, to be specific.

On one side is a team of human scientists who are trying to study a sentient species under six kilometers of a freezing, alien ocean. On the other side are the Sholen, technologically superior creatures who believe it’s their job to police inter-species interactions. And in the middle are the Ilmatarans, the giant crustaceans (think whale-sized lobsters) who the humans are trying to study.

Is it OK for the humans and the Ilmatarans to interact? The Sholen say no, and prohibit direct contact. This means the humans can only observe the Ilmatarans from afar. Since the Ilmatarans “see” via sonar, the humans coat their vessels and diving suits in radar-proof material in the hopes of remaining virtually invisible.

However, when one of the humans makes contact, all hell breaks loose. The Sholen order the humans to leave the planet; the humans refuse; and the Ilmatarans choose sides.

A Darkling Sea asks important questions amidst a page-turning undersea battle: Is it inherently destructive for a technologically advanced culture (or species) to interact with a less advanced culture? When different societies mix, must some groups necessarily win and others lose? Who defines what’s “advanced” and what’s “less advanced”?

The greatest danger of superior technology just might be the superiority complex that comes with it. In their hubris desire to prevent inter-cultural contamination, the Sholen are unaware that they’re breaking their own rules. As Cambias points out in the New Books interview:

There is a logical contradiction buried in [the Sholen] attitude because they’re trying to prevent advanced species from meddling with less advanced ones; that means that they, as an advanced species, have to go around meddling with less advanced species.

Also in the interview, Cambrias discusses the challenge (and fun) of inventing the Ilmatarans’ complex society from scratch, how his job as a game designer has both helped and hindered his storytelling, and space piracy, a topic he plans to explore at length in his next novel, Corsair.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A Darkling Sea: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came during a class for students who weren’t reading at grade level. “Part of my job in that class is to get students excited about literature,” she says. But one student remained disengaged despite her best efforts:

I had to call him after class one day and say ‘You actually have to give some of these books a shot. You might like them.’ And he was like ‘I bet you could even write a better book’ than the one we were currently reading. And I said, ‘I’ll take that challenge. Sure. OK.’

She handed the student a piece of paper and asked him to write down 10 things he wanted to see in the book. And then she sat down and wrote it. “That happened when he was a freshman and Virulent was published his senior year. That was a pretty exciting graduation present for him.”

It’s a heart-warming anecdote, one that belies the apocalyptic nature of the novels it inspired. Virulent: The Release, which became the first installment of a trilogy, starts with a bioterrorism attack that kills almost everyone. The story focuses largely on a handful of survivors hiding, and subsequently trapped, in a high school that, as Ms. Wescott explains in the podcast, is remarkably similar to the one in Portland, Ore., where she teaches. The narrative also draws on her experiences as a parent, exploring to what lengths parents might go to save their own children, even if others–perhaps even billions of others–suffer as a result.

On her web site, Ms. Wescott describes herself as “author, mother, teacher” but she could add “publisher,” having published her books independently. In her interview, Ms. Wescott discusses her experiences as an “indie” author and the fast-evolving world of self-publishing.

You can learn more about Ms. Wescott at Shelbi Wescott and Rob Wolf at http://www.robwolf.net/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Virulent: The Release (The Virulent Chronicles)

It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continues at its current pace, what will life be like 50 years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? The further in the future we go, the more we must rely on science fiction writers to help us fill in the details.

In her debut novel Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta takes us to a future where the defining consequence of global warming is water scarcity. But more than a portrait of an environmental apocalypse, Memory of Water is about secrets and their consequences: an authoritarian government’s secrets about the past, a family’s secrets about a hidden source of water.

The book is also about language. Ms. Itaranta, who was born and raised in Finland and now lives in England, wrote Memory of Water simultaneously in Finnish and English. As she explains in her interview with Rob Wolf, this forced her to engage in a heightened deliberation about her choice of each word–a slow and exacting process but one that produced diamond-sharp prose. “It forced me to throw away anything that was unnecessary. It forced me to look at each word and each sentence very closely on an almost microscopic level,” she says.

Ms. Itaranta also talks about her interest in the Japanese tea ceremony and how it provided the kernel around which the book grew, her advice for writers tackling their first novel, her books reception among Finnish-speaking versus the English-speaking audiences, and her aspiration to create a new kind of heroine.

You can learn more about Ms. Itaranta here.

Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Memory of Water: A Novel

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of Southern California is ruled by osteomancers who draw power and wealth from potions derived from the bones of magical creatures. In his conversation with Rob Wolf, the new host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eekhout discusses, among other things, his interest in myths and magic, the impact of his Dutch-Indonesian heritage on his writing, protagonist Daniel Blackland’s complex relationship with his father, and Eekhout’s use of outlines to plot his books.

This is Rob Wolf’s debut interview as host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. Follow him on Twitter: @RobWolfBooks

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Alternate Universe: Part 1 of Khronos Chronicles

California Bones (Daniel Blackland)

The Escape: Part 2 of Khronos Chronicles

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.” But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.” It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay. Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before. Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles. It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else. LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do. LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all.

According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.” So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own. LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning.

Montaigne asked, “What do I know?” But what if we what we know is nothing? In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing. It’s really something.

NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments

Works of fiction sometimes offer unique windows on society, and so it is with Leah Hager Cohen‘s novel No Book but the World (Riverhead, 2014). The story opens with Ava’s search for answers to how her brother Fred has landed in jail, accused of killing a young boy. Having been raised in a Summerhill-inspired alternative education environment along with Fred, Ava’s memories reconstruct for us the making of Fred’s dissonance with the rule-bound world of late twentieth-century America. Cohen provokes our thinking about education and learning philosophies, parenting, and the practice of law. Deeper still, she probes the tangling of childhood experiences with the memories of them and the emotions evoked by past and present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

No Book but the World: A Novel

What’s made you who you are? It’s a straightforward enough question, one that pops up, more or less and with more or less urgency, in most of our lives. And it’s a question for which most of us have straightforward answers: our families, usually, maybe our teachers, or maybe some important personal event–the death of a loved one, the onset of a disease. Sometimes we may nod toward history: the Depression, the Vietnam War, the attack on the Twin Towers. If we grew up on the South Side of Chicago or came of age on a farm in Idaho, we might see those places as crucial to the adults we’ve become. These are the kinds of things we expect to find in memoirs, that genre that tries to makes sense of our experience, in all its vast buzzing complexity and infinitely baffling richness, and tell us the story of a life.

Not so with Nicole Walker‘s new book Quench Your Thirst with Salt (Zone 3 Press, 2013). Walker has written a memoir of sorts, but one in which she’s invited in all that buzzing and all that bafflement, with the aim not of telling the story of her life, so much as capturing the surprising nature of being alive. Walker takes this question–what makes us who we are?–and looks in places we’d never expect. She finds, for example, that she can’t fully understand how her father’s excessive drinking has shaped her unless she can also understand how water itself shapes us, how it literally is the material we are, and how the water she drank as a child in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah came to exist in a landscape that was once a desert. William Blake may see a world in a grain of sand, but Walker see a self a city’s sewage system, an element of carbon, or the struggle of salmon making their way up a concrete spillway.

Quench Your Thirst with Salt is a mash up and shake up of memoir, social history, nature writing, confession, chemistry, geology, collage, and brave speculation, all brought together by a lively wit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Quench Your Thirst with Salt

In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchased Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, 2012) for my daughter, I think that I’ve re-read it nearly as many times as she has. For more information, check out E.C. Myers’ rave review of the series.

In this podcast, Hatke discusses his training as an artist, the origins and development of the Zita series, and provides fascinating information into how he conceptualizes and produces all-ages graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (Zita the Spacegirl, 2)

Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon and Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one would care about,” it’s been picked up by Simon and Schuster for Canadian and US distribution, and film rights sold to 20th Century Fox. If you have yet to experience WOOL, it’s a recommended must read!

In this interview with Michael Zummo, Hugh shares his approach to writing, his endeavors in self-publishing, the origins of the Wool series, along with what’s coming up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Wool (Silo, 1)

During my first few weeks at college, I concocted one of those dumb ideas that you get when you suddenly have the freedom of an adult without the wisdom of one. My new dorm-mates and I would go undercover, as it were, and spend a day as prospective students at the famous Evangelical college down the road, Bob Jones University.

Since we’d arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, we’d heard all sorts of rumors about Bob Jones: that you weren’t aloud to go out on a date without a chaperon; that the only place on campus men and women could mingle was a giant gymnasium filled with couches, and that you had to keep a couch cushion between you and the other person sitting next to you, presumably to block the demonic energy radiating from his or her genitals. And, as if this precaution weren’t enough, this gym was spotted with lifeguard chairs, in which guards kept a wary eye out for the slightest chastity infraction. We imagined the guards had whistles and Ray-Bands.

So we went and, as you can imagine, found nothing much out of the ordinary. Our tour guides were welcoming, the campus was well-kept, the classrooms and dorms were spacious and inviting, and the student body, far from radiating religious zeal or sexual repression, looked pretty much like the one we’d just left, perhaps a little more friendly. We didn’t see the mythic gymnasium, and no one ran around with a Bible, beating men and women away from one another. We were, of course, disappointed.

As boneheaded as we were back then, I do think our undercover adventure stems from a curiosity shared by many of us who aren’t a part of the Evangelical church: what’s life really like in that community? We might have heard about the alternative colleges and preschools, the prayer circles and the mega-churches, but, really, what’s the appeal? This curiosity is all the more odd given that anywhere from a quarter to over a third of Americans identify themselves as Evangelical, depending on which study you consult. It seems the Evangelical / non-Evangelical divide is just one of the many that currently mark our much divided country.

And now we have Erika Rae‘s new memoir, Devangelical (Emergency Press, 2012). In it, Rae accomplishes a dual feat. She gives those of us outside the Evangelical church a first-hand account of growing up within it–of its values and beliefs, of what it’s like to go to youth group or attend the Evangelical alternative to prom. She even includes a pithy “Guide to Churchese” that gives the Evangelical take on such terms as “Alter Call,” “Christian Alternative,” or “Sexual Immorality” (“If it’s sexual, it’s immoral”). But more importantly, Rae gives us a coming-of-age story, a story that’s at times hilarious and at times poignant. Rae captures that struggle we all know and that may be even harder than fending off the demons that lurk in Ouija boards or rock-and-roll music: growing up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Devangelical

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250,000-odd street lights, block after block, all sprawling westward out of the darkness of Lake Michigan like a dream of Euclidian order. I’m amazed because it’s so unnatural, so not the way we make sense of the places where we live our everyday lives. The grid is the living image of an abstract ideal: that a place can be quantified, cut up, understood, and settled.

The truth is very different, especially in a city like Chicago. Places are wild. Their pasts rear up and reveal themselves; their foundations give way. In all their layered complexity, contradiction, and intractability, places are about as quantifiable as people, a fact Barrie Jean Borich makes explicit in her new book, Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Borich sets out to map not only the city of Chicago and the other places she and her family have lived, but also to discover the hidden geographies in her own skin–the personal and collective histories, the experiences and desires, that make her who she is. The result is a book that’s insightful, lyrically beautiful, and uncompromising in its search for a self as rich as the cities in which she lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Body Geographic (American Lives)

R.S. Belcher‘s first book, Six-Gun Tarot (Tor, 2013), has receive widespread praise in the online reviewing community. It tells the fantasy-western-horror story of a Nevada town, called Golgotha, that is home to an unusual assortment of men and women, spirits and angels, and Lovecraftian waiting to unleash havoc upon the world. Throughout the book, Belcher retains a light touch, but also manages to explore the nature of coexistence among different ethnicities, faiths, and ways of life. On top of this, he juggles the points of view of a wide variety of characters. You should give it a try. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Six-Gun Tarot (Golgotha)

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist who lives in the pacific northwest. His debut novel, Nexus (Angry Robot, 2012), has received an impressive level of positive buzz, including an endorsement from one of our past interview subjects, Alistair Reynolds. Although this is his first work of fiction, Naam is no stranger to writing. His previous book, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement, received the 2005 HG Wells Award for Contributions to Transhumanism. As he discusses in the podcast, he has two books due out in 2013, including Crux, a sequel to Nexus, as well as a non-fiction work about technological adaptation and climate change, entitled The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. I hope you enjoy the interview, which ranges across all of these subjects. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement

Nexus: Nexus Arc Book 1

We all know that iconic scene from the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley Kowalski, played with dopey brutishness by a young Marlon Brando, stands at the foot of a curved iron staircase, eyes upturned, and belts “Stella!” with what Tennessee Williams calls, in his stage direction, “heaven-splitting violence.” We all know it, whether we’ve seen it or not. It’s one of those moments that unmoors from its original context and floats off into our culture at large, showing up in parodies on Saturday Night Live or as good-spirited fun in the Annual Tennessee Williams Stella Shout-Out Competition. It’s what Elena Passarello calls, in her new collection of essays, a “screaming meme–a unit of vocal culture built to replicate and to travel.”

In Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande Books, 2012), Passarello doesn’t merely investigate Brando’s “Stella!” She lives it. In 2011, she became the first woman to win the shout-out.

The volume of Passarello’s “Stella!” is a good measure of her curiosity. Her book takes up sound-centered topics from the rebel yell to the high C, from Judy Garland’s legendary 1961 comeback performance at Carnegie Hall to the chatter of crows. Along the way, we learn about the psychology, sociology, history, physicality, and humor of the human voice, whether its coming Frank Sinatra, Howard Dean, or a ventriloquist’s dummy, and it all amounts to a celebration of the sounds we create. As Passarello writes of Brandon:

“Stella!” proves that you might have wounded someone you love, you might have woken the neighbors, you might have pushed your voice until it sounds cartoonish and alien, but this scream of yours, if it comes from deep enough inside you, it is your best bet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Let Me Clear My Throat: Essays

I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilman’s distinctive settings, themes, and voice. It should surprise no one, in my view, that Thunderer received a nomination for the 2009 Locus Award for Best First Novel and that it also garnered Gilman a nomination for the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award in both 2009 and 2010.

Thus, when I agreed to host New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy I immediately contacted him about a podcast on The Rise of Ransom City (Tor, 2012). As a political scientist who works on state formation and international change I found The Rise of Ransom City as masterful account of the coming of modernity–as refracted through a fantastic setting. As Lev AC Rosen writes of it:

“The Rise of Ransom City continues Felix Gilman’s brilliant deconstruction of the mythology of the American West, putting it back together with magic and mechanics, and creating something so imaginative it seems to punch you in the chest. Narrator Professor Harry Ransom is a compelling voice; a teller of tall tales and showman, but whereas the snake-oil salesmen of the American West sold piss and ink, Ransom has a genuine miracle to sell. He is both liar and totally honest in ways that are sly and funny and sometimes tragic. This is a fantastic story of a war and a life told with incredible humanity and pizzazz, by a narrator who, like the world he inhabits, is bold and colorful and a wholly new sort of magic.”

Interested listeners might also read Johann Thorsson’s interview with Gilman.

A warning: the audio quality of this podcast is on the poor side. I hope that listeners will stick with it nonetheless, as Gilman has fascinating things to say about the themes and ideas at work in The Half-Made World and The Rise of Ransom City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Rise of Ransom City

As a journalist and author I usually work in factual financial news and analysis. Recently however, I have noticed an apparent increase in books that wrap the real financial tumult of our times into a fictional novel, thereby allowing the author to make a personal statement, blend characters and events and mix real truth with fiction.

Before the Barnard Madoff scandal many individuals may not have completely understood the meaning of ponzi. Simply put, in a ponzi scheme a fraud artist creates an illusion of a successful investment and pays returns to investors by using money from subsequent investors, rather than genuine profit actually earned by the investment. The scheme entices new investors with promises of unrealistic returns and needs constant inflows of new funds to keep the fraud in operation.

Charles Ponzi became famous – or infamous — for using the scheme in the 1920’s the technique is actually centuries old. At some point, as with Bernard Madoff the scheme collapses and badly burns many of its investors.

Most often, the victims of a ponzi scheme either swallow their losses or do what they can to regain some of their money through the courts. Ron McCabe took a different approach and wrote a novel entitled Betrayed focussing on the aftermath of the collapse of a ponzi scheme.

Ron McCabe and his wife lost about $1 million in a scheme that supposedly paid investors from the profits of real estate projects in Arizona. In actual fact, investors’ returns – such as they were – came from money flowing in from new investors – the classical ponzi strategy. Overall this particular ponzi scheme took in about 700 investors.

The McCabes lost their million dollars and at the age of 65 Ron McCabe felt it was too late to start anew business to make money so he wrote Betrayed (Telemachus Press, 2012), which focuses on the losses of Wally and Poppy Stroud in a ponzi scheme. As a result, Poppy Stroud commits suicide and Wally sets out to get revenge.

To research the book McCabe talked to about 200 of the 700 investors in the same scheme and created a cast of fictionalized fraud artists and their victims. I will be talking to him form his home in Mexico about his book and I’ll ask him why there seems to be an increase of books that take financial traumas and wrap them into novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Betrayed

In 1997, writer Dinty W. Moore launched a literary journal on a then-novel platform: the World Wide Web. The journal, which he called Brevity, created a forum for works of nonfiction under 750 words in length. Since it’s inaugural issue, Brevity has published hundreds of pieces that thrive on the concision and compression demanded of this genre, its almost haiku-like crystallization of literary art. Brevity has also become the central voice for the genre, one that has its roots in figures such as Heraclitus, Seneca, Montaigne and today includes some of the most interesting writers working in nonfiction. On Brevity’s blog and in its book reviews and essays on craft are discussions and debates about the nature of what, by turns, has been called the mirco-essay, flash nonfiction, or, in William Makepeace Thackery’s term, an “essaykin.” Whatever it’s called, it’s a vibrant and fascinating genre, as Moore himself has shown in his own essays on George Plimpton, Frida Kahlo, and the haunting faces of old men on the streets of Edinburgh.

Moore has brought this expertise and excitement to a new anthology: The Rose Metal Press Guide to Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers (Rose Metal Press, 2012). It includes contributions by twenty-six writers, who each discussion some element of craft–point of view, for example, or the use of research–along with an exercise for practicing this element and an example of an essay that demonstrates it. (And here, by way of full disclosure, I should say that I’m one of the 26 contributors.) The result is both an introduction and exploration of a genre that Moore compare to a forest fire, where, as readers, we’re like smoke jumpers, “one of those brave firefighters who jump out of planes and land 30 yards from where the forest fire is burning.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers

Anthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford University Press, 2012) recounts a fourteenth-century journey across the medieval world, albeit one that was likely written as the result of a voyage through libraries and bookshops. Mandeville (whomever he was – and we talk about this issue in the course of our conversation) offers extended discussions of the “Great Khan” of Cathay and of Prester John’s kingdom in India, peppering his tales with stories of dragons, descriptions of man-eating creatures that were half-hippopotamus and half-human, images of foreign alphabets, and many, many others. Bale’s translation is both fluidly rendered in an easily readable modern English prose, and supported by helpful annotations that situate Mandeville’s stories within a wider historical context, and explain Bale’s choices as a translator in terms of the broad range of printed and manuscript editions of Mandeville’s text. Over the course of our conversation we spoke about some especially memorable moments in the book, as well as Bale’s approach to rendering this fascinating but challenging work. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford World's Classics)

Blue Remembered Earth (Gollantz, 2012) takes place roughly 150 years in the future. Climate change, as well as the political and economic rise of Africa, have transformed the planet. Humanity is colonizing the solar system. Geoffrey Akinya, grandson of a visionary businesswoman, cares most about his scientific work with elephants. His sister, Sunday, pursues the life of an artist in an anarchic commune on the moon. But their grandmother’s death sets in motion an interplanetary treasure hunt with the potential to change humanity’s future.

Alastair Reynolds‘ latest book has received much critical praise; there’s a sense among some science-fiction writers and fans that Blue Remembered Earth marks an important development in the genre itself. Whatever readers may think of it, Reynolds is a gregarious and fascinating interview subject, and I’m very pleased that he agreed to record this podcast.

Alastair Reynolds was born in 1966 in Wales. He holds a PhD in Astronomy and worked at the European Space Agency. His novel Chasm City won the 2002 BSFA, and nearly every one of his novels has been shortlisted for a major award. Reynolds is probably best known for his Revelation Space series. He is currently working on a sequel to Blue Remembered Earth and a Dr. Who novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Blue Remembered Earth

Amy Peterson is a five-year old self-replicating android who lives with her synthetic mother and human “father.” Her struggles might be that of any super-intelligent youngster whose body and mind mark her as different than her schoolmates, but then her grandmother, Portia, appears at her kindergarten graduation and attacks her mother. Amy’s intervention leads to a startling result: she eats her grandmother and, in doing so, stores a self-aware fragment of Portia within a memory partition. She soon learns that Portia has a peculiar trait–she lacks the failsafe the prevents Vns from harming human beings. Now Amy must flee for her life while discovering the truth about herself and her inheritance.

vN: The First Machine Dynasty (Angry Robot Books, 2012) is Madeline Ashby‘s debut novel. Ashby is a strategic foresight consultant based in Toronto. She holds a masters degree in anime and manga writes on related subjects at io9, BoingBoing, and Tor.com. Her background and skill transform what might have been a straightforward work of Speculative Fiction into a provocative rumination on objectification, commodification, and the politics of difference. Peter Watts, author of Blindsight, describes Vn as picking up “where Blade Runner left off” and writes that “vN might just be the most piercing interrogation of humanoid AI since Asimov kicked it all of with the Three Laws.” I agree, and am considering assigning vN in my “Politics and Speculative Fiction” course. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

vN (Machine Dynasty Book 1)

Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a world scarred and depleted my magical wars. The Architects, who oversee the City, maintain it by harvesting the non-renewable magical energy found in each of the city’s inhabitants. But something goes wrong on Lark’s “Harvest Day,” and she soon finds herself on a quest to find safety outside the City’s walls–where the disappearance of magic has rendered the landscape a wasteland full of sadness and danger.

Skylark (Carolrhoda Books, 2012) is Meagan Spooner‘s debut novel, and the first installment of a planned trilogy. Spooner manages to weave a fresh and clever tale out of familiar elements, and her flair for blending darkness and light makes for a very enjoyable read. She also has some very interesting things to say about young-adult fiction, its place in SF and F, and about the transition from unpublished author to holding contracts for multiple books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Skylark

“D.B. Jackson” is David B. Coe’s pen name for his new historical-fantasy series, The Thieftaker Chronicles. Thieftaker (Tor Books, 2012) centers on Ethan Kaille, a private detective and conjurer, as he investigates a murder in colonial Boston. David, who received a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University before embarking on a career as a novelist, weaves in plenty of period details and historical personages into an alternate Boston where conjuration is real, albeit suppressed by the authorities. David maintains a page of resources for those interested in his well-researched setting. He also is a co-founder of, and co-writer for, a blog dedicated to assisting aspiring speculative-fiction and fantasy authors with all aspects of the craft.

Theiftaker has met with excellent reviews, so I wasn’t surprised to find that I enjoyed it a great deal. David proved a terrific interview subject. I contacted him on a whim, and he was very generous to agree despite the channel not even existing at the time. I was saddened to learn, however, that not only was there no actual conjuration in eighteenth-century Boston, but no thieftakers worked there either.

Writing under his own name, David has published the LonTobyn Chronicle–a trilogy that received the Crawford Fantasy Award as the best work by a new author in fantasy–as well as the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands quintet and Blood of the Southlands trilogy. He has also written the novelization of director Ridley Scott’s movie, Robin Hood. David’s books have been translated into a dozen languages. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Thieftaker (The Thieftaker Chronicles)

I met Ken MacLeod when we participated in a sequence of “Science Fiction and International Orders” panels at the London School of Economics in the winter of 2011. Ken is an important figure in his own right, as well as someone who has contributed a great deal to the Speculative-Ficiton community through, among other things, cultivating the talents of other writers. He’s also an incredibly nice guy. All of these traits explain why he was one of the first people I approached about doing an interview for the channel, and the first to agree.

As I hope comes through in the interview, I found The Night Sessions (Pyr, 2012) both fun to read and intellectually stimulating. It centers on DI Adam Ferguson as he investigates the murder of a priest in a near-future Edinburgh. Following the “Faith Wars” of the early twenty-first century the world has experienced a “Second Enlightenment” and aggressive secularism enjoys intellectual and political hegemony. But not every soul, whether organic or mechanical, is happy with this state of affairs….

Ken has an Honours and Masters degree in biological subjects and worked for some years in the information-technology industry. Since 1997 he has been a full-time writer, and in 2009 was Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at Edinburgh University. He is the author of thirteen novels, from The Star Fraction (1995) to Intrusion (Orbit, 2012), and many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Night Sessions

In our very first fiction-book interview on New Books in Secularism, we chat with Alyson Miers, author of Charlinder’s Walk (CreateSpace, 2011). In this adventure secularism-themed novel, Miers introduces us to Charlinder, a curious and daring young man who lives in the year 2130. The world he lives in is vastly different from the one we know today. Due to a plague that swept the earth and killed most of its inhabitants in 2010, Charlinder lives in a time where modern technology is gone, communities are isolated from each other, and surviving winter is once again a struggle. Why the earth succumbed to such a devastating plague over 100 years because is a cause for tension in his village of Paleola. On one hand there are those called the Faithful, who argue that the plague was God’s punishment for the evil deeds of human beings, whereas the rest of their small population is skeptical. Worried about rising disagreements and what it means for his village – Charlinder sets out on a world trek to find out the truth, with very surprising consequences.

It is difficult to put this book down once you start reading it, as Miers is very adept at transporting us into a world that is hard to imagine – a world without most of us in it.

Miers’ blog is called The Monster’s Ink, and she is also on Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Charlinder's Walk

Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing history is fine as far as it goes. It does, however, have a significant drawback: it limits the historian’s ability to tell the truth–not the truth of “facts,” but the truth of stories. Facts are facts; stories have meaning. Most history books are full of facts; yet many lack stories, and necessarily so. As a practicing historian, I can tell you this situation is very frustrating. We know that sometimes the facts are just not enough, but there is nothing we can do about it within the confines of our discipline.

There are historians–if that’s what they are–who just can’t stand these restrictions. They want to tell historical stories, and they do. They write “historical fiction” and, as a rule, they get very little respect in the literary or academic worlds. I doubt most of them are bothered. Why should they be? Historical fiction is remarkably popular: thousands of titles appear each year and those titles are read by millions of readers. Who cares if literary journals and professional historians poo-poo historical fiction? People love it.

Once in a great while, however, a book comes along whose truth is so powerful that even the literary critics and professors take notice. Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream (Greywolf Press, 2012) is such a book. It contains more “truth” about the Soviet project than an entire library of “serious” novels and dry-as-dust histories. If I had to recommend one book on the Soviet Union to someone who wanted to understand it, Red Plenty would be it. Read it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Red Plenty

In this installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earliest and greatest legends of all time: Homer’s epic story of the siege of Troy, called “The Iliad.” It’s a story of god-like heroes and blood-soaked battles; honor, pride, shame and defeat. In this interview, we dissect a key scene in “The Iliad,” where Hector and Achilles are about to meet in battle. Athena is also on hand, and she plays a crucial if underhanded role, with the grudging approval of her father, Zeus.

And Nagy is the perfect guide to this classic tale. He’s the director of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, as well as the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard. We spoke in his office at Widener Library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

If a mother raises her biologically male child as a daughter instead of a son, what would be the effects on the family, the community, the church? Indeed what would be the psychosocial, psychoemotional effects on the daughter once she discovers she’s a “he”? And what would all this reveal about the mother? What’s more, would the male-daughter’s brothers, father, friends come to agree with gender philosopher Judith Butler and accept the prevailing academic wisdom that gender and sex are social constructions, discourses that inform how we perform our lives? Or would they agree with some conservative Christian groups that a boy is a son. That’s how God made him, and that’s that! End of story. And what if the male-daughter is African American? What would race reveal about the social dynamics of gender in America?

Novelist Daniel Black deftly explores the above questions and so much more in his lyrical new novel Perfect Peace (St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Not to give too much away, but Perfect is the name of the male-daughter; Peace is her family name. For seven years, she’s a girl. At age eight, she is told she’s a boy. What ensues disturbs the Peace family and the black Southern community where they live. Yet Perfect learns lessons that Daniel Black believes America as a whole must learn to face.

There is never a dull moment in this intense interview. The discussion with Daniel Black is just as engaging as his fascinating novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Perfect Peace: A Novel

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books Network!)

Poet Nikky Finney’s new book Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) has made an immediate splash, receiving well-deserved critical acclaim from the literary world and wide attention from the reading public. Although her book has only been out a few months, it has already been widely reviewed, with Finney featured on the cover of the prestigious literary journal Poets and Writers.

Finney is among the who’s who of writers, a poet about whom Nikki Giovanni says, “We all, especially now, need.” And yet Finney is unpretentious, caring, and inspirational. All this is illustrated in her interview for New Books in African American Studies, where she discusses the autobiographical impulse behind the book’s title, pays homage to black womanhood, worries about black boys, and she speaks on her love of love, of life, of words, of laughter. Finney is deep. And while that description might seem trite, think metaphorically, think still waters. There is much to mine in both Head Off and Split and in this interview.

Finney has a generous spirit, giving much of herself to the world. But don’t be fooled. She doesn’t give all away. She reserves a little for herself, hones her spirit, cultivates it, as any good writer would. Then she lays some aesthetics on it, on what she has kept for herself, and blesses us, the world, when we’re ready. That’s what she has done in her latest volume. Enjoy it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Head Off & Split: Poems