New Books In Literature

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media. These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination. In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together. Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its ince

Terena Elizabeth Bell's Tell Me What You See (Whisk(e)y Tit, 2022), is a collection of ten experimental short stories about coronavirus quarantines, climate change, the January 6th invasion on the US Capitol, and other events from 2020-2021. Written in both word and image, pieces from the collection have been called "​​inventive and topical and fresh, emotional, chaotic, and important" by The McNeese Review and "timely, relevant, and interesting" by The Missouri Review. Title story "Tell Me What You See" is a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) City Artist Corps winner. 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 flash of modern warfare (Ukraine? Afghanistan? Vietnam? Poland? Hiroshima? Israel? Gaza?), a mother loses her child. She becomes "A Trojan Woman," compelled to embody every iconic character in Euripides’ classic play. Sara Farrington (Playwright) NYC & NJ based playwright, screenwriter, co-founder of Foxy Films, her theater company w/ Reid Farrington. 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 spotlight is on the literary magazine The Threepenny Review. I’m joined by the magazine’s founding and current Editor, Wendy Lesser. Wendy Lesser is the author of twelve nonfiction books and one novel; her latest book, entitled Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, came out from Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2020. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and many other institutions, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her journalistic writing about literature, dance, film, and music has appeared in a number of periodicals in America and abroad. Born in California and educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley, Lesser now divides her time between Berkeley and New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a

Charles Holdefer's new short story collection, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) weaves together ten stories that connect through America's pastime. Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth’s cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein’s secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven? From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination. Holdefer sends readers into extra innings with this satirical and heartfelt collection.  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 Stephen Schottenfeld about his new novel This Room Is Made of Noise (U Wisconsin Press, 2023). Don Lank is a newly divorced handyman who spots an imitation Tiffany lamp in the front window of a house and offers the elderly owner $800 for it. He’s shocked by the price he gets and returns to give 95-year-old Millie most of the money. While he’s there, he offers to do a couple of repairs in her deteriorating house, and over the course of the next few weeks and months, spends more and more time with her fixing her house, taking her to doctors’ appointments, buying her grocers, and slowly beginning to oversee her care. He’s also trying to repair his relationships with his father, his ex-wife, and his stepchildren. He’s not sure why he’s helping Millie, but struggles to focus on being altruistic and not merely greedy. Stephen Schottenfeld is the author of two Bluff City Pawn (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). His short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, The Virgini

Today I talked to Heather Redmond about her new novel Death and the Visitors (Kensington, 2024). In this second Regency-era mystery featuring Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the sixteen-year-old heroine (still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at this point in her life) and her stepsister and close lifetime companion, Jane Clairmont, are facing even greater penury and discomfort than in the first book, Death and the Sisters (2023), as a result of their parents’ profligacy and the absence of Mary’s older half-sister, banished to Wales because of her excessive attachment to the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and thus unable to help Jane and Mary with their chores. The girls live in a run-down house in a disreputable London neighborhood not far from Newgate Prison and the Smithfield meat market, where they spend their days watching their parents’ bookshop. Their father, an illustrious political thinker and writer, doesn’t earn enough to support five children and a wife. As a result, he has fallen in

Christie Hodgen is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel Boy Meets Girl, which won the 2020 AWP Award for the Novel. Her short fiction and essays have been included in dozens of literary journals and have won two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is the editor of New Letters. A sense of place looms large in the first essay discussed in this episode, “Disintegration” by Karen Fisher. Her job in the hinterlands of east New Orleans involves recycling, hogs that wander around and a boss who is equally beastly as he threatens to fire her. Wrestling for control of her circumstances is tough for the author, in a place that writes “off neglect as charm.” In “On Emptiness” by Joyde Dehli, a poetic sensibility shines. Fear is in the air, as Dehli notes that in response one can flee, fight, freeze or faint, to which might be added a fifth option: fawning, which the author does beautifully over a world that defies definition. In “Right Now

It's November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn't particularly happy in his job but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the deserted swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won't come out. A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most (Little, Brown, 2024) masterly breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. Jessica Anthony is the author of three previous books of fiction, most recently the novel Enter the Aardvark, a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. A recipient of the Creative Capital Awar

Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy. The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn why Shanghailanders’ core family is just so dysfunctional. In this interview, Juli and I talk about Shanghai, her decision to write the book in reverse chronological order, and what we gain when those from a non-white perspective write about expatriates. Juli Min is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University, and she holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She was the founding editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and served as its fiction editor from 2016 to 2023. You

Today, I interview Zoë Bossiere about Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir (Abrams Press, 2024). Bossiere is writer from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, as well as the coeditor of two anthologies: The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance. Today, we talk about their debut memoir, in which Bossiere captures their experience growing up as a trans boy in a Tucson, Arizona trailer park. It's a world that the young Bossiere both loves and longs to escape and it's one brought to life through utterly keen and compelling storytelling. Cactus Country is a book I love, a book I've shared countless times, a book full of hard-won wisdom. It's shown me what it means to be more fully and beautifully human. Enjoy my conversation with Zoë Bossiere. 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 Casey Plett. Plett is the author of multiple works of fiction, including the story collection A Dream of a Woman, the novel Little Fish, which was a winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Amazon First Novel Award in Canada, and and the story-collection A Safe Girl to Love, also a winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Today, we talk about her new book, On Community (Biblioasis, 2023), which explores the idea of community as a word, a symbol, and a very messy, very human experience of which we're all, in one way or another, a part. Enjoy my conversation with Casey Plett. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner's son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens. Jacob "Jake" Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake's right-hand man. By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy (U Iowa Press, 2024) combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of T

"In this tango palace everything was swaying rhythmically to and fro, bodies of men and women, beams of colored light, brilliant wine glasses, red and green liquids, slender fingers, pomegranate-colored lips, and feverish eyes. Tables and chairs, together with the crowd of people, cast their reflections on the center of the shiny floor. Everyone was under a powerful magical spell and lost in this enchanted palace."  Enigmatic, mesmerizing, and frenetic, Urban Scenes (Cambria, 2023) takes readers into the dazzling world of Shanghai in the 1920s. This collection of short fiction by Liu Na’ou (1905–1940) — a Taiwanese-born modernist writer — contains stories that take place in cinemas, art studios, and nightclubs. Touching on issues of modernity, social change, and shifting ideas of love, romance, and beauty, these tantalizing stories are accompanied by a thoughtful Introduction and helpful notes by the translators, Yaohua Shi and Judith Amory.  This collection is sure to appeal to those interested in modernist

In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the post civilised life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction. One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Dr. Paul

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples" the Greens. At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations. Today I talked to Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown, 2024). Nolan was born in Waterford

Kate Brandes' new novel, Stone Creek (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2024) introduces readers to Tilly and Frank Stone. Seventeen years ago, after living as a fugitive, Tilly Stone (then, age 13) is left to fend for herself in remote Pennsylvania when her infamous eco-terrorist father disappears under mysterious circumstances. She tries to forget the dams they blew up together and forge a new life until her father’s return threatens to upend her small-town world and her friendship with the dogged FBI agent still pursuing him. Ultimately, as the past and present detonate and blow up with more than one kind of casualty, Tilly must choose between the father she loves, the truth, and her home. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Fierce and unflinching, Rochelle Potkar's poetry springs from the deeply personal and ripples out to the world, capturing lovers' whispers and reverberations of explosions with equal ease. Vividly depicting love, grief, anger, and defiance, these poems glimmer like coins beneath the water surface, tethered with the weight of wishes clinging to them. As sensuous as it is articulate, Coins in Rivers (Hachette India, 2024) is a deep meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and citizenship. 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 novel The Siege of Burning Grass (Solaris, 2024) is set during an ongoing war between two empires: Varkal and Med’ariz and follows Alefret, a founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance who has been arrested and imprisoned by his own country. When the opportunity for freedom presents itself, Alefret must decide how willing he is to collaborate with his government’s war effort and how much he is willing to sacrifice to remain committed to his own ideals. In this interview, Mohamed describes the long history of violent responses to pacifist movements and some of the influences that went into writing a war novel. She discusses the relationship between education and war, the role of community in forming political movements, and the strengths of speculative fiction as a genre. We also chat about medical experimentation, wartime propaganda and cool science fiction technology.  The Siege of Burning Grass is a grounded and empathetic novel about the cruelties of war. It was a great joy to discuss it with

It's another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother's home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she's contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button. Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother's lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, th