New Books In Literature

"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

Catherine Segurson is the founding editor of Catamaran. She’s a painter, videographer and creative writer who graduated from the Master of Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Prior to founding Catamaran 12 years ago, she worked at both Zeotrope and ZYZZYVA literary magazines. California-based Catamaran focuses often on the life of the artist, and even more frequently on nature and the environment. The first of the essays discussed in this episode is “What Would Odysseus Do?” by Melanie Faranello. Her psychiatrist father, a Greek man, was always urging his patients to be bold and take on risks. His daughter, the author, does likewise by daring to write her dad imaginative letters as a girl, supposedly seeking his clinical advice. In “Ten Charms Against the Future” by Steve Wing, the first five vignettes offer examples of what each of the five senses offer in appreciating nature. Sight and sound remain vital as this sensual essay ends with the author’s whispering the word “shel

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with

In Ruchama Feuerman's novel In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (Open Road Media 2024), Isaac, a lonely, heartbroken New York haberdasher, moves to Jerusalem after he’s jilted by his bride-to-be and his mother dies. He stumbles into a job as the assistant to a famous kabbalist and spends his days helping the elderly man and his wife dispense wisdom and soup to the troubled souls who come into their courtyard. Isaac crosses paths with Tamar, a newly religious young American woman desperate to find a spiritually connected husband, and Mustafa, a physically deformed Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount. Isaac doesn’t realize that simply being kind to the janitor will change both their lives. Because of that kindness, Mustafa gifts Isaac with an ancient, discarded piece of pottery that he found in the garbage pile on the Temple Mount. His gift lands Isaac in jail and puts Mustafa in danger. Tamar is the only person Isaac knows who can help avert a disaster. First published in 2014, In the Courtyard of the Kab

A. J. Rodriguez speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Papel Picado,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. A.J. talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores a fraught moment in the life of a Latino high schooler struggling under the pressures of family, friendship, and expectation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A.J. also discusses how his writing has changed over time, and why he’s always writing toward not just a specific character’s experience but also the complex community of a place. A. J. Rodriguez is a Chicano fiction writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Kerouac Project. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades, judged by Jonathan Escoffery. His fiction also appears in 

Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something deeply personal. She became fascinated by the concept of loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art. Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures (404 Inklings, 2024) is part memoir, part meditation on the many faces of death – from sprinkling ashes across the globe, to the power of horror movies, the complexities of engaging in true crime entertainment, and the vital communities of peer support groups – Happy Death Club is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person’s journey through grief, and what lies beyond.  This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the A

Ronald Spatz is the editor-in-chief and co-founding editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. A formal National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Mr. Spatz has been recognized with Alaska State Governor’s Awards in Humanities and the Arts. He is currently a full professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he also served as the founding Dean of the University Honors College and Undergraduate Research & Scholarship and as the Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. Ronald Spatz’s abiding goal for Alaska Quarterly Review is to be innovative, risk-taking, and truth-seeking, all virtues born out during this interview and by the four essays discussed here. In “Hungry Ghost” by May-lee Chaie, a cascading series of misogynistic and racist acts within the family have contributed to a devastating degree of low self-esteem. The essay confronts the emotional abyss that plagues all concerned. In “Once” by Michael Bogan, the fairy-tale like qualities of a teenage r

In Christian Collier's debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir--a poem like "Beloved," whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides

Kendra Sullivan's latest book of poetry, Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds. Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and coleads the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initi

John Kuligowski is a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at Prairie Schooner and also currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He worked as an assistant editor for volumes 392 and 394 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography and has published in a number of venues both online and in print. Zainab Omaki is likewise a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at the magazine and has writings in Callaloo, The Rumpus, LA Review and elsewhere. Her novel-in-progress has funding both abroad and from the Nebraska Arts Council. Like John, she’s a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Prairie Schooner has a long legacy, stretching back to 1928, making it arguably the country’s longest continuous literary magazine. In this episode, the focus is on essays from two recent issues, beginning with “Summer Blues” by Hantian Zhang. For anyone who ever read William Gass’s medication, On Being Blue, this will serve as an interesting sequel. The theme or mood is signaled by the Portuguese word “saudale,”

Anthony Di Renzo's Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023) is the most audacious guide to Rome you will ever read. Pasquino, the city’s witty talking statue, will introduce you to the gallant heroes and grotesque villains, humble peddlers and flamboyant nobles, whores and saints and movie stars who have reigned throughout its turbulent history. Life in Rome is a carnival! Let its joy melt in your heart like gelato. Anthony’s previous books include Trinacria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily, Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America, and Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity. He teaches writing at Ithaca College. Recommended Books: John Keahey, Following Caesar  Chris Holmes writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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

Jim Hicks is the Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst, and a translator of literature from Italian, French, Spanish, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. His latest book is Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer. Shailja Patel is the Public Affairs Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a poet, essayist, and theatre and visual artist. She is the author of Migritude. The Massachusetts Review generally focuses on the world at large, versus personal essays. Indeed, as Shailja Patel says in this episode, the magazine is about “freedom writing” that necessarily creates some discomfort in readers as tough topics get tackled. In this case, that billing fits well “An Introduction to Exile” by Oz Johnson, where religious conversion means we’re hearing from a Filipina Jew teaching herself about the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways her rabbi wishes she wouldn’t. In turn, in “Roe: Telling the Tale” by Joyce Avrech Berkman, we encounter a historical framing tha

Daughters of Shandong (Berkley Books, 2024), the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three daughters abandoned by their wealthy family in soon-to-be Communist China. It is 1948, and Chairman Mao’s forces have moved into Shandong Province, driving the Nationalist Army into retreat. Although the town of Zhucheng is small and rural, the Ang family owns a palatial estate, built by generations of government officials and scholars. Even before the war turns against them, the family has little use for its eldest daughter-in-law, Chiang-Yue, who has produced three daughters but no sons. The family lives by the ancient Chinese proverb “Value men and belittle women,” so even though its second son does have a male heir, that child’s existence cannot redeem Chiang-Yue in her in-laws’ eyes. When the Communists approach, the other family members, including the girls’ father, flee. The narrator, Li-Hai, stays behind with her mother and sisters—ostensibly to keep eith

Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, each with a different conceptualization of time. In one, time is circular, and people are destined to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, time stands still. In yet another, time is a nightingale, trapped by a bell jar. Translated into over thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians and artists around the world. In poetic vignettes, Alan Lightman explores the connections between science and art, creativity and the rhythms of life, and ultimately the fragility of human existence. This conversation includes Alan Lightman (MIT), Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Annette Martínez-Iñesta, of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM), and Joshua Chaparro