New Books In Literature

It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place—first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships—every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them. Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters (Grove Press, 2024) is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of

On this episode of NBN, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Griffin and Governor General Award winning poet, Tolu Oloruntoba, whose highly-anticipated poetry collection, Unravel, was released by McClelland & Stewart in spring 2025. A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world. More about Tolu Oloruntoba: TOLU OLORUNTOBA was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the Un

Monsters, in all their terrifying glory, have preoccupied humans since we began telling stories. But where did these stories come from? In Monsterland: A Journey Around the World’s Dark Imagination (Scribe, 2025), award-winning author Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth — giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons — all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify. His far-ranging adventure takes him across the world. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, travels to an eighteenth-century Balkan vampire’s forest dwelling, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. On his travels, he discovers that the stories of the people and places that birthed them are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves. Artfully written, Monsterland is a spellbinding interrogation into why we need these monsters and what they can tell us abo

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London. When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elem

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. I had decided I was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might entail, I understood writers lived in New York. From the start, Kusy’s seemed the perfect place for a budding writer looking for life experience, a singular, endlessly entertaining circus. When I interviewed Red, my old boss at Kusy’s in October of 2013, the first thing he said was, “I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the fucking sto

The itinerary of Faithfully Seeking Franz comprises an irregular quest for dead mentor, modernist author Franz Kafka--in places he lived, worked, vacationed and convalesced, and in the body of work he left: fiction, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence. The search for the man inside the writer is both a personal journey and a joint venture of two in the field: E. and M. in pursuit of K. The story might even be said to unfold as a love note to triangulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood. Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes

Poems by and biographies of inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual in the face of extreme suffering. The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the midst of the horror, some inmates turned to poetry to provide comfort, to preserve their sense of humanity, or to document their experiences. Some were or would later become established poets; others were prominent politicians or theologians; still others were ordinary men and women. My Shadow in Dachau: Poems (Camden House, 2014) contains 68 poems by 32 inmates of Dachau, in 10 different original languages and facing-page English translation, along with short biographies. A foreword by Walter Jens and an introduction

Memory Feather, who was born with a misshapen hand and was able to communicate with animals, looks back to when she was a child living with her newly divorced mother in a dilapidated hotel far from home. Her mother, Virginia cleans rooms and turns occasional tricks to support Memory until 1953, when she’s forced to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town where her difficult, bigoted parents live. Much to their disdain, Virginia’s childhood friend Mac welcomes Mem and her mother to live with him and offers Virginia a job in his antique store. As a gay man in the 1950s, Mac suffers harassment and violence, and even Memory’s cat Minerva knows that the good-looking hustler who’s moved in with Mac is evil. Mem recalls her anxiety, her fears, and her role in the series of events that changed her life forever. Minrose Gwin is the author of The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been publishe

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) about their phenomenal debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books, 2021), which won the 2022 ReLit Award for Poetry. With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places More about Charlie Petch: Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa's Children,

Michael David Lukas speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “More to the Story,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Michael talks about his writing process for the essay, which began when a dark family mystery moved him to research a side of his family he’d never learned much about. He also discusses the revision stages of the piece, which included adding in details of the other side of the family—his mother’s parents—who were Holocaust survivors. We also talk about his time as a nightshift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and the new novel project he’s working on now. Michael David Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 2018, the Sami Rohr Prize, and France’s best foreign novel prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street J

In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to bestselling author Donna Besel about her staggering memoir, The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family (University of Regina Press, 2021) which has been hailed as “a shattering story and an essential one, told with consummate honesty and courage.” —Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives The Unravelling is a brave, riveting telling of the destruction caused by sexual assault within a family, and the physical, psychological, emotional, financial, and legal tolls survivors often shoulder. Donna Besel offers an honest portrayal of the years-long police process from disclosure to prosecution that offers readers greater insight into the challenges victims face and the remarkable strength and resilience required to obtain some measure of justice. More about The Unravelling: It’s the antithesis of why a wedding should be memorable. In 1992, at a sister’s nuptials, Donna Besel’s family members discovered that their father, Jock Tod, had molested their youngest

NBN host and CanLit fangirl extraordinaire Hollay Ghadery speaks with rob mclennan about his collection of stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024). This contains a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations. About rob mcle

Today I spoke with Ronald Okuaki Lieber about his new book, The Long Journey Out (Resource Publications, 2023) These poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, And Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure from "psychedelic journey work.” Throughout the collection, Lieber (who lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of his life as an army brat) is a master of mise-en-scène; each poem located somewhere more or less specific. The vicissitudes of the specificity change to meet the reader on the journey out. For me, this is movingly demonstrated in what I interpret as the central poem on the journey, Gare Montparnasse: The Melancholy of Departure, read beautifully by Lieber in the interview. Gare Montparnasse is a specific point of departure. The train, however, will not stop in our small provincial village.” Where is the village? The reader gets to decide. Lieber considers his poems “as children” and would like to know how they’re doin

Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future. Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen. Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk. Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life. A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the

Shortlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, All the Colour in the World by CS Richardson tells the story of the restorative power of art in one man’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’20s and ’30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Richardson about this extraordinary novel. Henry, born 1916, thin-as-sticks, nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler—copying illustrations from his Boy’s Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, eight-year-old Henry receives as a gift his first set of colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). As he commits these colours to memory—cadmium yellow; burnt ochre; deep scarlet red—a passion for art, colour, and the stories of the great artists takes hold, and becomes Henry’s unique way of seeing the world. It is a passion that will both haunt and sustain him on his journey through the century: from boyhood dreams on a summ

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk. But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray’s Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master’s from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children’s magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurs

In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery chops it up with poet Rob Winger about his collection, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant by Rob Winger (McClelland & Stewart, 2021). This is an astonishing collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context. How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be? Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voya

Shahd Alshammari’s Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in. As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memory, disability, and movement. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Shahd Alshammari about her creative process, her personal journey with multiple sclerosis, as well as how her writings explore illness, wellness, and the search for meaning. Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disabi