New Books In 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 co

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 behi

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 Ri

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,

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 set

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 r

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

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

"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 i

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

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.

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 Literatu

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/

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 Burea

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, li

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." Da

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 Zachari

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

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.

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