New Books In 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

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

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 Universit

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

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

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 c

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

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

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

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 morta

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-hear

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, an

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 hist

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 work

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: Storyte

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 prese

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

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 Awar

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. In

“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 sig