New Books In Literature

Today I talked to Jessica Stilling about her new novel After the Barricades (DX Varos, 2023). After her mother dies in a tragic accident, Anna cleans out her closet and finds a striking painting that she’d never seen before. She also finds a trove of letters from Stefan Terre, a name she’s never heard. She travels to Paris for work and also to learn more about her mother, Bethany, who studied at the Sorbonne in 1968. That was a year of student protests and labor strikes by students and workers demanding better pay, workplace safety, and a more equitable society. Bethany never told Anna about her affair with Stefan, a Romanian Jew who survived the Holocaust, became a painter, and was working as a waiter when she met him in Paris. Now it’s 2019, and Anna wants Stefan to tell her about how her mother once wanted to change the world. Jessica Stilling earned a BA from the New School and an MFA in Creative Writing from the City University of New York. Before she published After the Barricades, she published The Wea