New Books in Literature Podcast

David Wellington, "The Last Astronaut" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Last Astronaut (Orbit, 2019), David Wellington turns his prolific imagination—which is more often associated with earthbound monsters like zombies, vampires, and werewolves—to the threat of ...

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J. Robert Lennon, “See You In Paradise” (Graywolf Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J. Robert Lennon is a novelist, actually–better known for his longer work (Mailman, Familiar, Happyland). His most recent book, though, collects his short stories from the past 15 years: See You In...

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jayy dodd, "The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus" (Nightboat Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If the prompt is “respond to a myth of Narcissus using thoughtful, meditative poems,” then jayy dodd gave us a beautiful answer. In The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus (Nightboat Books, 2019), jayy ...

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Mary Meriam, Lillian Faderman, Amy Lowell, “Lady of the Moon” (Headmistress Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Lady of the Moon (Headmistress Press, 2015), the reader is graced not only with the poetry of Amy Lowell, but with sonnets in response and a scholarly essay on the poet’s life, love, and work. A...

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C. W. Gortner, "The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna" (Ballentine Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

101 years have passed since the murder of the Imperial Family of Russia at Yekaterinburg, but their appeal has not diminished. Indeed, interest in the Romanovs is at a historic high as television ...

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Courtney J. Hall, “Some Rise by Sin” (Five Directions Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The reverberations of Henry VIII’s tumultuous reign continued to echo long after the monarch’s death. England teetered into Protestantism, then veered back into Catholicism before settling into an ...

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Rachel Stolzman Gullo, "Practice Dying" (Bedazzled Ink, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Stolzman Gullo Practice Dying (Bedazzled Ink, 2018) is about twins, David and Jamila, who seek meaning and connection from opposite ends of the world. Just as she turns 30, Jamila falls in l...

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Anders Carlson-Wee, “Dynamite” (Bull City Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On ...

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Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The story of where we come from is such an important aspect of our personal sense of self, the forefront of many conversations about national identity, community, and belonging. In a country like t...

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Jane Lindskold, “Artemis Invaded” (Tor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At a time when science fiction is more likely to portray ecosystems collapsing rather than flourishing, Jane Lindskold‘s Artemis series is an anomaly. Its eponymous planet is not an ecological disa...

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Miryam Sivan, "Make it Concrete" (Cuidono Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For twenty years, 47-year-old Isabel Toledo has been ghostwriting the stories of Holocaust survivors. It's the mid 1990's, Isabel is divorced from the father of her three children and in precarious...

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Ryan Ridge, “American Homes” (University of Michigan Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should re...

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Adrienne Celt, "Invitation to a Bonfire" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zoya Andropova—soon to be known in her adopted country as Zoë Andropov—didn’t ask to be rescued from her Soviet orphanage, even after the arrest of her father, a strong supporter of the very regime...

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Melinda Snodgrass, “Edge of Dawn” (Tor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common? Answer: Melinda Snodgrass. The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. Bu...

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Eliot Peper, "Breach" (47North, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The massive corporation at the center of Eliot Peper’s Analog trilogy, which he completed last month with the publication of Breach (47North, 2019) is radically different from most science fictiona...

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Abeer Hoque, “The Lovers and Leavers” (Fourth Estate, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her first novel, The Lovers and the Leavers (Fourth Estate, 2015), Abeer Hoque undertakes a literary challenge that I suspect even the most seasoned writer would find daunting: how do you tell t...

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Sharon Shinn, "Echo in Onyx: Uncommon Echoes" (Audible Studios, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brianna, our narrator, is the daughter of a country inn-keeper. Her quick thinking and compassion during a job interview earn her a coveted position as lady’s maid for Lady Marguerite, the daughter...

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James L. Cambias, “Corsair” (Tor Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future. Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead ...

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Christopher Rea, "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hoaxes! Jokes! Farces and fun! Cristopher Rea's China’s Chaplin (Cornell University Press, 2019) introduces the imagination of Xu Zhuodai (1880–1958), a comic dynamo who made Shanghai laugh through...

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Peter Oberg, ed., “Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep” (Affront Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking ...

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Nina Boutsikaris, "I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych" (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I’m talking with Nina Boutsikaris. Her new book is called I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). And if you’ve ever said those words—I’m trying ...

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Porochista Khakpour, “The Last Illusion” (Bloomsbury USA, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks. “The big...

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John Sibley Williams, "As One Fire Consumes Another" (Orison Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Sibley Williams’ As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Books, 2019) presents a familiar world full of burnings carried out on both the grand and intimate scale. The newspaper-like columns of pr...

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Mark Ehling, “River Dead of Minneapolis Scavenged by Teens” (New Carriage, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’re a reader, then you know the joy of discovering books. You also know that some of those discoveries stand out. Yes, there’s the pleasure of finding a good book. And there’s even those rare...

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Reema Zaman, "I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir" (Amberjack, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since its inception in 2017, the viral #MeToo movement has called more cultural attention to abusive behavior, creating a much-needed public space for women to speak up about the violence they have...

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Ferrett Steinmetz, “Flex” (Angry Robot 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome...

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Kate Harris, "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" (Dey Street Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Harris — writer, scientist, and extreme cyclist – talks about the trip she made with her friend Mel, tracing Marco Polo’s route across Central Asia and Tibet. The journey is the subject of Har...

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Meg Elison, “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife” (Sybaritic Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it. First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Sci...

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Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Too often keeping patients alive gets in the way of helping them as they approach death. Dr. Pauline Chen shares her experiences as a medical student and transplant surgeon and how they’ve shaped t...

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Ken Liu, “The Grace of Kings” (Saga Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them al...

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Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories" (Small Beer Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vandana Singh has made a career of studying both hard science and the far corners of creativity. It’s no surprise then that Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), which was ...

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Michael Gorra, “The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany” (Princeton UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from ...

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Anne Cushman, "The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood" (Shambala, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sutra is the Sanskrit name for a short spiritual teaching, and it comes from the same root as the English word suture, or stitch. This story of motherhood as a path to awakening is, says yoga and m...

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David Hull (trans.), Mao Dun, “Waverings” (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work...

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Tsering Döndrup, "The Handsome Monk and Other Stories" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A series of stories ranging from two-page narrative excerpts to 90+ page novellas, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories (Columbia University Press, 2019), translated by Columbia PhD student Christop...

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Jennifer Marie Brissett, “Elysium, or the World After” (Aqueduct Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the surviv...

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Ana Johns, "The Woman in the White Kimono" (Park Row Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Naoko Nakamura is only seventeen when she falls madly in love with an American navy man. It’s 1957, and the US occupation of Japan has ended just a few years before, leaving bitter memories in the ...

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Rod Duncan, “The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter” (Angry Robot, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past. In The Bullet-Catcher’s...

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Ariela Freedman, "A Joy to Be Hidden" (Linda Leith Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s the late 1990’s and Alice Stein is a grad student in New York City. Her father died the previous year, leaving her mother with 8-year-old twins to raise. Alice is in charge of looking in on he...

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Ben H. Winters, “World of Trouble” (Quirk Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unrav...

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Audrey Schulman, "Theory of Bastards" (Europa Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explo...

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Kameron Hurley, “The Mirror Empire” (Angry Robot, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. He...

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Chelsea Biondolillo, "The Skinned Bird" (Kernpunkt Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve ever flipped a large rock over to see what was underneath and encountered dark sludge, the movement of insects, and the stirring of your own fascination, then you know something about the...

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Alex London, “Guardian” (Philomel, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee sh...

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R. F. Kuang, "The Poppy War" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rin, an orphan raised by a family that treats her badly, is no Harry Potter, despite the superficial similarities. No kindly wizards await her; there are no summons from a cute feathered familiar. ...

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Lydia Netzer, “How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky” (St. Martin’s Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions. In the seventeenth century, the paths of these...

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Julie Zuckerman, "The Book of Jeremiah" (Press 53, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie Zuckerman’s moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah (Press 53, 2019), tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler—the son of immigrants, brilliant po...

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Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn, “Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future” (William Morrow, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Before Apollo 11, there was Jules Verne’s novel From the Earth to the Moon. Before the Internet, there was Mark Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904. In other words, before the appe...

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Sally Wen Mao, "Oculus" (Graywolf Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem fol...

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Brian Staveley, “The Emperor’s Blades” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does it take to be an emperor? That question is at the heart of Brian Staveley‘s debut novel The Emperor’s Blades (Tor, 2014). In this first of a projected trilogy, Staveley focuses on three...

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Hilary Plum, "Watchfire" (Rescue Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examine...

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Robert Silverberg, “Science Fiction: 101” (Roc, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science Fiction: 101 (Roc, 2014) isn’t just an “exploration of the craft of science fiction” as its subtitle says; it’s also about the impact the stories in this anthology had on the imagination of...

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Caitlin Starling, "The Luminous Dead" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caitlin Starling’s debut The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019) takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabi...

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Oliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historical fiction, by definition, supplements the verifiable documentary record with elements of the imagination. Otherwise, it is not fiction but history. These elements often include invented ch...

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J Mase III, "And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, and Inappropriate Jokes About Death" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his own description of his book, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, & Inappropriate Jokes About Death, J Mase III writes, “Feel free to scream directly in...

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Max Gladstone, “Full Fathom Five” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Full Fathom Five (Tor, 2014) the third and most recent novel in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, features dying divinities and depositions, idols and investments, priestesses and poets, offerings to...

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Ann Weisgarber, "The Glovemaker" (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When a strange man knocks on Deborah Tyler’s door one January evening in 1888, she faces a difficult decision. She can guess that her visitor is a criminal, because who else would travel to her iso...

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Andy Weir, “The Martian” (Crown, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Strand a man on Mars with only a fraction of the supplies he needs to survive and what do you get? A bestseller. Andy Weir‘s The Martian (Crown, 2014) has been on a journey almost as remarkable as...

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Patricia Leavy, "Spark" (The Guilford Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, I talked with Patricia Leavy on her new book, Spark (The Guilford Press, 2019). The book is a highly original novel about an unexpected yet extremely fruitful journey of a sociolog...

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James L. Cambias, “A Darkling Sea” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

History is shaped by cultures interacting either peacefully (through trade or art, for example) or violently, through war or colonialism. There doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid cultural intermix...

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Meg Elison, "The Book of Flora" (47North, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meg Elison’s The Book of Flora (47North, 2019) trilogy is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse. The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnam...

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Shelbi Wescott, “Virulent” (Arthur Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came d...

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Susan Smith Daniels, "The Genuine Stories" (New Rivers Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Genuine Storiesis a linked collection centered around Genevieve “Genuine” Eriksson, a woman with an uncanny ability to heal people. Her gift begins to unfold at the age of eight despite the lin...

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Emmi Itaranta, “Memory of Water” (Harper Voyager, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continue...

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Elsa Hart, "City of Ink" (Minotaur Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If there is one thing more fun than discovering a new (to oneself) author, it is discovering a new author with a series already well underway. In City of Ink (Minotaur Books, 2018), the third of El...

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Greg van Eekhout, “California Bones” (Tor Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of ...

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Frances Donovan, "Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore" (Reaching Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Grey Held writes of Frances Donovan's book, Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore (Reaching Press 2018 ), "there is hunting for love, there is basking in love, there is longing." This collection offers al...

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Eric LeMay, “In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments” (Emergency Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.” But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “...

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Jennifer Acker on the Importance of Food in Fiction (And Animals!) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sunil Chandaria is struggling to write his PhD dissertation in philosophy at Harvard University. He feels his father’s disapproval because he didn’t become a doctor, and his mother’s disapproval th...

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Leah Hager Cohen, “No Book But the World” (Riverhead Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Works of fiction sometimes offer unique windows on society, and so it is with Leah Hager Cohen‘s novel No Book but the World (Riverhead, 2014). The story opens with Ava’s search for answers to how ...

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Anand Prahlad, "The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir" (U Alaska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story. For the first four years of his li...

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Nicole Walker, “Quench Your Thirst with Salt” (Zone 3 Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What’s made you who you are? It’s a straightforward enough question, one that pops up, more or less and with more or less urgency, in most of our lives. And it’s a question for which most of us hav...

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Kelly J. Beard, "An Imperfect Rapture" (Zone 3 Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Many of you listening to this now probably recall growing up in a household of faith. You may have fond memories of the familiar rituals, the holidays, the shared family values. A weekly service at...

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Ben Hatke, “Legends of Zita the Spacegirl” (First Second, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchas...

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Stephen Hough, "The Final Retreat" (Sylph Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018) is a debut novel of Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist and composer. The novel narrates a story of a priest Joseph Flynn, who undergoes a deep ...

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Hugh C. Howey, “Wool” (Simon and Schuster, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos ...

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Sara Tantlinger, "The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes" (StrangeHouse Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes (StrangeHouse Books, 2018), Sara Tantlinger intertwines fact and speculation to examine inner workings of H.H. Holmes, a man who committed g...

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Erika Rae, “Devangelical” (Emergency Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During my first few weeks at college, I concocted one of those dumb ideas that you get when you suddenly have the freedom of an adult without the wisdom of one. My new dorm-mates and I would go un...

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Madeline Miller, "Circe" (Little, Brown and Company, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Circe is an immortal naiad, the daughter of the Sun God, Helios. Ignored or belittled by her divine kin because of her human-sounding voice, dull-colored hair, and quiet manner, she turns to her li...

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Barrie Jean Borich, “Body Geographic” (University of Nebraska Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250...

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Andrea Miller, "The Day The Buddha Woke Up" (Wisdom Publications, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andrea Miller is the deputy editor of Lion's Roar magazine (formerly the Shambhala Sun) and the author of two picture books: The Day the Buddha Woke Up and My First Book of Canadian Birds. She's a...

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R.S. Belcher, “Six-Gun Tarot” (Tor, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

R.S. Belcher‘s first book, Six-Gun Tarot (Tor, 2013), has receive widespread praise in the online reviewing community. It tells the fantasy-western-horror story of a Nevada town, called Golgotha, t...

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Liza Perrat, "The Swooping Magpie" (Triskele Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lindsay Townsend is doing well at her high school in Wollongong, Australia. She’s pretty and popular and smart enough that she can spend as much time at the beach as she does hunched over her books...

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Ramez Naam, “Nexus” (Angry Robot, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist who lives in the pacific northwest. His debut novel, Nexus (Angry Robot, 2012), has received an impressive level of positive buzz, including an endorsement from o...

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LaTanya McQueen, "And It Begins Like This" (Black Lawrence Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Bl...

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Elena Passarello, “Let Me Clear My Throat ” (Sarabande Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all know that iconic scene from the 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley Kowalski, played with dopey brutishness by a young Marlon Brando, stands at the foot of a curved iron st...

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Rosellen Brown, "The Lake on Fire" (Sarabande Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Against the backdrop of a gritty 1890’s Chicago teaming with labor problems, filthy sweatshops, and putrid stockyards, two young immigrants struggle to survive. Chaya and her brilliant younger brot...

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Felix Gilman, “The Rise of Ransom City” (Tor, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I first learned about Felix Gilman‘s work from the influential academic blog Crooked Timber. I proceeded to read Thunderer, Gears of the City, and Half-Made World and found myself impressed by Gilm...

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Kurt Raaflaub, "The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works" (Pantheon, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (...

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Ron McCabe, “Betrayed” (Telemachus Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As a journalist and author I usually work in factual financial news and analysis. Recently however, I have noticed an apparent increase in books that wrap the real financial tumult of our times int...

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C.P. Lesley, "Song of the Siren" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in t...

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Dinty W. Moore, “The Rose Metal Press Guide to Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers” (Rose Metal Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1997, writer Dinty W. Moore launched a literary journal on a then-novel platform: the World Wide Web. The journal, which he called Brevity, created a forum for works of nonfiction under 750 wor...

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Matthew Binder, "The Absolved" (Black Spot Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Henri is a middle-aged doctor, one of the few employed people left in the U.S, though the reader suspect his job might be in danger. The hospital administrator, Serena, keeps reducing staff. A larg...

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Anthony Bale, “The Book of Marvels and Travels” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anthony Bale‘s new translation of Sir John Mandeville’s classic account is an exciting and engaging text that’s accessible to a wide range of readers. The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford Univer...

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Tade Thompson, "The Rosewater Insurrection" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019) takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to s...

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Alastair Reynolds, “Blue Remembered Earth” (Gollancz, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Blue Remembered Earth (Gollantz, 2012) takes place roughly 150 years in the future. Climate change, as well as the political and economic rise of Africa, have transformed the planet. Humanity is co...

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Allison Coffelt, "Maps Are Lines We Draw: A Road Trip Through Haiti" (Lanternfish Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Allison Coffelt lives and writes in Columbia, Missouri. She works as the director of education and outreach for the annual documentary-based True/False Film Festival, as well as hosting the fantast...

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Madeline Ashby, “vN: The First Machine Dynasty” (Angry Robot Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amy Peterson is a five-year old self-replicating android who lives with her synthetic mother and human “father.” Her struggles might be that of any super-intelligent youngster whose body and mind m...

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Isobel O’Hare, "all this can be yours" (University of Hell Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Isobel O’Hare’s all this can be yours (University of Hell Press, 2019) presents a series of erasures crafted from celebrity sexual assault apologies. These poems offer fierce explorations of the tr...

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Meagan Spooner, “Skylark” (Carolrhoda Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lark Ainsley lives within a near-hermetically sealed city located in a world scarred and depleted my magical wars. The Architects, who oversee the City, maintain it by harvesting the non-renewable ...

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Mike Chen, "Here and Now and Then" (MIRA, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mike Chen’s debut novel Here and Now and Then (MIRA, 2019) is a portrait of patience. The main character, Kin Stewart, waits 18 years for his employer to retrieve him from an assignment. Then, afte...

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D.B. Jackson, “Thieftaker” (Tor Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“D.B. Jackson” is David B. Coe’s pen name for his new historical-fantasy series, The Thieftaker Chronicles. Thieftaker (Tor Books, 2012) centers on Ethan Kaille, a private detective and conjurer, a...

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Kate Quinn, "The Huntress" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we think of World War II, we envision a catastrophe of massive proportions: millions killed in concentration camps, on the battlefield, during bombing raids and in the nuclear explosions that ...

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Ken MacLeod, “The Night Sessions” (Pyr, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

I met Ken MacLeod when we participated in a sequence of “Science Fiction and International Orders” panels at the London School of Economics in the winter of 2011. Ken is an important figure in his ...

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Nicole Walker, "Sustainability, A Love Story" (Ohio State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I’m talking with Nicole Walker, who’s just published a new book about sustainability. In fact, that’s its title: Sustainability, A Love Story (Ohio State University Press, 2018). Now if some...

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Alison Miers, “Charlinder’s Walk” (CreateSpace, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In our very first fiction-book interview on New Books in Secularism, we chat with Alyson Miers, author of Charlinder’s Walk (CreateSpace, 2011). In this adventure secularism-themed novel, Miers int...

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Megan Burns, "Basic Programming" (Lavender Ink, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Basic Programming ( Lavender Ink, 2018), the latest collection by Megan Burns, is an exercise in balance. Between grief and healing. Between humanness and technology. Between examination and accept...

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Francis Spufford, “Red Plenty: Industry! Progress! Abundance! Inside the Fifties Soviet Dream” (Greywolf Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Historians are not supposed to make stuff up. If it happened, and can be proved to have happened, then it’s in; if it didn’t, or can’t be documented, then it’s out. This way of going about writing ...

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Pema Tseden, "Enticement" (SUNY Press 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement(State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s...

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Gregory Nagy on Homer’s “Iliad” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this installment of Faculty Insight, produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School, ThoughtCast speaks with the esteemed Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy about one of the earli...

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James Rollins, "Crucible" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving ar...

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Daniel Black, “Perfect Peace” (St. Martin’s Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If a mother raises her biologically male child as a daughter instead of a son, what would be the effects on the family, the community, the church? Indeed what would be the psychosocial, psychoemoti...

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Caitlin Hamilton Summie, "To Lay to Rest our Ghosts" (Fornite, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An 8-year-old awaits her father’s return from the war. A young man returns home to northern Minnesota for his sister’s funeral. A woman struggles to survive in New York City. Caitlin Hamilton Summi...

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Nikky Finney, “Head Off and Split: Poems” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books ...

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S. J. Hartland, "The 19th Bladesman" (Dark Blade, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A rich and complex world of sword-wielding fighters and seductive sorceresses, written in percussive, lyrical prose. The 19th Bladesman (Dark Blade, 2018) first introduces us to Kaell, the eponymou...

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Micah McCrary, "Island in the City" (U Nebraska Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you read a lot of nonfiction, you may be familiar with what some call the “memoir quandary”—the complaint that memoir and autobiography are too narrowly focused on the writer’s life to be of rea...

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Zaina Arafat, "You Exist Too Much" (Catapult, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem f...

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Pam Jenoff, "The Lost Girls of Paris" (Park Row Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Although World War II has long been a favorite subject in both literature and history, a new interest seems to have developed in the multiple roles played by women during the war. In The Lost Girls...

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Sarah Wisseman, "The Botticelli Caper" (Wings ePress, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Botticelli Caper (Wings ePress, 2019) is set at the Uffizi Galleries during a period, not long ago, when workmen were constantly coming in and out during massive amounts of reconstruction. Flor...

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Yang-Sze Choo, "The Night Tiger" (Flatiron Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set...

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Rebekah Taussig, "Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body" (HarperOne, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body ...

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Marshall Ryan Maresca, "The Way of the Shield" (DAW, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dayne has the highest respect for the order he’s joined, the Tarians. The Tarian warriors adhere to a chivalrous code of honor, though they live in a time period vaguely suggestive of post-Renaissa...

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Lawrence Osborne, "The Glass Kingdom" (Hogarth, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Mullins, an American woman, arrives at the Kingdom: a fading luxury apartment complex in Bangkok. She is there to lay low, after passing over forged collectors’ items in Hong Kong. She meets ...

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Tom Sweterlitsch, "The Gone World" (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes. The book opens with a brutal mu...

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Michelle Cameron, "Beyond the Ghetto Gates" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The intense interest in the horrors of World War II that has characterized the last few years has tended to overshadow other aspects of the long history of Jewish populations in Europe and the anti...

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Stephen Evans, "The Island of Always" (Time Being Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minneapolis environmental attorneys Nick Ward and Lena Grant are no longer partners in law or marriage, but their lives are still strongly intertwined. Nick and his puppet can charm his psychiatris...

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Rachel Genn, "What You Could Have Won" (And Other Stories, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After Henry Sinclair’s supervisor steals his research, he tries to rejuvenate his career by turning his girlfriend into a drug experiment. Astrid is a rising young singer. From her New York City ap...

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Terry Gamble, "The Eulogist" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Olivia Givens and her family leave Ireland in 1819, they have no idea that they are distant victims of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia four years before. They know only that the crops are fai...

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P. Djèlí Clark, "Ring Shout" (Tordotcom, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

P. Djèlí Clark’s new novella, Ring Shout (Tordotcom, 2020) is a fantasy built around an ugly moment in American history—the emergence of the second Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. The story...

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Catherynne M. Valente, "Space Opera" (Saga Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M...

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Deni Ellis Bechard, "A Song from Faraway" (Milkweed Editions, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A young man visits his half-brother in Vancouver and steals a book that changes his life. An archeology student is befriended and brought to Iraq by a brother and sister who need his help in assess...

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Ivy Johnson, "Born Again" (The Operating System, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The poetry and prose in Ivy Johnson’s Born Again (The Operating System, 2018) beautifully dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, this collection gi...

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Lisa B. Thompson, "Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays" (Northwestern UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lisa B. Thompson is equally renowned as a scholar of African and African-American studies and as a playwright. Her latest book Underground, Monroe, and the Mamalogues: Three Plays (Northwestern Uni...

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Shanthi Sekaran, "Lucky Boy" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the ...

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Anne Louise Bannon, "Death of the Chinese Field Hands" (Healcroft House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Anne Louise Bannon heard her husband, then archivist for the City of Los Angeles, speak about how early Angelenos dug a large ditch (a zanja) to cull water from the Porciuncula River (now kno...

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P. K. Adams, "The Greenest Branch" (Iron Knight Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable woman by any standards. Known for her musical compositions and mystical prayers, Hildegard was also Germany’s first recognized...

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Heather Lende, "Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics" (Algonquin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Heather Lende was one of the thousands of women inspired to take a more active role in politics during the past few years. Though her entire campaign for assembly member in Haines, Alaska, cost les...

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Peng Shepherd, "The Book of M" (William Morrow, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow. The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more p...

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Maria Hinojosa, "Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America" (Atria Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maria Hinojosa is an award-winning journalist who, for nearly thirty years, has reported on stories and communities in America that often go ignored by the mainstream media—from tales of hope in th...

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Laura Catherine Brown, "Made by Mary" (C and R Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s 1999, and Ann is a guitar-playing thirty-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of having children even though she was born without a uterus. As Laura Catherine Brown's novel Made by Mary (C an...

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Shakira Croce, "Leave It Raw" (Finishing Line Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like a storm waiting to break over a plain, Shakira Croce pulls at tensions and heartstrings in a debut collection filled with longing, wit, and intelligence. Through masterful imagery, Croce float...

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James Baldwin, "Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was pu...

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Morris Ardoin, "Stone Motel: Memoirs of a Cajun Boy" (UP of Mississippi, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to...

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Bina Shah, "Before She Sleeps" (Delphinium Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018) is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after...

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Jennie Fields, "Atomic Love" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inspired by Leona Woods, the only woman who worked on the Manhattan Project, Atomic Love (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2020) tells the story of Rosalind Porter, a physicist recruited by Enrico Fermi to joi...

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Lauren C. Teffeau, "Implanted" (Angry Robot, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emery, Em for short, is a smart and dedicated college graduate. She anticipates a future in which she, and eventually, her parents, can escape the lower strata of the domed city of New Worth. She h...

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Eshkol Nevo, "The Last Interview" (Other Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eshkol Novo's The Last Interview was published in Hebrew in 2018 and was at the top of Israel’s bestseller list for 30 weeks. It is currently on the short list for the Lattes Grinzano Prize in Ital...

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Erica Trabold, "Five Plots" (Seneca Review Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When you picture the midwestern United States, what do you see? For those who live on either coast, the phrase “flyover country,” might come to mind. Wide open spaces and vast empty plains. Miles a...

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Menna Van Praag, "The Sisters Grimm" (Harper Voyager, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked to Menna Van Praag about her new book The Sisters Grimm (Harper Voyager, 2020)... In a set up reminiscent of the show Orphan Black, four feisty young women struggle to make their way...

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Patrick B. Mullen, "Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music" (U Illinois Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On its back cover, Patrick B. Mullen’s Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music(University of Illinois Press, 2018) is aptly described as “part scholar's musings and part fan's...

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Melissa Valentine, "The Names of All the Flowers: A Memoir" (The Feminist Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Set in rapidly gentrifying 1990s Oakland, this memoir explores siblinghood, adolescence, and grief in a family shattered by loss. Melissa Valentine and her older brother Junior grow up running arou...

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Samantha Silva, "Mr. Dickens and His Carol" (Flatiron Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christmas is not looking bright for Charles Dickens. His latest novel has proven a massive flop, and that upstart William Thackeray doesn’t miss an opportunity to crow. Bills are rolling in, every ...

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Jasper Fforde, "The Constant Rabbit" (Viking, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Jasper Fforde’s The Constant Rabbit (Viking, 2020), residents of the United Kingdom live among human-sized anthropomorphized rabbits. The rabbits make fine citizens—more than fine, in fact. They...

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Laurie Frankel, "This is How it Always is" (Flatiron Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new novel This is How it Always is (Flatiron Books, 2017), Laurie Frankel tells the story of the Walsh-Adams family and how they grapple with the youngest child, the fifth son, who announces...

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Andrew Krivak, “The Bear” (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A cautionary tale of human fragility, of love and loss, The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press) is a stunning tribute to the beauty of nature’s dominion. In an Edenic future, a girl and her father live ...

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Joshua Max Feldman, "Start Without Me" (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Joshua Max Feldman's thoughtful, bittersweet novel Start Without Me (William Morrow, 2017), two strangers meet at an airport restaurant, and through the course of one Thanksgiving Day, help each...

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David Moloney, “Counsel,” The Common magazine (Spring, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writer David Moloney speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Counsel,” which appears in Issue 19 of The Common magazine. “Counsel” is an excerpt from Moloney’s novel-in-stories, Ba...

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Sergio Troncoso, "A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son" (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son (Cinco Puntos Press, 2020) is a collection of linked short stories, which Luis Alberto Urrea called “a world-class collection.” The book won the Kay Cattarulla Aw...

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Nivedita Lakhera, “Pillow of Dreams” (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pillow of Dreams (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) is an intensely emotional and inspirational collection of poetry and art by Dr. Nivedita Lakhera. She experienced a stroke, divorce, and then a heartbreak ...

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Finola Austin, "Bronte's Mistress" (Atria Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems likely that most of our listeners have at least heard of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. Many also know that Charlotte and Emily had two other talent...

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P. K. Adams, "Midnight Fire" (Iron Knight Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most novels about the sixteenth century written in English take place in Italy, France, or England—with the occasional foray into Spain or Portugal. P. K. Adams’ Jagiellonian Mystery series is a we...

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Kate Brandes, “The Promise of Pierson Orchard” (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do families decide when financial relief outweighs the risks of drilling for natural gas on their land? In Kate Brandes’ novel Promise of Pierson Orchard (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2017), a ...

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Evan Winter, "The Fires of Vengeance" (Orbit Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In order to reclaim her throne and save her people, an ousted queen must join forces with a young warrior in the second book of this"relentlessly gripping, brilliant" epic fantasy series from a bre...

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Corey Sobel, "The Red Shirt" (UP of Kentucky, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all hi...

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Anthony Ryan, “The Empire of Ashes” (Ace, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Draconis Memoria series is comprised of a trilogy set in a world where drake (dragon) blood is a prized commodity, the basis of the trading fortune of the Ironship Syndicate. It is a brilliant,...

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Roy G. Guzmán, "Catrachos" (Graywolf Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roy G. Guzmán’s Catrachos (Graywolf Press, 2020) is a stunning debut collection of poetry that immerses the reader in rich, vibrant language. Described as being “part immigration narrative, part el...

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Kelly Harris-DeBerry, "Freedom Knows My Name" (Xavier Review Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Freedom Knows My Name (Xavier Review Press, 2020), Kelly Harris-DeBerry creates the world anew from scraps of memories and rhythm. She bounces between the pages, as well as the accompanying audi...

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Tiffany Quay Tyson, “The Past is Never” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once...

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Mary Cappello, "Lecture" (Transit Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Mary Cappello about her new book, Lecture (Transit Books, 2020). Although I almost hesitate to call it a book. It’s much more—like all great lectures are—a performance, one full o...

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Carly Israel, "Seconds and Inches" (Jaded Ibis Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Carly Israel about her bold new memoir, Seconds and Inches (Jaded Ibis Press). In the opening sentence of her introduction, Israel writes, “My last name, Israel, means one who wre...

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Eliot Peper, “Borderless” (47North) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland? Th...

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Jennifer Valenti, "The Maverick" (Broken Arrow Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Maverick (Broken Arrow Books, 2020), author Jennifer Valenti plugs into the current zeitgeist of young women who struggle to defy the casual sexism of men in power. Jane Valiante is elated w...

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Jessica Gross, "Hysteria" (Unnamed Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“But creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly for they are apt to know a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let ...

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Vernon Keeve III, “Southern Migrant Mixtape” (Nomadic Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press. Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or ...

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Rachel Hall, "Heirlooms: Stories" (BkMk Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“It turns out there are things that cannot be left. The very nature of secrets, for instance, insists that they be kept.” On this episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews D...

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Linda Stewart Henley, "Estelle" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most people think of Edgar Degas as a French painter of ballerinas. But few have heard that his mother came from New Orleans or that he spent five months in that city between October 1872 and Febru...

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Keith Gessen, “A Terrible Country” (Viking, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip...

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Tom Rastrelli, "Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Love, Abuse, and Scandal in the Catholic Seminary" (U Iowa Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tom Rastrelli is a survivor of clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse who then became a priest in the early days of the Catholic Church’s ongoing scandals. Confessions of a Gay Priest: A Memoir of Sex, Lo...

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Tracy Clark, "What You Don't See" (Kensington, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency. When her old CPD friend and partner, Ben Mickerson asks ...

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Dustin Parsons, “Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams” (U Georgia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six ...

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David Adjmi, "Lot Six" (Harper, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lot Six (Harper 2020) is a moving and hilarious memoir from playwright David Adjmi. The book traces Adjmi’s search for his identity, during which he becomes an observant yeshiva student, a club kid...

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Silviana Wood, "Barrio Dreams: Selected Plays" (U Arizona Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Silviana Wood is a legend of Chicano theatre. Through her involvement with Teatro Libertad, Teatro Chicano, and El Teatro Nacional de Atzlán she has created plays where working class Chicanos are c...

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Sam Hooker, “The Winter Riddle” (Black Spot Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you are a young moody woman who likes to wear black, you might well be a witch. Or aspire to be a witch. If you needed a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to behave, you could benefit from picking up...

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Harvey Araton, "Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Harvey Araton’s new book Our Last Season: A Writer, a Fan, a Friendship (Penguin, 2020), reads like a mix between Tuesdays with Morrie and a sequel to his book When the Garden was Eden (which chron...

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Ann Dávila Cardinal, "Five Midnights" (Tor Teen, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann Dávila Cardinal writes stories that thrill you. She writes about lives that face challenge and find a way through, despite the horror that chases them. She writes about Puerto Rico and trauma a...

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Lee Zacharias, “Across the Great Lake” (U Wisconsin Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lake Michigan in 1936 is an essential commercial seaway, one that captains and their crews must cross regularly no matter the season, breaking massive ice floes under the prows of their ships and p...

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Alix E. Harrow, "The Once and Future Witches" (Redhook, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches (Redhook, 2020) begins with the familiar phrase “Once upon a time” but the novel is anything but a traditional fairytale. Yes, there are witches. But th...

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Diane Cook, "The New Wilderness" (Harper, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness (Harper, 2020) is a poignant portrait of a mother and daughter fleeing the polluted cities of a near-future dystopia for a hand-to-mouth existence in the country’s l...

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Shelby Yastrow and Tony Jacklin, “Bad Lies” (Mascot Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Questions about freedom of the press, defamation, libel and slander have been in the news quite a bit lately. Bad Lies (Mascot Books, 2017) tells the story of Eddie Bennison, who is over 50 when he...

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Farzana Doctor, "Seven" (Dundurn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sharifa and her husband Murtuza are spending his sabbatical year in Mumbai with their seven-year-old daughter, Zeenat. While Murtuza teaches, Shari is planning to homeschool Zee, reconnect with her...

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Mark Edward Langley, "Death Waits in the Dark" (Blackstone Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While Arthur Nakai is attending a wake for a man he considered a brother with whom he served in the U.S. Marines, he receives a call from an old friend whose sons have just been murdered. Arthur so...

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John Crowley, “Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr” (Saga Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr (Saga Press, 2017), John Crowley provides an account of human history through the eyes of a crow. The story takes flight in the Iron Age, when the eponymous ma...

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Finishing Your Book When Life Is A Disaster from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish...

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Premee Mohamed, "Beneath The Rising" (Solaris, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Premee Mohamed’s debut novel, Beneath the Rising (Solaris, 2020) came out in March, but don’t call her a new writer. “I find it funny that people refer to people who have just started to get publis...

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Sue Prideaux, “I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche” (Tim Duggan Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like most philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is better known for his ideas than for the life he led. In I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), Sue Prideaux details the events ...

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Sunday Taylor, "The Anglophile's Notebook" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Californian Claire Easton, who writes a magazine column called “The Anglophile’s Notebook,” travels to England to do research for a book about Charlotte Brontë. She’s already in love with England, ...

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Catherine Adel West, "Saving Ruby King: A Novel" (Park Row Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible child...

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Wade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future. Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short ...

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Terry Baum, "One Dyke’s Theater: Selected Plays 1975-2014" (Exit Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Terry Baum’s book One Dyke’s Theater: Selected Plays 1975-2014 (Exit Press, 2019) collects plays and solo scripts from throughout the career of a “slightly world-renowned lesbian playwright.” The p...

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Assaf Gavron, "The Hilltop" (Scribner, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mordantly funny and deeply moving, The Hilltop about life in a West Bank settlement has been hailed as “brilliant” (The New York Times Book Review) and “The Great Israeli Novel [in which] Gavron st...

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Rachel Z. Arndt, “Beyond Measure” (Sarabande Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Our world today is full of algorithms and metrics designed to help us keep up, to keep track, to keep going. New devices, such as the smartwatch, now make it possible to quantify and standardize ev...

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Yehoshua November, "Two Worlds Exist" (Orison Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Yehoshua November's second poetry collection, Two Worlds Exist (Orison Books), movingly examines the harmonies and dissonances involved in practicing an ancient religious tradition in contemporary ...

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Karin Tidbeck, “Amatka” (Vintage, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Karin Tidbeck‘s Amatka (Vintage, 2017), words weave—and have the potential to shred—the fabric of reality. Amatka was shortlisted for the Compton Crook and Locus Awards. A reviewer on N...

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Chantal Bilodeau, "Forward" (Tanlonbooks 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Over the past ten years, Chantal Bilodeau has made a name for herself a playwright singularly dedicated to writing plays about the issue of climate change. These are not dry docu-dramas, but deeply...

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Bernard Cornwell, “War of the Wolf” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As seems appropriate for a character as resourceful, skilled, and self-confident as Uhtred of Bebbanburg, he goes from strength to strength. In addition to a set of bestselling novels, collectively...

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Jack Fredrickson "The Black Cage: A Milo Rigg Mystery" (Severn House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this well-written mystery, The Black Cage: A Milo Rigg Mystery (Severn House Publishers), it’s bitter winter in Chicago, and disgraced crime reporter Milo Rigg wakes up every night dreaming that...

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Leslie Schweitzer Miller, “Discovery” (Notramour Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Giselle Gélis runs into David Rettig at a biblical studies conference, she’s not expecting a life-changing experience. On the contrary, the thought foremost in her mind is escaping the creepy ...

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Madeline Ashby, "ReV: The Machine Dynasty, Book III" (Angry Robot, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writers and readers of science fiction love stories about artificial intelligence, robots, and mechanical beings whose sentience mirrors, matches or exceeds that of humans. The stories stay fresh f...

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John Kaag, “American Philosophy: A Love Story” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. American Philosophy: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) won the John Dewey Prize from the Society for ...

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Bryn Turnbull, "The Woman before Wallis" (Mira Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most modern Americans can identify the names Wallace Simpson and Gloria Vanderbilt. But Simpson was not the first divorced American to win the heart of Great Britain’s future if short-reigned King ...

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Rebecca Roanhorse, “Trail of Lightning” (Saga Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters. Th...

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Melissa Faliveno, "Tomboyland: Essays" (Topple Books and Little A, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writers often evoke the famous que sais-je (“What do I know?”) of Michel de Montaigne, father of the literary essay. Montaigne was known for his deeply exploratory writing about the many overlappin...

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Mira T. Lee, “Everything Here is Beautiful” (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her first novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018), author Mira T. Lee delves into the sometimes troubled but always compelling life of Lucia from the perspectives of her ...

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Yxta Maya Murray, "The World Doesn't Work that Way, But it Could: Stories" (U Nevada Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A trainer of beauty pageant contestants is disappointed after spending a fortune to prepare a beautiful Latina for the Miss USA pageant, only to learn that she harbors a disqualifying secret. A nur...

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Margot Singer, “Underground Fugue” (Melville House, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England. That was also the summer of the London r...

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Satyan Devadoss, "Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There are very few math books that merit the adjective ‘charming’ but Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries (MIT Press, 2020) is one of them. Satyan Devadoss and Matt Harvey have chosen a t...

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Stephanie Elizondo Griest, “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands” (UNC Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely, in conversations public or private amon...

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John DeSimone, "Road to Delano" (Rare Bird Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while gro...

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Rivers Solomon, “An Unkindness of Ghosts” (Akashic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder. That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matil...

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Laura Ruby, "Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All" (Balzer and Bray, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Francesca and Toni are brought to the orphanage when their mother suffers a breakdown and dies, and their father gets involved with a new woman. Their story, set in Chicago of the 1940s, unfolds du...

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Kawika Guillermo, “Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel” (Westphalia Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia...

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Nate Marshall, "Finna: Poems" (One World, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Finna: Poems (One World), his new collection of poetry, Nate Marshall examines the way that pop culture influences Black vernacular, the role of storytelling, family, and place. Marshall defines...

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Tessa Fontaine, “The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts” (FSG, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Who doesn’t remember their first trip to the county fair? The greasy hotdogs and popcorn and cotton candy. The lights and sounds of the seemingly endless games and rides and shows on the midway. Bu...

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Sonya Bilocerkowycz, "On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine" (Mad Creek Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s been a difficult year in America. From plague, to protests, to politics, there have never been so many lives at stake, nor so many questions about the future of our country. Since his election...

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Margo Catts, “Among the Lesser Gods” (Arcade Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Margo Catts’ new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA, discovers she’s pregnant. She considers it to...

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Elsa Hart, "The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne" (Minotaur Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lady Cecily Kay has just returned to England when she encounters Sir Barnaby Mayne. It’s 1703, Queen Anne is on the throne, and London’s coffee houses are buzzing with discussions of everything fro...

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Jacqueline Friedland, “Trouble the Water” (SparkPress, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South C...

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Edward A. Farmer, "Pale: A Novel" (Blackstone, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s 1966, and Bernice’s husband has either died or abandoned her. Her brother Floyd invites her to join him as a servant working for white owners of an old plantation house in Mississippi. Floyd w...

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K.R. Richardson, “Blood Orbit,” (Pyr, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a...

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Erika Rummel, "The Road to Gesualdo" (D. X. Varos, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Italian Renaissance introduced—or reintroduced—many valuable concepts to society and culture, giving rise eventually to our modern world. But it was also a time of fierce political infighting, ...

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Bob Brody, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age” (Heliotrope Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really intere...

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Bill LeFurgy, "Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore"?(High Kicker Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Bill LeFurgy's Into the Suffering City: A Novel of Baltimore?(High Kicker Books), Sarah Kennecott is a brilliant young doctor who cares deeply about justice for murder victims after her own fami...

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Cat Rambo, “Hearts of Tabat” (WordFire Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Cat Rambo‘s Hearts of Tabat (WordFire Press, 2018) is rich in emotions and description, though it revolves around a murder mystery as well. We experience the imaginary port city of Tabat through th...

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Chelsea Wagenaar, "The Spinning Place" (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Spinning Place (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2019), Chelsea Wagenaar explores the power of language—in terms of its possibilities and what it fails to express. As a being with a body in th...

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Nick Dybek, “The Verdun Affair: A Novel” (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The V...

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Chanelle Benz, "The Gone Dead" (Ecco, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A decrepit house in Greendale, Mississippi once belonged to Billie James’s father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when she was four years old. Her mother dies of cancer. Then years lat...

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Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warrior” (Balestier Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just...

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Nancy Thayer, "Girls of Summer: A Novel" (Ballantine Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christina Gessler talks with her friend Nancy Thayer about Girls of Summer: A Novel (Ballantine Books), which was just chosen for O Magazine’s Summer Reading List. Girls of Summer is set during one...

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Tony Romano, “Where My Body Ends and the World Begins” (Allium Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Where My Body Ends and the World Begins (Allium Press, 2017) imagines what it might have been like for one of the survivors of a tragic fire that took place on December 1, 1958, in a Catholic schoo...

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Suri Hustvedt, "Memories of the Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How Do We Write Our Personal History at the Same Time That It’s Written for Us? Today I talked to Suri Hustvedt about this question and others as we discuss her book Memories of the Future (Simon a...

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Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “...

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Jessica Winters Mireles, "Lost in Oaxaca" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After an injury to her hand derails her promising concert career, Camille retreats to her mother’s house and teaches piano to mostly desultory students. The years pass, and she finds Graciela, the ...

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Mary-Kim Arnold, “Litany for the Long Moment” (Essay Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American ...

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Emily B. Martin, "Sunshield: A Novel" (Harper Voyager, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A frustrated prince out to make a name for himself, a mysterious young woman who goes by the name of the Sunshield Bandit, and a prisoner named Tamsin — Emily B. Martin's Sunshield: A Novel (Harper...

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Sharon Solwitz, “Once, in Lourdes” (Spiegel & Grau, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sharon Solwitz‘s novel, Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel & Grau, 2017), is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide, during the summer before their senior yea...

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P. W. Singer and A. Cole, "Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In P. W. Singer and August Cole's groundbreaking book, Burn-In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), an FBI agent hunts a new kind of terrorist through a Washin...

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Martha Wells, “Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries” (Tor, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, bec...

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Ilze Hugo, "The Down Days" (Skybound Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Few science fiction writers have their vision of the future tested upon publication. But that’s what happened to Ilze Hugo, whose novel about a mysterious epidemic, The Down Days (Skybound Books, 2...

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Julia Fine, “What Should be Wild” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“What should be wild” is really asking who should be wild? Simultaneously a plea against the domestication of women, a unique fairy tale, and impressive literary fiction, this novel explores the ta...

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Sohrab Ahmari, "From Fire, by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith" (Ignatius Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Youthful arrogance. Hipster alienation. A lot of reading. A lot of drinking. Struggles to adjust to a land radically different from the one that one has left in youth. Intense wrestling with nearly...

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Sam J. Miller, “Blackfish City” (Ecco, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City (Ecco, 2018), in a teeming metropolis full ...

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Connie Kronlokhen, "So Are You to My Thoughts" (Lightly Held Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So Are You to My Thoughts (Lightly Held Books, 2020 is the seventh novel in a series about the Mikkelson siblings and loosely based loosely on the author’s family. Kronlokken’s earlier novels in th...

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Robert Goolrick, “The Dying of the Light” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018). The house is Saratoga, a colonial-era estate in Virginia th...

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Sarah Knott, "Mother is a Verb: An Unconventional History" (Penguin, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mothering is as old as human existence. But how has this most essential experience changed over time and cultures? What is the history of maternity—the history of pregnancy, birth, the encounter wi...

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M. L. Liebler, “Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond” (Wayne State UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about Detroit music by a diverse group of music...

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Will Thomas, "Lethal Pursuit" (Minotaur, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

London, 1892. Private enquiry agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn have been tasked by the Prime Minister to deliver a satchel to the Vatican. The satchel contains a document desperately desired...

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Daryl Gregory, “Spoonbenders” (Knopf, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.” Then again, who needs Tolstoy when yo...

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "The Age of Phillis" (Wesleyan UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer J. Davis speaks with Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, about The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan UP, 2020), Jeffers’s latest collection of poems centere...

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Kelly Sundberg, “Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Abuse and Survival” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve read the news or been on the internet at all this year, you’ve probably come across the hashtag #MeToo, the rallying cry of a movement aimed at calling out the harassment and abuse men in...

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Maggie Kast, "Side by Side but Never Face to Face" (Orison Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

During the first few stories, we think the book centers on Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor whose parents converted out of Judaism to save him from centuries of oppression. He and his third ...

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Maggie Shen King, “An Excess Male” (Harper Voyager, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of “extra” men who will never find spouses. ...

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Donna Hemans, "Tea by the Sea" (Red Hen Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A new father walks out of the hospital with his day-old baby while the mother recuperates from giving birth. He tells a series of lies and moves houses or countries whenever the truth gets too clos...

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Sandra Allen, “A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia” (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is it really like to have a family member with serious mental illness? Sandra Allen’s unique book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia (Scribner, 2018), addresses t...

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Crissy Van Meter, "Creatures: A Novel" (Algonquin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Going back and forth in time, Evangeline (Evie) recalls the challenges of being raised on a lush island off the coast of California. Her mother has left Evie and her father, and her father raises E...

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Fonda Lee, “Jade City” (Orbit, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts. Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with both internal and external conflicts ear...

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Sarah M. Sala, "Devil's Lake" (Tolsun Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books, 2020), the debut collection by Sarah Sala, is an amalgam of American life. The poems move deftly within a world that is equal parts dangerous, celebratory, subdued, mode...

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Danielle Teller, “All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother” (William Morrow, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Most of us hear the Cinderella story in childhood: a mean stepmother favors her own daughters and controls her hapless husband, turning the sweet and innocent Cinderella into a scullery maid and re...

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Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, "The Story Collector" (Henry Holt, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

On this special kids-at-home episode of the New Books Network, Dr. Lee Pierce (s/t) interviews middle grade reader author Kristin O’Donnell Tubb about The Story Collector (Henry Holt, 2018), the fi...

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James Cook, “Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s” (Unbound, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolesce...

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Barbara Monier, "The Rocky Orchard" (Amika Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sitting on the porch swing at her family’s vacation house, Mazie sees an old woman cutting through the orchard across the way and offers her a glass of water. Before long, they are playing cards ev...

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Douglas Lain, “Bash Bash Revolution” (Night Shade Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to that hypothetical moment when an artifi...

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Eric LeMay, "Remember Me: An Essay" (CutBank 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This, my first podcast for the New Books Network, was a hard one … but, a good one. Listen in, as I talk cancer, parenting, writing, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet with my former professor and mentor, au...

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Ellen Notbohm, “The River by Starlight” (She Writes Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Annie Rushton heads west to keep house for her older brother on his Montana homestead, she expects to leave marriage and motherhood behind her. After all, the husband she walked out on at twen...

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Janie Chang, "The Library of Legends" (William Morrow, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Perhaps in anticipation of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the armistice, or just the reality that the last survivors will not be with us much longer, World War II has dominated the genre of histo...

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Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti, “Low-Fat Love Stories” (Sense Publishers, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti‘s Low-Fat Love Stories (Sense Publishers, 2017) is a collection of short stories and artistic portraits focusing on women’s dissatisfying relationships. What make...

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Tochi Onyebuchi, "Riot Baby" (Tor.com, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby (Tor.com, 2020) tells the story of two siblings—Ella, who is gifted with powers of precognition and telekinesis, and her younger brother Kevin, whose exuberant resistanc...

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Annalee Newitz, “Autonomous” (Tor, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new productivity pill, corporate bosses hire a...

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Frederik H. Green, "Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu: Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic" (Stone Bridge Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Xu Xu (1908-1980) was one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. His popular urban gothic tales, his exotic spy fiction, and his quasi-existentialist love stories full of no...

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David Wanczyk, “Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind” (Swallow Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called Beep Ball, and the players, with the exce...

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Erica Bauermeister, "House Lessons: Renovating a Life" (Sasquatch Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the New York Times, best selling author Erica Bauermeister comes House Lessons: Renovating a Life (Sasquatch Books, 2020). This memoir is about the power of home, and the transformative act of...

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E.J. Swift, “Paris Adrift” (Solaris, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Paris has a way of resisting history, absorbing change gradually instead of being transformed by it. The same can be said of Hallie, the protagonist of E.J. Swift’s Paris Adrift (Solaris, 2018), wh...

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Gabriel Bump, "Everywhere You Don’t Belong" (Algonquin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abandoned by his parents and raised by a strong-willed grandmother and her live-in friend, Claude McKay Love just wants to have friends and fit in at school or on the playground. He faces all the u...

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Koritha Mitchell, ed., “Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted” by Frances E.W. Harper (Broadview Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature. Indeed, throughout much of the twentieth c...

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Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...

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Patrice Sarath, “The Sisters Mederos” (Angry Robot, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There is something almost sweetly Victorian about the new fantasy novel, The Sisters Mederos (Angry Robot, 2018), by Patrice Sarath, which concerns two young sisters enduring misfortune. The openin...

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Alice C. Early, "The Moon Always Rising" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At the dawn of the new millennium, Els Gordon finds herself adrift – she’s in mourning for her fiancé and her father, she’s lost the inheritance of her Scottish Highlands estate, her mother left wh...

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Adrienne Sharp, “The Magnificent Esme Wells” (Harper, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

At six, Esme Wells has never attended school, but she has already learned how to take care of her father: accompany him to the racetrack, load up on hot dogs when asked, and keep an eye open for st...

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Kathryn H. Ross, "Black Was Not a Label" (Pronto, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invite...

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Mur Lafferty, “Six Wakes” (Orbit, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rob Wolf interviews Mur Lafferty about Six Wakes (Orbit, 2017), her novel about murdered clones that received nods for this year’s Philip K. Dick and Nebula awards—and, after the interview was reco...

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Megan E. O'Keefe, "Velocity Weapon" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sist...

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John Richard Bell, “The Circumstantial Enemy” (Endeavour Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We all imagine that, when put to the test, we will end up on the right side of history, however we define it. Nowhere is that statement more true than in reference to World War II. But sometimes pe...

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S. M. Hardy, "The Evil Within" (Allison and Busby, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jim, our narrator, experiences a crisis of conscience in the wake of the possible suicide of his girlfriend. He quits his high-paying job seizing assets for a loan company and moves to a small vill...

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Tim Pratt, “The Wrong Stars” (Angry Robot, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rob Wolf interviews Tim Pratt about his Philip K. Dick Award-nominated space opera The Wrong Stars. Pratt is the author of over 20 novels, picking up a Hugo Award and nominations for the Nebula an...

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Chip Jacobs, "Arroyo" (Rare Birds Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. The original Nick, who starts out working on an ostrich farm, is...

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Claudia H. Long, “Chains of Silver” (Five Directions Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

From the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, the Catholic authorities in Spain and its colonies, including Mexico, took a hard line against the Jewish community. Those who would not c...

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Caridad Svich, "The Hour of All Things and Other Plays" (Intellect Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect Books, 2018) collects four plays by Caridad Svich, a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement playwright. The plays take place in Venezuela, Sub-Saharan ...

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Ryan Wieser, “The Glass Blade” (Kensington, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lean, mean, and a fighting machine. That could describe lovely Jessop, psychologically and physically scarred at the hands of a former Infinity Hunter with the catchy name of Falco Bane. Jessop plo...

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Chris Fleming, "On Drugs" (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'" On Drugs (Giramondo...

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Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of anesthesia in the Ether Dome at Massach...

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Marco Rafalà, "How Fires End" (Little A, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In a sad but loving tribute to his Sicilian-Italian heritage, Marco Rafala’s debut novel How Fires End (Little A, 2019) centers on the haunting legacy of WWII on the people of a small Sicilian vill...

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Jo Woolf, “The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration” (Sandstone Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hello from Gabrielle at the NBN Fantasy and Adventure channel. This podcast will be about adventure, and what could be more adventurous than traveling to a far-away place thats hard to get to, and ...

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Lana Lesley, "Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces" (53rd State, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces (53rd State Press, 2019) is Lana Lesley’s graphic novelization of Lipstick Traces by Austin-based theatre collective Rude Mechs, itself an adaptation of Greil Marcus’ cl...

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Meg Elison, “The Book of Etta” (47North, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Born into a world where men vastly outnumber women, Etta is expected to choose between two roles: mother or midwife. And yet the protagonist of Meg Elison‘s eponymous second novel chooses a third:...

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Laura Lam, "Goldilocks" (Orbit, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact...

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Thomas Mira y Lopez, “The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead” (Counterpoint Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We’ve all participated in the rituals of the dead at some time or another in our lives, going to funerals and wakes, visiting loved ones in cemeteries. Some of us may even have a plan for when we p...

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Janice Hadlow, "The Other Bennet Sister" (Henry Holt, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is well known that the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), which enjoyed at best a modest success during her lifetime, have become ever more popular in the last fifty years or so. They support a ...

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Interview with Australian Poets Leni Shilton and Renee Pettitt-Schipp from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative, Walking with Camels: The Story of Bertha S...

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Martin Shaw, "Courting the Wild Twin" (Chelsea Green, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a lon...

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Robert J. Sawyer, “Quantum Night” (Ace, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Rob Wolf interviews Robert J. Sawyer, the author of 23 novels, about his most recent book, Quantum Night (Ace, 2016). Sawyer is considered, as he puts it, “an optimistic and upbea...

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Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...

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Carla M. Wilson, “Curious Impossibilities: Ten Cinematic Riffs” (Black Scat Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Impossible Conversations: Imaginary Interviews with World-Famous Artists (Black Scat Books, 2015), Carla M. Wilson imagined discussions with (you guessed it) world-famous artists. In this book—C...

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Kevin Miller, "Fight Fight" (Braveship Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this interview we discuss Fight Fight (Braveship Books, 2018), book 3 of the Raven One series. In Fight Fight, former aviator Kevin Miller explores the next big fight in the South China Sea when...

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Gwen C. Katz, “Among the Red Stars” (Harper Teen, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Valentina (Valka) Koroleva and her cousin Iskra share a dream: to fly in defense of their Soviet motherland against the Nazi forces that have launched a surprise invasion in violation of Hitler’s n...

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Archana Venkatesan, "Endless Song: Tiruvaymoli" (Penguin, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the...

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Omar El Akkad, “American War” (Knopf, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Set 50-plus years in the future, Omar El Akkad‘s debut novel American War (Knopf, 2017) has been widely praised, becoming one of those rare books with science fiction themes to make numerous mainst...

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Margaret Randall, "I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Margaret Randall’s new memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was published by Duke University Press in March 2020. Randall, born in New York City in 1936, lived in Mexico, Cuba, ...

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Jason Arnopp, “The Last Days of Jack Sparks” (Orbit, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A modern morality tale lurks under this fast-paced horror novel. Jason Arnopp‘s The Last Days of Jack Sparks (Orbit, 2016) consists of the diary of a fictional character, Jack Sparks, along with a ...

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Matthew Quirk, "Hour of the Assassin" (William Morrow, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After a decade spent protecting public officials, Nick Averose has the unique ability to think like an assassin. Now he works as a red-teamer, who tests security systems to find vulnerabilities. Hi...

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Linda Grover, “Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year” (U Minnesota Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the story of the four seasons of life, from Z...

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Sarah Adleman, "The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes" (Tolsun, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Houston Chronicle’s review of Sarah Adleman’s The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun 2019) praises that the book “dissects the feelings that have been a part of her since her mo...

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David Walton, “The Genius Plague” (Pyr, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Everyone knows that wild mushrooms can be dangerous, but David Walton in his new novel The Genius Plague (Pyr, 2017) raises the dangers to a new plane. While victims of an unusual fungal infection...

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Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, "Starling Days" (The Overlook Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mina completed a doctorate in Classics but can’t find a tenure track position. She earns money by teaching adjunct classes and tutoring in Latin. Mina’s husband, Oscar, who works for his distant fa...

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Angela Davis-Gardner, “Butterfly’s Child” (Random House, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I talked with Angela Davis-Gardner, an award-winning North Carolina-based novelist writing about Japan. Her book Butterfly’s Child (Random House, 2011) depicts the journey of a Japanese Ameri...

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Keren Landsman, "The Heart of the Circle" (Angry Robot, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

dReed Katz is in many ways an ordinary guy. He shares an apartment in Tel Aviv with his best friend, Daphne, works in a coffee shop, crushes on Lee, a green-eyed man from abroad, and dreads family ...

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Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, “Last Christmas in Paris” (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When we first meet Thomas Harding in 1968, he is facing what he believes will be his last Christmas and mourning the loss of an unnamed woman who clearly meant a great deal to him. He carries with ...

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Jaime Baum, "Then She Woke Up" (2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

One summer, Joni Griffith Wexler realizes that she hasn’t paid enough attention to her life. While her sons are at sleepaway camp and her husband immersed in his work, she rushes from one impulsive...

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Becky Chambers, “A Closed and Common Orbit” (Harper Voyager, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rob Wolf interviews Becky Chambers, author of the Wayfarer series. The first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Harper Voyager, 2016), was originally self-published then quickly picked up...

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Tyler Hayes, "The Imaginary Corpse" (Angry Robot, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther...

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Octavia Randolph, “Silver Hammer, Golden Cross” (Pyewacket Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Silver Hammer, Golden Cross (Pyewacket Press, 2017) is sixth in the series of the Circle of Ceridwen series. It begins by exploring the friendship of two young heirs, Ceric, of Saxon descent and Hr...

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Octavia Cade, "Mary Shelley Makes a Monster" (Aqueduct Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of he...

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Mindy Fried, “Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir” (Vanderbilt UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Mindy Fried shares her experiences with providing care for her father at the end of his life. With rich sto...

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Mari Coates, "The Pelton Papers" (She Writes Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton ...

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Michelle Kuo, “Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, A Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship” (Random House, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It takes courage to walk into a classroom when students don’t look like you. It takes courage to return every day to teach a class when students devalue education. Media has portrayed the scenario ...

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Shelly Hoover, "Timeless Sisters: Peace at the River" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in th...

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Dinty W. Moore, “The Story Cure: A Book Doctor’s Pain-Free Guide to Finishing your Novel or Memoir” (Ten Speed Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you’ve ever wondered how your favorite writers go about crafting their written works, or if you’ve ever been interested in writing a book yourself, chances are you’ve wandered into a bookstore o...

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George Scialabba, "How To Be Depressed" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong...

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Stephen Baxter, “The Massacre of Mankind,” (Crown, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In this episode, Rob Wolf speaks with Stephen Baxter, author of The Massacre of Mankind (Crown, 2017), the alliteratively titled sequel to H. G. Wells‘ alliteratively titled classic, The War of th...

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C. Baker and P. Phongpaichit, "From the Fifty J?taka: Selections from the Thai Paññ?sa J?taka" (Silkworm Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The J?taka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the P?li Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In additi...

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Barbary Ridley, “When It’s Over” (She Writes Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors p...

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Mark Haber, "Reinhardt's Garden" (Coffee House Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Carried...

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Judithe Little, “Wickwythe Hall” (Black Opal Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For some reason, books occasionally arrive in pairs—meaning that out of nowhere a topic that has received little attention convinces two or more writers that it is novel-worthy, and those authors p...

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Jake Kaminski, "The Shadow Wolves" (Page Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In his novel The Shadow Wolves (Page Publishing, 2019), Jake Kaminski tells the story of Ethan Crowe, a Lakota Sioux tracker who spent a career with the Delta Forces and the Defense Intelligence Ag...

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Julie E. Czerneda, Ed., “Nebula Awards Showcase 2017,” (Pyr, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Since their establishment, the Nebula Awards have proven a trusty guide to what the next generation will consider a classic. Take for example, the inaugural award for Best Novel, which went to Fra...

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Ken Liu, "The Hidden Girl and Other Stories" (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children. Whether his characters are adjusting to life o...

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Claude Lalumiere, “Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment” (Guernica Editions, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pungently sensual, Claude Lalumiere‘s Venera Dreams: A Weird Entertainment (Guernica Editions, 2017), is a carnal carnival ride, circling around the central conceit. There’s a city-state by the nam...

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Stephen Jenkinson, "Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble" (North Atlantic Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interviewed Stephen Jenkinson. He’s not only an author, an activist, a musician, and the founder of a school, but also an inspired etymologist, a spiritual trickster, and a mythopoetic stor...

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Charlene Ball, “Dark Lady: A Novel of Emilia Bassano Lanyer” (She Writes Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emilia Bassano loves many things: music, poetry, Latin, herbs. Born to a family of Italian musicians living in sixteenth-century London, Emilia benefits from early fostering in the household of a c...

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James Rosone, "Rigged" (Front Line, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In military thrillers, many authors attempt to create plausible conflicts and many come up short, but James Rosone and Miranda Watson's Rigged (Front Line ,2019), Book one of "The Falling Empire Se...

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PJ Manney, “(ID)entity,” (47North, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Artificial intelligence has long been a favorite feature of science fiction. Every robot or talking computer or starship operating system has contributed to our idealized image of the bits-and-byte...

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Carrie Vaughn, "The Immortal Conquistador" (Tachyon Publications, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead, Ricardo found the end of his mortal life, and a new one, as a renegade vampire. For over five hundred years, Ricardo...

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Deborah Parker and Mark L. Parker, “Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy” (U. of Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle...

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K. M. Szpara, "Docile" (Tor.com, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Docile (Tor.com, 2020), the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy. Tor describes the book as a “science fictio...

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Megan Haskell, “Sanyare: The Rebel Apprentice, Vol. 3” (Trabuco Ridge Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rie is a more than a hundred years old, and sometimes she feels like it, even if she looks like any other human girl. After uncovering a plot to create war between the nine realms, she and her frie...

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Maya Rodale, "An Heiress to Remember" (Avon Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As Maya Rodale notes early in this interview, romance novels tend not to get the same respect as other categories of fiction, historical or otherwise. Here, and in her Dangerous Books for Girls, sh...

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Malka Older, “Null States,” (Tor, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Malka Older‘s Centenal Cycle is set in the latter half of the 21st century and yet, like all good science fiction, it speaks to the current moment. Null States (Tor, 2017), the second book in her ...

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Berry Grass, "Hall of Waters" (Operating System, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the Amer...

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Elizabeth Peters and Joan Hess, “The Painted Queen” (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Even a novelist with thirty-five books under her belt would find it difficult to finish someone else’s series, set in a relatively unfamiliar part of the world and a century earlier than the fictio...

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Eliza Griswold, "If Men, Then" (FSG, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eliza Griswold writes in Snow in Rome, "we hate being human,/depleted by absence." In her latest poetry collection, If Men, Then (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), Griswold grapples with a world th...

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Ben H. Winters, “Underground Airlines” (Mulholland Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Underground Airlines (Mulholland Books, 2016) is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we’d like to believe. In an alter...

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Laura Waterman, "Starvation Shore" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attem...

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Beverly Jenkins, “Chasing Down a Dream: A Blessings Novel” (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Blessings Series continue with a heartwarming novel, Chasing Down a Dream (William Morrow Paperbacks, 2017), about what makes a family when trials test relationships. And in Henry Adams, Kansas...

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Sarah Abrevaya Stein, "A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of ...

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Mykola Soroka, “Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mykola Soroka’s Faces of Displacement: The Writings of Volodymyr Vynnychenko (McGill-Queens University Press, 2012) is a compelling investigation of the oeuvre of one of the Ukrainian writers whose...

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Karl Schroeder, "Stealing Worlds" (Tor Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action...

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Claudia Casper, “The Mercy Journals,” (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) is the third novel by Claudia Casper and her first work of science fiction. Set in 2047, it tells the story of Allen Quincy through his journals. Quinc...

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Kimberly Dark, "Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society" (AK Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integratin...

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Linnea Hartsuyker, “The Half-Drowned King” (Harper, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ragnvald Eysteinsson is returning from years raiding in Ireland under the leadership of Solvi and focused on winning a contest with his fellow sailors when Solvi attacks. Ragnvald falls into the fj...

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Emily Strelow, "The Wild Birds" (Rare Bird Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An orphaned young woman disguises herself as a boy in order to escape the dangers of being alone in 1870’s San Francisco. A group of castoffs destroy the bird population of the Farallon Island by s...

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Michael Allan, “In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Allan‘s In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2016) challenges traditional perceptions of world literature: he argues that the d...

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Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...

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James Morrow, “The Asylum of Dr. Caligari” (Tachyon Publications, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Asylum of Dr. Caligari (Tachyon Publications, 2017) is a deft little novel, is a perfect fit for people who are not just interested in fantasy, but also history, art, geography and linguistics....

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Franny Choi, "Soft Science" (Alice James Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Franny Choi’s book-length collection of poetry, Soft Science (Alice James Books 2019), explores queer, Asian American femininity through the lens of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. As...

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Fiona Helmsley, “Girls Gone Old” (We Heard You Like Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Fiona Helmsley‘s Girls Gone Old (We Heard You Like Books, 2017) is wildly honest, intense in its personal and cultural inquiry, and often brilliantly hilarious. Helmsley uses her keen eye, rich lif...

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Sarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the ris...

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Jacob Emery, “Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism” (Northern Illinois U. Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Alternative Kinships: Economy and Family in Russian Modernism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), Jacob Emery presents literary texts as intersections of aesthetic, social, and economic ...

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Phil Christman, "Midwest Futures" (Belt Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for t...

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Beatriz Williams, “Cocoa Beach” (HarperCollins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The State of Florida might have been designed for Prohibition. Its long coastline, its proximity to the Caribbean sources of rum, and (in 1922) its vast stretches of undeveloped coastline made it a...

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Gabrielle Mathieu, "Girl of Fire" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In the fantasy medieval land of Trea—a conservative society that despite its worship of the goddess Amur respects her human daughters only as wives and mothers—eighteen-year-old Berona has limited ...

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Linda Nagata, “The Last Good Man” (Mythic Island Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In The Last Good Man (Mythic Island Press, 2017), Linda Nagata uses a brisk and bracing writing style to immerse us into the lives of private military contractors, in the near future. The team, ba...

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Kristen Millares Young, "Subduction" (Red Hen Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction (Red Hen Press, 2020), provides a lyrical exploration of cultural encounters in the Pacific Northwest. After a Latina anthropologist, Claudia, flees...

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Sarah Ladipo Manyika, “Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” (Cassava Republic Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun (Cassava Republic Press, 2016), is an excellent addition to the larger, and ever-expanding, genre of Nigerian literatu...

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Michael Zapata, "The Lost Book of Adana Moreau" (Hanover Square Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1916, Adana Moreau’s parents are killed by American Marines. She flees to Santo Domingo and then to New Orleans. There, she marries a pirate, Titus Moreau, and gives birth to their son, Maxwell....

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Marlene Banks, “Ruth’s Redemption” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s A Love Story. Set in the 1800s, Ruth’s Redemption (Lift Every Voice, 2012), is an unusual depiction of the lives of slaves and free blacks in pre-Civil War America. Although a slave, Bo is ed...

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Nino Cipri, "Homesick: Stories" (Dzanc Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Ci...

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David Kushner, “Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D and D” (Nation Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D and D (Nation Books, 2017) by David Kushner and illustrated by Koren Shadmi is a gorgeous depiction of the late E. Gary Gygax’s life and...

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Martín Prechtel, "The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun" (North Atlantic Books, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I interview Martín Prechtel, whose work ranges from painting and drawing to overlooked histories and living languages to farming and blacksmithing and cooking to the six books he’s written, w...

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Kathy Wilson Florence, “Jaybird’s Song” (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The country meanders through new ideas brou...

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Brad Balukjian, "The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife" (U Nebraska Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today we are joined by Brad Balukjian, author of the book The Wax Pack: On the Open Road in Search of Baseball’s Afterlife (University of Nebraska, 2020). A combination of Charles Kuralt and Lawren...

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Gabrielle Mathieu, “The Falcon Flies Alone” (Five Directions Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peppa Mueller has a lot going for her. The daughter of a deceased Harvard professor who gave her an eclectic upbringing, she is heir to his fortune, and Radcliffe has accepted her application for u...

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Joan Schweighardt, "Gifts for the Dead" (Five Directions Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Last summer, massive fires in the Amazon rain forest provoked environmental concerns around the world. But the history of exploitation—of the natural world of the rain forest and the people living ...

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Nicky Drayden, “The Prey of Gods” (Harper Voyager, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Prey of the Gods, published by Harper Voyager on June 13th, is Nicky Drayden‘s debut novel, though she’s published many short stories. It’s a compassionate work, despite a neglected blood-thirs...

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Abdullah Qodiriy, "Bygone Days" (Bowker, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Reese’s recent translation of Abdullah Qodiriy’s 1920s novel O’tkan Kunlar (Bygone Days) brings an exemplary piece of modern Uzbek literature to English-speaking audiences. The story, which si...

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William Walsh, “Forty-Four American Boys: Short Histories of Presidential Childhoods” (Outpost19, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Whether you’re on the right or the left of the political spectrum, I’ll bet that lately the Office of the President isn’t far from your mind. Every day, it seems, I encounter one, two, three, four ...

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Sarah Kozloff, "The Nine Realms" (Tor, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Kozloff does her world building gradually and carefully, introducing you to a few characters you get to know and care for, before moving on to other lands and cultures. The land of Weirandale...

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An Interview with Suzanne Gibbs Taylor of Gibbs Smith: BabyLit from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Gibbs Smith motto is “to enrich and inspire mankind.” Since 1969, the publishing house has become known for creating smart, stylish, sophisticated books. This has included books on architecture...

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Kameron Hurley, "The Light Brigade" (Saga Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Some war stories emphasize heroism and a higher purpose; others emphasize brutality and disillusionment. The first kind of story got Dietz, the narrator of Kameron Hurley’s military science fiction...

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Michelle Cox, “A Girl Like You: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s January 1935. Prohibition has just ended, but the Great Depression has not, and much of Chicago remains under the grip of the crime lords who profited from the trade in illegal liquor. Eightee...

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Lowell Mick White, "Burnt House" (Buffalo Times Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After her parents' divorce, Jackie Stalnaker is sent to her grandmother’s dilapidated house in a tiny town in West Virginia. It’s a hot, mid 1970’s summer in Burnt House, where the only thing to lo...

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Assaph Mehr, “Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic” (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Assaph Mehr‘s Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) is Egretia, a town in a fantasy world modeled on the Roman Empire, and the occasion is the cr...

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Christina Adams, "Camel Crazy" (New World Library, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra....

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Roy Bing Chan, “The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature” (U. Washington Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period throug...

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Katharine Dion, "The Dependents" (Back Bay Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Gene is newly widowed and haunted by his memories. As he bumbles through long days, he questions his wife Maida’s sudden death, his daughter’s motives, and the enduring and meaningful friendship of...

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Territory-A Literary Project about Maps: Discussion with Tommy Mira y Lopez from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published...

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Priya Sharm, "Ormeshadow" (Tor.com, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A slim volume you can swallow in one melancholy winter afternoon, best with sips of a mellow amber whisky with undertones of peat, Priya Sharm's Ormeshadow (Tor.com, 2019) is about more about human...

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Sarah Bracey White, “Primary Lessons: A Memoir” (CavanKerry Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was ...

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Mike Chen, "A Beginning at the End" (MIRA, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The end of the world is no excuse for eating French fries. That’s a lesson 7-year-old Sunny Donelly learns from her father, Rob, who tries to give her as normal a childhood as possible in the post-...

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Tiffany Reisz, “The Night Mark” (Mira Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

So many people hope to find the perfect soul mate, but suppose you do, only to lose the person you love just as your life together is getting off to a beautiful start? Faye Morgan reacts by tumblin...

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Becca Klaver, "Ready for the World" (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Becca Klaver writes in the poem 'Hooliganism Was the Charge,' It offered reassurance which said, “You are not alone; I can hear you.” Her forthcoming collection, Ready for the World (Black Lawrence...

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Aliette de Bodard, “The House of Binding Thorns” (Ace, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, 2017), Aliette de Bodard‘s novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, is the follow up to The House of Shattered Wings, which won the 20...

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Mark Barr, "Watershed" (Hub City Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, ...

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Marlene Banks, “Son of A Preacher Man” and “Greenwood and Archer” (Lift Every Voice, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human n...

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Serena Burdick, "The Girls with No Names" (Park Row Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Effie Tildon loves her older sister, Luella. Sixteen to Effie’s thirteen, Luella has long taken the leading role in deciding what the two sisters do, even when it leads them in directions their par...

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Leia Penina Wilson, “i built a boat with all the towels in your closet” (Red Hen Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, ...

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Donald Morrill, "Impetuous Sleeper" (Mid-List Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Usually on the New Books Network we do exactly what our name says: we talk about new books. Today, however, we’re doing something a little different. I’m interviewing Donald Morrill about his very ...

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Julia Alekseyeva, “Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution” (Microcosm Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish fam...

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Jason Brown, "A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed" (Missouri Review, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The ten linked stories in Jason Brown's A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed (Missouri Review, 2019) follow John Howland and his descendants as they struggle wi...

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Li Zhi, “A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings” (Columbia UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Wr...

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Quincy Carroll, “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel” (Inkshares, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offeri...

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Seanan McGuire, "Middlegame" (Tor.com, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Science fiction and fantasy often feature characters who seek absolute control (over a kingdom, country, world, galaxy or universe), but few break down the secret to power as elegantly as Seanan Mc...

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David Rosen and Aaron Santesso, “The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood” (Yale UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the atta...

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Jim Rossi, "Cleantech Con Artists: A True Vegas Caper" (2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After Jim Rossi began writing his M.A. thesis in History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the project took an unexpected turn. His research on the solar industry in the Mojave desert brought...

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Polly Buckingham, “The Expense of a View” (U. North Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 20...

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Joyce Ashuntantang, "A Basket of Flaming Ashes" (African Books Collective, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Joyce Ashuntantang talks about her experiences as a traveler and a poet, from her childhood Cameroon to her years studying in Great Britain and the United States. Ashuntantang is a professor of Eng...

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Holly Charles, “Velvet” (AuthorHouse, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) be...

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Christopher Brown, "Rule of Capture" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Donny Kimoe, a wise-cracking lawyer who used to work for the prosecution and has kept his security clearance, believes in the legal system. His work as a defense attorney will change all that. His ...

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Marcia Aldrich, “Waveform: 21st-Century Essays by Women” (U of Georgia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of “the essayification of everything.” She noted how not only the genre, but also the genres inventor,...

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Katherine Kayne, "Bound in Flame" (Passionflower Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leticia Liliuokalani Lang, better known as Letty, has good intentions, but her strong will and quick temper tend to get in her way. Banished from her Hawaiian home due to a conflict with her stepmo...

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Ashaki Jackson, “Language Lesson” (Miel Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? ...

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K Chess, "Famous Men Who Never Lived" (Tin House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Famous Men Who Never Lived (Tin House, 2019) is set in two Brooklyns. In one, people ride in trams; in the other, they take subways. In one, the swastika is a symbol of luck; in the other, it signi...

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Gail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contemporary Culture” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015/2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Ha...

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Nora Gold, "The Dead Man" (Inanna Publications, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

An intelligent, middle-aged feminist and pitch-perfect musician cannot recuperate from a brief affair with a narcissistic and possibly psychopathic married but famous music critic. By returning to ...

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Scott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Undead: Fifteen Hundred Years of Supernatural Encounters” (Penguin, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-...

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Dan Burns, "Grace: Stories and a Novella" (Chicago Arts Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. I...

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Mary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton” (McGill-Queens UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–pro...

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Mary Fleming, "The Art of Regret" (She Writes Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Trevor McFarquhar was traumatized by the silence following the deaths of his sister and father. He was again traumatized when his mother moved him and his brother to Paris, remarried, and expected ...

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Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and Media in France, 1983-2013” (Liverpool UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work o...

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Olga Zilberbourg, "Like Water and Other Stories" (WTAW Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The phenomenon of the Russian emigre writer is nothing new. Exile seems almost as necessary a commodity as ink to many of Russia's most celebrated writers, including Alexander Herzen, Alexander Sol...

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Scott Donaldson, “The Impossible Craft” Literary Biography” (Penn State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Admiring books that appeal to our hearts and souls, rather often we want to know more about the writers who create them. If a book is a dialogical and communal entity–as readers we also participate...

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Sarah Pinsker, "A Song for a New Day" (Berkley, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sarah Pinsker’s A Song for a New Day (Berkley, 2019) explores how society changes following two plausible disasters: a surge in terrorism and a deadly epidemic. In the Before, people brush against ...

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Daniel Moran,”Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers” (U. of Georgia Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a...

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Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne, "Holding Onto Nothing" (Blair, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who...

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Kate Partridge, “Intended American Dictionary” (Miel Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Wh...

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Emily Skaja, "Brute" (Graywolf Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Emily Skaja’s Brute (Graywolf Press, 2019) is a stunning collection of poetry that navigates the dark corridors of trauma found at the end of an abusive relationsh...

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Jonathan Lethem, “A Gambler’s Anatomy” (Doubleday, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 i...

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Steven Moore, "The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Solider" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Popular public conception of war has a long and problematic history, with its origins in ancient texts like The Art of War to bestselling books like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Though ma...

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Kristen Case, “Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Failures of Self” (Essay Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Craig DiLouie, "Our War" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In science fiction, “near future” usually refers to settings that are a few years to a few decades off. But Craig DiLouie’s Our War (Orbit, 2019)—about a second U.S. civil war that starts after the...

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Eric Gardner, “Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 C...

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Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...

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Kristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin’s Family” (Stanford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 i...

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Johanna Stoberock, "Pigs" (Red Hen Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In her new novel Pigs (Red Hen Press, 2019), Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in th...

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Martha Conway, “Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery” (Noontime Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 co...

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Tamara J. Madison, "Threed, This Road Not Damascus" (Trio House, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tamara J. Madison, both on the page and in voice, is magical. In her most recent collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus (Trio House, 2019), she seamlessly bridges the gap between past and prese...

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Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian History” (U. of Toronto Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 comple...

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Charles Todd, "A Cruel Deception" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Writing novels—never mind entire series—takes determination, persistence, imagination, and craft. Charles Todd has added to those natural challenges the joys and complications of creating a single ...

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Jan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust” (Wayne State UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 th...

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H. G. Parry, "The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep" (Redhook, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them t...

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Ellen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Emily Roberson, "Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Welcome to New Books in fantasy and adventure, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today we’ll be talking with Emily Roberson about her debut YA novel, Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters (Farr...

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Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, ...

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Julie Justicz, "Degrees of Difficulty" (Fomite Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben Novotny was born with a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused profound mental retardation and seizures. He is severely limited but forms a tight bond with his older brother Hugo, who invents...

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Robert K. Elder, et. al. “Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park” (Kent State UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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, Ill...

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Talia Carner, "The Third Daughter" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

As revealed by the title of Talia Carner’s latest novel, The Third Daughter (William Morrow, 2019), her heroine, Batya, has two older sisters. Both ran off with men their parents could not tolerate...

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John Jodzio, “Knock Out” (Soft Skull Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 wo...

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Jason Bayani, "Locus" (Omnidawn Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

"Poetry gave me back a way to find my culture, my history,” says Jason Bayani while discussion his new book Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019), which blends memoir and poetry into a stunning explorat...

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Amy Wright, “Cracker Sonnets” (BrickRoad Poetry Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 an...

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Oren Harman, "Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World" (FSG, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.” Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’...

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Mark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel” (U. of Hawaii Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 (Fe...

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Alan Bradley, "The Flavia de Luce Mystery Series" (Random House, 2009-19) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alan Bradley’s first mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, came out in 2009, and received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award, the Agatha Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys ...

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John Alba Cutler, “Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 a...

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Wiley Cash, "The Last Ballad" (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash discusses his novel, The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017) writing fiction inspired by the South, and exploring the complexities of s...

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Bert Ashe, “Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles” (Agate Bolden, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 unprec...

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John Birmingham, "The Cruel Stars" (Del Rey, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After writing more than 30 books, including memoirs, military science fiction, alternate histories, and a book of writing advice, John Birmingham was ready to try his hand at the sweeping and drama...

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Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, “Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity” (Sundress Publications, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 ...

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K. C. Maher, "The Best of Crimes" (RedDoor Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A man turns himself into the police for kidnapping an underage girl. The police chief tell him to go home but Walter insists on being arrested and charged. Back to the beginning of the story in 199...

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Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Laughs’: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour” (Brill, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 kin...

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Sofia Grant, "Lies in White Dresses" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Francie Meeker and her best friend, Vi Carothers, bought into the promise offered to middle-class, especially white, women in the mid-twentieth-century United States: find a man with a good career,...

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Ramez Naam, “Apex” (Angry Robot, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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...

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Nicholas Walton, "Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency" (Hurst, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, g...

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Kristen Harnisch, “The California Wife” (She Writes Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

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 b...

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Peg Alford Pursell, "A Girl Goes into the Forest" (Dzanc Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The stories and fables in A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc Books, 2019) twist and turn with the sorrows and challenges of family, lovers, growing up, and aging. Sometimes wry, sometimes charming,...

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Janice A. Lowe, “LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal” (Miami University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

“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 t...

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Annalee Newitz, "The Future of Another Timeline" (Tor, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline(Tor, 2019)stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion. The book opens...

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Rodrigo Toscano, “Explosion Rocks Springfield” (Fence Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then reac...

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Tim Frandy, "Inari Sami Folklore: Stories from Aanaar" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Inari Sámi Folklore: Stories from Aanaar (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) is rich multivoiced anthology of folktales, legends, joik songs, proverbs, riddles, and other verbal art, this is the ...

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Robert S. Boynton, “The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Korea’s Abduction Project” (FSG, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a p...

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Deborah L. Davitt, "The Gates of Never" (Finishing Line Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Drawing on the author’s deep knowledge of classical literature, Deborah L. Davitt’s book of poetry The Gates of Never (Finishing Line Press, 2018) explores the intersections of myth, science, and h...

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Adam Rakunas, “Windswept” (Angry Robot, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Padma Mehta, the hero of Adam Rakunas’ Philip K. Dick Award-nominated novel Windswept, is part Philip Marlow, part Norma Rae, part Jessica Jones. Theres no question that Mehta needs the skills of ...

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Daphne Kalotay, "Blue Hours" (Triquarterly, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s 1991, and recent college graduate Mim wants to be a writer, but for now she is folding clothes at Benetton. She notices the trash-filled streets and befriends exotic Kyra, who joins Mim’s disp...

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Diane McKinney-Whetstone, “Lazaretto” (Harper, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the...

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Gill Paul, "The Lost Daughter" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Grand Duchess Maria Romanova arrives in Ekaterinburg in 1918 with her parents, the former Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. After months of house arrest in the deep interior of Russia, the ...

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Laini Giles, “The Forgotten Flapper: A Novel of Olive Thomas” (Sepia Stories, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she’s just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even tho...

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Chelene Knight, "Dear Current Occupant" (Book*hug, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Today, I’m talking with Chelene Knight. She’s written a new memoir called Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018). And as her title suggests, it’s a letter of sorts, one written to those people who ...

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Matthew Quirk, “Cold Barrel Zero” (Mulholland Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The next time you head to the beach or settle in for a long plane ride, you may not want your imagination filling with images of rogue operatives planting traps or terrorist organizations plotting ...

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Cadwell Turnbull, "The Lesson" (Blackstone Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Cadwell Turnbull’s The Lesson (Blackstone Publishing, 2019), the U.S. Virgin Islands serve as Earth’s entry point for the Ynaa, beings from a far corner of the universe whose intentions and desi...

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Minsoo Kang, trans. “The Story of Hong Gildong” (Penguin Classics, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classicâ€¦prose fiction of...

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Jeffrey Saks, "Agnon Library of The Toby Press" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied...

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Marguerite Reed, “Archangel” (Arche Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Marguerite Reed‘s Archangel (Arche Press, 2015) introduces a hero not often found at the center of science fiction: a mother, who takes cuddling responsibilities as seriously as she does the fate o...

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Melissa Albert, "The Hazel Wood" (Flatiron Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melissa Albert's novel The Hazel Wood(Flatiron Books, 2018) is a shivery delight, like a dazzling vintage ball gown of paisley silk, slithering over your head. Reading it is like drowning in musk r...

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Weina Dai Randel, “The Moon in the Palace” (Sourcebooks, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In four thousand years of Chinese history, Empress Wu stands alone as the only woman to rule in her own name. She died in her eighties after decades of successful governance, but her sons could not...

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Rebecca Clarren, "Kickdown" (Arcade, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Two sisters are struggling to save their land when a gas well explodes on a neighboring ranch in western Colorado, setting off a disturbing chain of events. Their father has died, the older sister ...

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Eubanks, Abel and Chen, eds., “Verge: Studies in Global Asias 1.2: Collecting Asias” (U of Minnesota Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Char...

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C.A. Fletcher, "A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

C.A. Fletcher’s new novel, A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World(Orbit, 2019), takes place several generations after a pandemic has turned humans into an endangered species. For Griz, the adol...

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PJ Manney, “(R)evolution” (47North, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

PJ Manney‘s fast-action novel (R)evolution (47North, 2015) has all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller: a terrorist attack using nanotechnology, a military-industrial conspiracy, a scientist wh...

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Linnea Hartsuyker, "The Golden Wolf" (Harper, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When I spoke with Linnea Hartsuyker back in 2017, her epic saga was just beginning. The first novel opens with her hero, Ragnvald, seeing a vision of a golden wolf who will unite the feuding kingdo...

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Patrick Madden, “Sublime Physick: Essays” (U of Nebraska Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After I read Patrick Madden‘s fascinating new collection of essays, entitled Sublime Physick: Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), I found myself struggling with the best way to describe it...

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Karen Hugg, "The Forgetting Flower" (Magnolia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Planted in her mind while the author was working as a professional gardener, The Forgetting Flower (Magnolia Press, 2019) tells the story of Renia, a working- class young woman who left Crakow to l...

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Mary Doria Russell, “Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral” (Ecco Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

The Wild West of Zane Grey and John Wayne movies, with its clear divisions between good guys and bad guys, cowboys and Indians (never called Native Americans in this narrative), bears little resemb...

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G. P. Gottlieb, "Battered" (D. X. Varos, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It is not easy to interview a writer of murder mysteries without giving away too many details, but when an author not only manages to create a full and complex cast of characters but also sweetens ...

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James D. Stein, “L.A. Math: Romance, Crime, and Mathematics in the City of Angels” (Princeton UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Romance. Crime. Mathematics. These things do not go together. Or do they? James D. Stein thinks they do, and he admirably shows us how in his wonderful collection of stories L.A. Math: Romance, Cri...

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Kate Braithwaite, "The Girl Puzzle" (Crooked Cat Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nellie Bly is in some respects a household name, yet the passage of time has erased many of her accomplishments from popular memory. One of the first well-known female journalists, she wrote for Jo...

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Will Buckingham, “Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes” (Earnshaw Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw B...

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Laury Silvers, “The Lover” (Kindle Direct Publishers, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Zaytuna just wants to be left alone to her ascetic practices and nurse her dark view of the world. But when an impoverished servant girl she barely knows comes and begs her to bring some justice to...

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Brenda Cooper, “Edge of Dark” (Pyr, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

This episode features author and futurist Brenda Cooper and is the second of my conversations with nominees for the 2016 Philip K. Dick Award. Cooper’s novel Edge of Dark (Pyr, 2015) is set in a s...

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Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, "This is How You Lose the Time War" (Gallery, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

For Blue and Red—arch enemies at the center of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone’s epistolary novella, This is How You Lose the Time War (Gallery, 2019)—the only thing that endures after millennia o...

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Tina Escaja, “Free Fall/Caida libre” (Fomite Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tina Escaja‘s, Free Fall/Caida libre, translated by Mark Eisner (Fomite Press, 2015), is an exceptional example of poetry in translation as artistic collaboration. Poetry exists outside of the marg...

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Eyal Kless, "The Lost Puzzler: The Tarakan Chronicles" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

A picaresque novel about a serious boy with special powers, The Lost Puzzler takes place in an impoverished, technologically backwards world. After the fall of the advanced Tarakan Empire, the rema...

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Anjali Mitter Duva, “Faint Promise of Rain” (She Writes Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In 1530, Babur the Tiger, the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan, moved south and conquered the northwest section of what was then known as Hindustan. Babur, although accepted as padishah and emp...

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Rabeah Ghaffari, "To Keep the Sun Alive" (Catapult, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

It’s 1979, and the Islamic Revolution is just around the corner, as is a massive solar eclipse. In this epic novel set in the small Iranian city of Naishapur, a retired judge and his wife, Bibi, gr...

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Douglas Lain, “After the Saucers Landed” (Night Shade Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In today’s episode, I talk with Douglas Lain, one of six authors whose works were nominated for this year’s Philip K. Dick Award. Lain’s novel, After the Saucers Landed (Night Shade Books, 2015) i...

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David Slucki, "My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons" (Wayne State UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

In Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019), David Slucki, Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charl...

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Joan Schweighardt, “The Last Wife of Attila the Hun” (Booktrope Editions, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Long before Genghis Khan set off to conquer the known world, the pattern of steppe warriors attacking–and often defeating–settled empires was well established. Only a few names of those who led the...

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Lauren Willig, "The Summer Country" (William Morrow, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

When Emily Dawson inherits a plantation in Barbados from her grandfather, Jonathan Fenty, in 1854, she is not quite sure what to make of the bequest. Emily, an English vicar’s daughter, has long be...

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David B. Coe, “His Father’s Eyes,” (Baen, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David B. Coe just finished a busy year in which he published three novels, two of which we discuss in this episode of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His Father’s Eyes (Baen, 2015) is th...

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Sarah St. Vincent, "Ways to Hide in Winter" (Melville House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

After surviving a car crash that left her widowed at twenty-two, Kathleen has retreated to a remote corner of a state park, where she works flipping burgers for deer hunters and hikers—happy, she i...

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James Franco, “Directing Herbert White” (Graywolf Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Every poet has their obsessions and for James Franco they are childhood, gender, sex, innocence, and the work place he knows best: the film industry. Within these poetic frames we’re introduced to ...

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Nikky Finney, “Head Off and Split: Poems” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2010) from 2011-07-06T14:38:45

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books ...

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Nikky Finney, “Head Off and Split: Poems” (TriQuarterly/Northwestern UP, 2010) from 2011-07-06T14:38:45

UPDATE: Nikky Finney’s Head Off and Split has been named a finalist for a National Book Award. Congratulations, Nikky, from the folks at New Books in African American Studies and the New Books ...

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Podcasts by New Books in Literature

All episodes

David Wellington, "The Last Astronaut" (Orbit, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J. Robert Lennon, “See You In Paradise” (Graywolf Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

jayy dodd, "The Black Condition Ft. Narcissus" (Nightboat Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mary Meriam, Lillian Faderman, Amy Lowell, “Lady of the Moon” (Headmistress Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

C. W. Gortner, "The Romanov Empress: A Novel of Tsarina Maria Feodorovna" (Ballentine Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Courtney J. Hall, “Some Rise by Sin” (Five Directions Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rachel Stolzman Gullo, "Practice Dying" (Bedazzled Ink, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anders Carlson-Wee, “Dynamite” (Bull City Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sophia Shalmiyev, "Mother Winter: A Memoir" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jane Lindskold, “Artemis Invaded” (Tor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Miryam Sivan, "Make it Concrete" (Cuidono Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ryan Ridge, “American Homes” (University of Michigan Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Adrienne Celt, "Invitation to a Bonfire" (Bloomsbury, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Melinda Snodgrass, “Edge of Dawn” (Tor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eliot Peper, "Breach" (47North, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Abeer Hoque, “The Lovers and Leavers” (Fourth Estate, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sharon Shinn, "Echo in Onyx: Uncommon Echoes" (Audible Studios, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James L. Cambias, “Corsair” (Tor Books, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Christopher Rea, "China's Chaplin: Comic Stories and Farces by Xu Zhuodai" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Peter Oberg, ed., “Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep” (Affront Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nina Boutsikaris, "I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry: An Intimacy Triptych" (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Porochista Khakpour, “The Last Illusion” (Bloomsbury USA, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

John Sibley Williams, "As One Fire Consumes Another" (Orison Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Mark Ehling, “River Dead of Minneapolis Scavenged by Teens” (New Carriage, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Reema Zaman, "I Am Yours: A Shared Memoir" (Amberjack, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ferrett Steinmetz, “Flex” (Angry Robot 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kate Harris, "Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road" (Dey Street Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meg Elison, “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife” (Sybaritic Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Pauline W. Chen, "Final Exam: A Surgeon’s Reflections on Mortality" (Vintage, 2008) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ken Liu, “The Grace of Kings” (Saga Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Vandana Singh, "Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories" (Small Beer Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Michael Gorra, “The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany” (Princeton UP, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anne Cushman, "The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood" (Shambala, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

David Hull (trans.), Mao Dun, “Waverings” (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Tsering Döndrup, "The Handsome Monk and Other Stories" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Marie Brissett, “Elysium, or the World After” (Aqueduct Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ana Johns, "The Woman in the White Kimono" (Park Row Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Rod Duncan, “The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter” (Angry Robot, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ariela Freedman, "A Joy to Be Hidden" (Linda Leith Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben H. Winters, “World of Trouble” (Quirk Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Audrey Schulman, "Theory of Bastards" (Europa Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kameron Hurley, “The Mirror Empire” (Angry Robot, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Chelsea Biondolillo, "The Skinned Bird" (Kernpunkt Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Alex London, “Guardian” (Philomel, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

R. F. Kuang, "The Poppy War" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Lydia Netzer, “How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky” (St. Martin’s Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Julie Zuckerman, "The Book of Jeremiah" (Press 53, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kathryn Cramer and Ed Finn, “Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future” (William Morrow, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sally Wen Mao, "Oculus" (Graywolf Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Brian Staveley, “The Emperor’s Blades” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hilary Plum, "Watchfire" (Rescue Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Robert Silverberg, “Science Fiction: 101” (Roc, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Caitlin Starling, "The Luminous Dead" (Harper Voyager, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Oliver Ready (trans.), Vladimir Sharov, “Before and During” (Dedalus Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

J Mase III, "And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, and Inappropriate Jokes About Death" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Max Gladstone, “Full Fathom Five” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ann Weisgarber, "The Glovemaker" (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Andy Weir, “The Martian” (Crown, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Patricia Leavy, "Spark" (The Guilford Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

James L. Cambias, “A Darkling Sea” (Tor, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Meg Elison, "The Book of Flora" (47North, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Shelbi Wescott, “Virulent” (Arthur Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Susan Smith Daniels, "The Genuine Stories" (New Rivers Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Emmi Itaranta, “Memory of Water” (Harper Voyager, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Elsa Hart, "City of Ink" (Minotaur Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Greg van Eekhout, “California Bones” (Tor Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Frances Donovan, "Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore" (Reaching Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Eric LeMay, “In Praise of Nothing: Essays, Memoir, and Experiments” (Emergency Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Jennifer Acker on the Importance of Food in Fiction (And Animals!) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Leah Hager Cohen, “No Book But the World” (Riverhead Books, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Anand Prahlad, "The Secret Life of a Black Aspie: A Memoir" (U Alaska Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Nicole Walker, “Quench Your Thirst with Salt” (Zone 3 Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Kelly J. Beard, "An Imperfect Rapture" (Zone 3 Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Ben Hatke, “Legends of Zita the Spacegirl” (First Second, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Stephen Hough, "The Final Retreat" (Sylph Editions, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Hugh C. Howey, “Wool” (Simon and Schuster, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Sara Tantlinger, "The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes" (StrangeHouse Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393

Erika Rae, “Devangelical” (Emergency Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393