New Books In Literature

Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind. In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships--all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death. Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me (Flatiron Books, 2023) is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning. Rasheed Ne

When the two immigrant parents in Zeno Sworder’s latest illustrated book go to the baker asking for a cake for their son, the baker asks for something different instead of money. “Five centimeters should do it,” says the baker. “Your height, of course” That starts the story of My Strange Shrinking Parents (Thames & Hudson: 2023): a tale that connects to immigration, parental sacrifice, and the changing perspective that comes with growing up. In this interview, Zeno and I talk about immigrant parents, the use of height as a symbol, and what’s different about creating an illustrated book. Zeno Sworder is a writer and artist who lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is also the author of This Small Blue Dot (Thames & Hudson: 2021). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of My Strange Shrinking Parents. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Book

Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenager during the Red Summer race riots of 1919 shot and killed a police detective after he broke down her bedroom door. Prohibited from arguing self-defense, she was convicted of manslaughter, but a judge later tossed out the verdict. Penelope found the real Johnson’s exoneration so remarkable that she felt “it had to be magic.” As she puts it, “How did this young Black girl get out of that situation? If magic was involved, that would make so much more sense.” The book’s magical elements are layered over D.C.’s dynamic Black community, where Black entrepreneurs, artists and academics thrive even as they face racism that is both overt (the Ku Klux Klan holds a demonst

Today I talked to Sarit Yishai-Levi about The Woman Beyond the Sea (Amazon Crossing, 2023). The book was translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann. Eliyah is 25 when she travels from Tel Aviv to Paris to meet up with her husband, who turns out to be having an affair with a French woman. As her life crumbles, Eliyah plunges into a deep depression, returns home to her childhood bed, and slowly descends into madness. The therapist assigned to her after a suicide attempt manages to help her rebuild her life, but she still grapples with Lily, her not-very loving mother. Then Eliyah and her mother journey across the sea to discover the truth about who they both are. Moving but sometimes horrifying backstories set around the world fill out the lives of the characters - Eliyah’s mother, father, her new boyfriend, and her grandparents. This is a sweeping saga about trauma, betrayal, antisemitism, expulsion from home and country, and secrets. Sarit Yishai-Levi Yishai-Levi was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family that has li

Today I talked to Kelly Barnhill about her book The Crane Husband (Tordotcom, 2023). Our unnamed narrator, a fifteen-year-old girl, manages to care for her six-year-old brother and creative but irresponsible mother by skipping school and selling her mother’s artwork. Her father taught her everything useful before he died, and much like Katniss in The Hunger Games, she devotes herself to keeping her small family afloat (and dodging the social worker’s efforts to intervene). The Crane Husband opens with the arrival of her mother’s newest lover, an insolent giant crane that demands every bit of her mother’s attention while returning her affection with raucous sex and deep cuts from his razor-sharp beak. From this surrealist beginning, things get progressively stranger. In some ways, this surreal, poetic novella reminded me of Australian author Kathleen Jenning’s eerie novella, Flyway. There are fatherless children fighting for survival, allusion to ancestral violence, and odd metamorphoses taking place in remote

Sherry Thomas' latest book in her Lady Sherlock Series, A Tempest at Sea (Berkley, 2023), finds Charlotte Holmes in a dangerous investigation at set in the seventh book in this bestselling series. After feigning her own death in Cornwall to escape from Moriarty’s perilous attention, Charlotte Holmes goes into hiding. But then she receives a tempting offer: Find a dossier the crown is desperately seeking, and she might be able to go back to a normal life. Her search leads her aboard the RMS Provence. But on the night Charlotte makes her move to retrieve the dossier, in the midst of a terrifying storm in the Bay of Biscay, a brutal murder takes place on the ship. Instead of solving the crime, as she is accustomed to doing, Charlotte must take care not to be embroiled in this investigation, lest it become known to those who harbor ill intentions that Sherlock Holmes is abroad and still very much alive.  Thomas talks about writing the series, her approach to a female Sherlock, romance, writing about social class,

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse. Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America. Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 20

Svetlana Lavochkina's book Dam Duchess (Whiskey Tit, 2018) invites readers to take a surreal journey into the past: the construction of Dnipro Dam, the Stalinist regime, the fate of the aristocrats of the Russian Empire, the horrors of the Holodomor, the memory of the Cossack Hetmanate that travels from generation to generation, the Soviet harrowing of life and psyche. To survive in the Soviet Union, one has to learn how to adjust to the system that embraces fear and intimidation to impose a distorted sense of loyalty and comradeship. Agreements can certify the collapse of empires, but the individual’s memory of violence sanctioned by brutal regimes will travel through years, decades, and generations. Lavochkina’s Dam Duchess calls for compassion that can easily be lost once terror is normalized. Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American liter

Victoria Garza begins her poetic memoir with her ten-year-old self learning that her little sister and cousin have died in a car accident. She painstakingly recalls lovely moments with her sister as they faced their parents’ divorce, their new lives surrounded by family members, their Mexican American culture and celebrations. Over the course of the book, she examines her own survivor’s guilt, her disassociation, and her attempt to rebuild herself. She includes the memories of other family members, each of whom remembers parts of that awful day, and she observes the different ways everyone is affected by grief. Garza also explores death and its customs as described by various poets, authors, and religious traditions. The Field (Jackleg Press, 2022) is a memoir about losing a loved one, family, and memory. For most of Victoria’s professional writing career, she’s written journalism, screenplays, documentaries, and multimedia content. Sometimes, she’s a filmmaker, information designer and content strategist. Sh

It’s just after World War II, and Elinor White (born Elinor de Witt, which also means “white”), a single woman in her mid-forties, lives as a recluse in a village near Tunbridge Wells. One day in 1947, while on a walk, she encounters a recent arrival named Rose Mackie and is drawn to Rose’s three-year-old daughter, Susie. When thugs from London threaten Rose and Susie, Elinor brushes off the skills she polished during the two world wars and, with the help of a former colleague who has risen through the ranks at Scotland Yard, sets out to discover exactly what the thugs have planned for Rose’s husband, Jim. While trying to put a stop to it, she uncovers a web of intrigue and corruption that reaches to the very top of society. This story occurs alongside an exploration of Elinor’s past, beginning with her girlhood in Belgium under German occupation during World War I and extending to her service as an intelligence agent against the Nazis twenty or so years later. Eventually the two threads of Elinor’s history a

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. Lured by the promise of a big payday, she quits teaching and moves to L.A. to turn the novel into an action flick with the help of some studio hacks. But as she's pressured to change her main character from a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay; siren calls lure Penelope's co-writers into danger. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood's violations? American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a ruthless industry town, where she discovers a beating heart in her own fiction, a mermaid who will fight to move between worlds without giving up her voice. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we'll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale. Ju

An early American adage proclaimed, "The frontier was heaven for men and dogs―hell for women and mules." Since the 1700s, when his name first appeared in print, Daniel Boone has been synonymous with America's westward expansion and life on the frontier. Traces (Fireside Industries, 2022) is a retelling of Boone's saga through the eyes of his wife, Rebecca, and her two oldest daughters, Susannah and Jemima. Daniel became a mythic figure during his lifetime, but his fame fueled backwoods gossip that bedeviled the Boone women throughout their lives―most notably the widespread suspicion that one of Rebecca's children was fathered by Daniel's younger brother. Traces explores the origins of these rumors, exposes the harsh realities of frontier life, and gives voice to the women whose vibrant lives have been reduced to little more than scattered footnotes within the historical record. Along the path of Daniel's restless wandering, the women were eyewitnesses to the clash of cultures between the settlers and the indi

The star of On Java Road (Hogarth: 2022), the latest novel from Lawrence Osborne, is Adrian Gyle, a down-on-his-luck correspondent in Hong Kong, in the midst of its 2019 protests. Adrian spends his time drinking with Jimmy Tang, a royal screw-up from one of Hong Kong’s tycoon families. But a new character–and an unexpected death–threatens to drive a wedge in their relationship, as Hong Kong is mired in an uncertain future. Lawrence Osborne is the author of The Glass Kingdom, The Forgiven, The Ballad of a Small Player, Hunters in the Dark, and six books of nonfiction. His short story “Volcano” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2012, and he has written for the New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Forbes, Harper’s, and several other publications. Today, Lawrence and I talk about the choice of Hong Kong as a setting, his use of real-world places, and the decision to use a still-fresh event as the backdrop for his latest novel. You can find more reviews, excerpts, int

In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination with the notion of "borders", including borders between humans and machines, men and women, normality and abnormality..., and how these borders can be translated into themes for her fictional creation. Finally, Lin also tells us how literary and philosophical theories such as posthumanism, queer theory, cultural constructivism, inspired and influenced her creative writings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Idra Novey about her new novel Take What You Need (Viking 2023). Leah, her husband, and their little son are driving back to where she grew up in the mountains of Appalachia. They are heading to the home where her stepmother fled after leaving Leah’s father, and after the divorce, Jean was no longer allowed to stay in touch with Leah. But she was the mother Leah knew and loved. Now, Jean has died and left Leah her artwork, and when they arrive at the house, Leah is stunned to find giant sculptures welded from scrap metal. During her final years, Jean had needed the help of a troubled young man, a neighbor who has no chance of finding employment and who is squatting without water in the house next door. He’s the one who tells Leah that Jean has died. This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull. Idra Novey earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia Unive

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023) is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In "belly," a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In "We Feel it in Punta Cana," a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In "The Oldest Sensation is Anger," a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn. Kendall Dinniene is a fourth year English PhD student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research examines how contempor

You Must Believe in Spring (Hajar Press, 2022) is Mohamed Tonsy's "speculative fiction." It is about the future of Egypt when people's memory of the recent revolution is beginning to fade away as a distant past. How can we find hope when we find ourselves in a dystopia?   Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a disciple of the national Sufi institute and a swimmer representing the Armed Forces, proximity to power cannot undo his revolutionary birthright: like his mother and grandmother before him, Shahed is an undercover rebel. When a general arrives at the Sufi institute looking for help with a military assignment, Shahed accepts, all while concealing his own plans for resistance. The mission takes him behind the walls of a prison town, inside a secret army barracks in the Sinai desert, and deep into the murky waters of the past. As he wades through his mother’s repressed memories and the state’s repressed histories, Shahed grapp

Spring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers? Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives. Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories, testimonies, diaries, letters and confessions, The Butterfly and the Axe (Amsterdam Publishers, 2023) seeks to fill a gap in the historical record of the Holocaust by reimagining those who were murdered and erased from memory, and to shed light on the transgenerational effects of trauma. Omer Bartov was born in Israel and teaches history in the United States. His mother emigrated from Galicia to Palestine before World War II. Most of the rest of his family were murdered under unknown circumstances in the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium m

Once in a while, a novel comes along that is both different and special. Marvelous (William Morrow, 2023) is such a book. Retellings of fairy tales are not unusual, and some of them are quite good. But here Molly Greeley explores the real-life story that gave rise to one of the best-loved tales, “Beauty and the Beast.” In doing so, she raises issues of inclusion, trust, acceptance, the effects of trauma, and basic humanity—all in a gentle, non-preachy way. Pedro Gonzales, later known as Petrus Gonsalvus or Pierre Sauvage (Pierre the Savage, which itself says a great deal about other people’s views of him), was born on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, around 1537. We know from early on that he was abandoned by his mother as an infant, presumably because he was born covered in hair—a rare genetic condition that was seen at the time as evidence that a child was the spawn of a devil. His adoptive mother, Isabel, belongs to the indigenous people of Tenerife, the Guanche, whose culture and religion have

Kashana is the author of the novel The Survivalists, which was published in January 2023 by Soft Skull Press. She’s also a TV writer who has written for The Great North and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Recommended Books: Chris Terry, Black Card Alejandro Varela, The Town of Babylon  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature