New Books In Literature

In this episode, we are talking to Mark Krotov, the publisher and co-editor of n + 1, a magazine of politics, essays and fiction described once: “like The Paris Review, but not dead” (Keith Gessen, co-founder). Mark was born in Moscow and left Russia for Atlanta at the age of six. He graduated from Columbia in 2008. Before joining n + 1, he used to work as an assistant editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Agata Popeda is a Polish-American journalist. Interested in everything, with a particular weakness for literature and foreign relations. 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 Rebecca D’Harlingue about her novel The Lines Between Us (She Writes Press, 2020). A widow in 17th century Spain discovers that her beloved niece, Juliana, has suddenly disappeared. Juliana records her forced journey in the diary she received from Tia Ana. Years later, when she feels herself to be nearing the end of her life, she writes to Ana, explains why she fled, and tells her that she is a nun in the new world. Ana’s response provokes Juliana into sharing her life story and demanding that Mercedes, a nun who hasn’t yet taken her vows, leave the convent. The years pass, and Mercedes, near the end of her own life, passes Juliana’s packet to her granddaughter with a demand that the mothers among her descendants keep the secret of this packet from their own daughters, only passing it to one granddaughter in each generation. Three hundred years later and we’re in 20th century America, when a college Spanish professor finds the packet while cleaning out her mother’s closet after her mother’s

A brief, elegant memoir of the author's work as a Red Cross volunteer delivering emergency water to residents of Flint, Michigan, Standpipe sets the struggles of a city in crisis against the author's personal journey as his mother declines into dementia and eventual death. Written with a poet's eye for detail and quiet metaphor, Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint (Belt, 2021) is an intimate look at one man's engagement with both civic and familial trauma. This gentle, observant book is for readers seeking to better understand the human experience of the Flint Water Crisis, and a vivid investigation into how we all heal. Claire Clark is a medical educator, historian of medicine, and associate professor in the University of Kentucky’s College of Medicine. She teaches and writes about health behavior in historical context. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. In After Callimachus (Princeton UP, 2020), esteemed poet and critic Stephanie Burt’s attentive translations and inspired adaptations introduce the work, spirit, and letter of Callimachus to today’s poetry readers. Skillfully combining intricate patterns of sound and classical precedent with the very modern concerns of sex, gender, love, death, and technology, these poems speak with a twenty-first century voice, while also opening multiple gateways to ancient worlds. This Callimachus travels the Mediterranean, pays homage to Athena and Zeus, develops erotic fixations, practices funerary commemoration, and brings fresh gifts for the cult of Artemis. This reimagined poet also visits airports, uses

The Portrait is a story full of ambiguity and suspense, one that works on many different levels and holds the reader’s attention until the very last page. Recently published to great acclaim, the book will soon become a Sky TV mini-series. In what she called a 'beautiful' conversation with Duncan McCargo, Ilaria Bernadini explains, inter alia: why she chose to write The Portrait (Simon and Schuster, 2021) in English; the disarmingly rich imaginative hinterlands of her secondary characters; what it was like to have her own portrait painted; and, most importantly, how, when Martìn falls desperately ill, Valeria suddenly becomes open to new people and to re-reading closed chapters of her life.  If you want to know how far The Portrait trangresses into the realm of magical realism, and what possible sequels Ilaria may write, you need to listen to this intriguing podcast about an extremely compelling and important new novel.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becomi

An exhilaratingly comical, crosscultural debut novel, The Wife Who Wasn't (New Europe Books, 2021) brings together an eccentric community from the hills of Santa Barbara, California, and a family of Russians from Chișinău, the capital of Moldova. It starts in the late 1990s, after the fall of communism, and has at its center the mail-order marriage between a California man (Sammy) and a Russian woman (Tania) who comes to America, which engenders a series of hilarious cultural misunderstandings. The novel's four parts take place alternately in California and Moldova, and comprise short chapters whose point of view moves seamlessly between that of the omniscient narrator and that of various characters. Delivered in arresting prose, both realities--late 90s, bohemian/hipster California and postcommunist Moldova--thus come together from opposite points of view. Above all, this novel is a comedy of manners that depicts the cultural (and personality) clash between Tania and Sammy, Anna (Sammy's teenage daughter) an

Today I interview Dinty W. Moore and Zoë Bossiere, the editors of the new anthology The Best of Brevity: Twenty Groundbreaking Years of Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press, 2020). The anthology brings together the best of Brevity Magazine, which publishes works of literary nonfiction that are less than 750 words. So how do you write about, say, the experience of becoming a mother or losing a father or coming of age or the nature of our age, all in less than 750 words? And how do you do it powerfully, beautifully, and artfully? It seems impossible. And yet for over twenty years, this is exactly what Brevity has given us: thousands of literary gems that glow and pulse with our humanity. Today I get a chance to ask Dinty and Zoë about how these 750-words-or-less wonders work and how the magazine has fostered a new literary genre into American letters. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org

The scene is Turkey in the mid-to-late Seventies. A young male college student hops onto a bus. He sits next to a cute female student from his class, but before they can strike up a conversation, they see a right-wing passenger, walk up to another passenger and hit him on the head with a hammer. The young woman screams. The two students get off the bus, only for the female student to call the male student a “disgusting fascist” and leave in anger. Scenes like this are seen in Turkish Kaleidoscope: Fractured Lives in a Time of Violence (Princeton University Press, 2021) is a graphic novel written by Professor Jenny White and illustrated by Ergün Gündüz. The book combines Jenny’s own experiences in Turkey with insights gleaned from interviews to illustrate Turkey’s political conflict in the late 1970s, between right-wing and left-wing movements. You can watch a promotional video for the book, and the book can be ordered from the Princeton University Press website. Jenny has also put together a Spotify playlist 

In All Sorrows Can Be Borne (Rare Bird Books, 2021), Loren Stephens tells the story, inspired by true events, of a Japanese woman who survives the bombing of Hiroshima, joins her half-sister in Osaka and gives up her dream of becoming a theater star. Later, she marries the man of her dreams and gives birth to a beautiful son. After her husband is diagnosed with tuberculosis, he convinces Noriko to send the toddler to his sister and her Japanese American husband, who live in Montana. Eighteen years later, Noriko’s son enlists in the U.S. Navy and gets sent to Japan. This is a novel about Japanese society and postwar cultural norms, the human cost of war, and a mother’s love. Loren Stephens is a widely published essayist and fiction and nonfiction storyteller. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, MacGuffin, The Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, Forge, Crack the Spine, Amuse Bouche, The Writer’s Launch, the Summerset Review, the Montreal Literary Review, and Tablet Travel Magazine t

Exhale: Hope, Healing, and a Life in Transplant (Post Hill Press, 2021) is the riveting memoir of a top transplant doctor who rode the emotional rollercoaster of saving and losing lives—until it was time to step back and reassess his own life. A young father with a rare form of lung cancer who has been turned down for a transplant by several hospitals. A kid who was considered not “smart enough” to be worthy of a transplant. A young mother dying on the waiting list in front of her two small children. A father losing his oldest daughter after a transplant goes awry. The nights waiting for donor lungs to become available, understanding that someone needed to die so that another patient could live. These are some of the stories in Exhale, a memoir about Dr. Weill’s ten years spent directing the lung transplant program at Stanford. Through these stories, he shows not only the miracle of transplantation, but also how it is a very human endeavor performed by people with strengths and weaknesses, powerful attributes

Mira Sucharov’s new book, Borders and Belonging: A Memoir (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020), is a work that takes seriously the feminist adage that the “personal is political,” and vice versa. Through an intimate telling of her life, Sucharov uses the work to trace her shifting relationship to Israel, and the Israeli-Plaestinitan conflict, the meaning of diaspora Jewish identity, and what writing about International Relation can look like. The memoir covers topics such as the divorce of her parents, her time spent at Jewish summer camps as a child, visits to Israel, and her time in graduate school then later as a professional academic working in the field of Political Science, specializing in Israel-Palestine. Throughout, Sucharov touches on themes of identity, gender, disability, and home. It is a work of use to scholars across the humanities and social sciences for its honest approach to the subjective dynamics of academic engagement. Mira Sucharov is Professor of Political Science and University Chair of Teaching

Today I talked to Andrea Stewart about The Bone Shard Daughter: The Drowning Empire Book One (Hachette UK, 2020). In a world of floating islands, various narrators try to achieve or avoid their destiny, or just understand the mysteries of their existence. There’s Lin, the Emperor’s daughter, set against her foster brother by the manipulative Emperor himself, who fosters the rivalry between them by bestowing keys as mark of his favor. The keys open various rooms which hold the secret to his power. The Emperor’s most powerful tool is the bone shard magic that he uses to program constructs, assemblages of beasts that he builds which then execute his commands. When the Emperor begins to show Lin’s foster brother how to use the bone shards, Lin is determined to find out the secret as well and position herself to be the next Emperor. Then there’s Jovis, a talkative smuggler whose one aim in life is to find the woman he loves, who disappeared one day on a boat with blue sails. Jovis’s quest keeps getting sidelined t

Deborah Lindsay Williams speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her “‘You Like to Have Some Cup of Tea?’ and Other Questions About Complicity and Place,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Williams talks about living and writing in Abu Dhabi, traveling to South Africa with her family, and how narrow the western view of these places can be, often simplifying very complex issues of racial hierarchy, economics, culture, and history. She also discusses her novel-in-progress, The Corset and the Veil, based on the life of Lady Hester Stanhope, who fled England in 1809 in search of alternatives to her life as an impoverished aristocrat. Deborah Lindsay Williams teaches in the literature and creative writing program at NYU Abu Dhabi. With Cyrus Patell, she is co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940, for which she also wrote the chapter on children’s literature. She is currently working on a book called The Necessity of

Sherlock Holmes is one of the rare literary characters who has achieved a kind of cultural immortality. As Bonnie MacBird notes in this interview, display an image of a deerstalker hat and a pipe almost anywhere in the world, and people can identify the great detective without a second thought. So is it any wonder that an entire industry is devoted to expanding the Conan Doyle canon? Not all these attempts succeed, but MacBird’s novels are a gem. The Three Locks (Collins Crime Club, 2021), fourth in her series and set in 1887, opens with a mysterious package delivered to Dr. John Watson. London is in the midst of a heat wave, Watson’s friend Holmes has withdrawn in one of his periodic funks, and the package offers the rather disgruntled doctor a welcome distraction. Its appeal increases when Watson discovers that it contains an engraved silver box sent by his father’s half-sister, an aunt he didn’t know he had, and represents his mother’s last gift to him. But as he struggles to unlock the box, Holmes appears

Space operas take readers far from Earth with stories about alien cultures and battles between good and evil. But while usually set in distant galaxies in the far flung future or past, they inevitably tell us, like any good science fiction, about our lives today. Ginger Smith’s debut The Rush's Edge (Angry Robot, 2020) takes place when humanity is spread across the galaxy and soldiers are born in labs, but it touches on subjects we grapple with now: blind loyalty to authority, the ethics of genetic science, and the prejudices that divide humans. Halvor Cullen is a VAT—a member of the genetically engineered Vanguard Assault Troops who are programmed to be loyal to their commander and addicted to the rush of battle. VATs are released from duty after seven years of service, but their bodies burn out quickly, and they die young. But it’s when they’re released from duty that things get interesting. How does a person programmed to be a soldier find purpose or meaningful relationships when they’re no longer a soldie

What do you ask a novelist who has won a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur genius grant? Cocktail advice, of course. When I had the honor of chatting with Viet Thanh Nguyen about his two novels The Sympathizer and The Committed, we started by discussing what beverages would go well with his books. While the first book is a spy novel and the second is a noir mafia story, they both use the same hard-drinking narrator to explore issues of race and racism, colonialism and decolonization, and violence and non-violence. Set in Southern California in the 1970s and Paris, France in the 1980s, the novels combine a history of the Vietnamese refugee experience with a critique of whiteness and a generous dose of literary criticism. The books are also full of humor, which is at times ribald and scatological. Dr. Viet Thanh Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Professor Nguyen is the author of several books in

Drawing from his/her own experience as a trans performer, sex worker, and undocumented immigrant, Iván Monalisa Ojeda chronicles the lives of Latinx queer and trans immigrants in New York City. Whether she is struggling with addiction, clashing with law enforcement, or is being subjected to personal violence, each character choses her own path of defiance, often responding to her fate with with irreverent dark humor. What emerges is the portrait of a group of friends who express unquestioning solidarity and love for each other, and of an unfamiliar, glittering and violent, New York City that will draw readers in and swallow them whole. On every page of Las Biuty Queens: Stories (Astra House, 2021), Iván Monalisa's unique narrative talent is on display as he/she artfully transforms the language of the streets, making it his/her own -- rich with rhythm and debauchery. This bold new collection positions Ojeda as a fresh and necessary voice within the canon of world literature. Rachel Stuart is a sex work researc

The Ukrainian literary scene today is particularly vibrant. The voice of Serhiy Zhadan is distinct, well-known, and easily-recognizable. In 2021, Yale University Press published his novel titled The Orphanage (Yale UP, 2021), which originally appeared in 2017. In this interview, translators Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler talk about their team work on the novel translation into English. This is not their first translation of Zhadan’s works: Voroshilovgrad in their translation was published a few years ago. When answering the question about why they chose The Orphanage as their translation project, Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler mentioned that they wanted to make this novel available to Anglophone readers. They find it transformative, as such that can change the way we look at life.  Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler share their reading of the novel while drawing attention to the episodes that they found compelling. They also comment on the language of Se

Fátima Policarpo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Her Borders Become Her,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. In this conversation, Policarpo talks about creating an essay that includes elements of ghost stories, using language barriers and rich settings to set up complicated dynamics between family members who bully, and are later bullied in turn. She also discusses her current manuscript, a longer work incorporating many of the ideas and themes explored in this essay, and about her work teaching writing and literature with a focus on human rights education. Fátima Policarpo is a Portuguese American writer. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Fourth Genre, and Ninth Letter. Her work has been supported by grants from the Luso-American Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund; and by fellowships from the DISQUIET International Literary Program, which she attended as a 2016 Fellow; and the Vermont Studio Center, where she resided as a 2018 NEA Fellow

May 1857. The Indian city of Shahjahanabad, today called Delhi, is tense. British officers are worried about rumors of insubordination and rebellion elsewhere in India, while the local residents both await and fear a coming storm of revolutionary fervor. Trying to make a living in this setting is Mirza Ghalib, one of India’s most celebrated poets, well known for his works in Urdu and Persian. He is also the protagonist, at least in a fictionalised form, of Murder at the Mushaira (Aleph Book Company, 2021) by Raza Mir. The novel is a murder mystery: a particularly disliked poet is murdered at a poetry recital, forcing Ghalib ito play detective, balancing both haughty English officials and passionate Indian mutineers as he attempts to seek the truth. In this interview, Raza introduces both Ghalib and Shahjahanabad. We talk about the historical roots of his story, including where he diverges from historical accuracy. Finally, we discuss why literary figures like Ghalib are so popular as detectives. Raza Mir teac