New Books In Literature

Every year one of my absolute favorite episodes is the Booksellers Best-Of episode for which I get to interview independent bookstore managers, owners, and booksellers about the books that meant the most to them over the course of a year.  This year I welcome an exciting new bookseller to the program: Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of Programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. She is a 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, graduate of Barnard College, and currently serves on the American Bookseller Association’s DEI Committee. Christine is passionate about championing marginalized authors both at Loyalty and on her Bookstagram @readingismagical. My returning guest will be known to all who love books and live in Ithaca, New York. Lisa Swayze is general manager and buyer at Buffalo St., Books Ithaca’s independent, co-op bookstore. She serves on the board of the American booksellers Association, and works every day toward making Indie book selling more sustainabl

Alina Gorban is an illustrator of 22 children's books, a cartoonist, and a teaching artist. In our interview we celebrate her new graphic novel entitled, Silence, Full Stop (Street Noise Books, 2023), a very personal and explicit graphic memoir of the struggles of an adolescent girl processing the trauma of childhood sexual assault. It is her debut as an author, and it is published under the pseudonymn Karina Shor. Alina grew up in Israel, after immigrating from the former Soviet Union. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and now lives back in Tel Aviv, Israel. Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Jarret Keene's, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press, 2023),  is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley's survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she'll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school's most powerful opponents. When she's captured by the enemy warlord, she's surprised by two revelations: He's not the monster her headmaster wants her to believe and the one thing she can't safeguard is her own heart. Hammer of the Dogs celebrates the courageousness of a younger generation in the face of authority while exploring the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. It's a story of transforma

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time? When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal (Riverhead Books, 2023) is a story about how the peop

Linking literature, philosophy, art, and personal experience, a moving exploration of the wooded landscape’s power. In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State, which had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish, and Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who currently live and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history of forests from prehistory to the present, taking in Gilgamesh, Virgil, Dante, the Gawain poet, medieval alchemists, the Brothers Grimm, Hudson River painters, Latin American folklore, contemporary African novelists, and much more. Combining lyricism with contemporary scholarship, Sax opens new emotional, intellectual, and environmental perspectives on the storied history of the forest. Avery Weinman earned her Master’

Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be" )--as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why "auto-fiction" strikes her as a "bad category" and "a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally" since "the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience." Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer's weirdness! Mentioned in this Episode: By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Shoul

In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the local newspaper presents the newly born Ernsts and Thälmas in a photo on the front page, forever tying four families together. In Cecil the Lion Had to Die (HURI, 2023), Olena Stiazhkina follows these families through radical transformations when the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neoimperial Russia occupies Ukraine's Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Just as Stiazhkina's decision to write in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance--performed in this book that begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian--the stark choices of family members take them in different directions, presenting a mult

Where the Pavement Turns to Sand (Malarkey Books, 2023) is a collection of working class, everyday heartbreaks and bad decisions. In a refreshing rural Canadian setting, the characters in these slice of life tales stumble through divorce, debt, bad sex, and boring jobs, but also curling robots, aliens, jackalopes, wendigo, lots of legs wet with urine, and (maybe) sasquatches with an unexpected whimsy. What makes it work is Birnie’s signature dark humor and conversational style that makes every story feel like it was your neighbor telling it to you over a beer around a campfire, or at the rink. Surprising, entertaining, grimy and weird.” Sheldon Birnie is a writer, family man, and beer league hockey player living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand (Malarkey Books) and Missing Like Teeth: An oral history of Winnipeg underground rock 1990-2001 (Eternal Cavalier Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a pr

Today I talked to Katherine Vaz about her new novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books, 2023). In 1843-1846, on the Portuguese island of Madeira, five-year-old John Alves lived in jail and starved alongside his heretic mother, who was condemned to death for converting to Protestantism from Catholicism. Finally freed, John befriends young Mary Freitas, the adopted daughter of a wonderful botanist. Both families are forced to flee, and they end up in southern Illinois. John teaches signing to deaf children and Mary works as a gardener for a wealthy man who falls in love with her. She’s torn after she and John find each other again, but he’s off to fight in the Civil War. A mean-spirited trick keeps them away from each other and Mary accepts her boss’s marriage proposal. This is a rich and detailed love story based on the Portuguese community of Jacksonville, Illinois, historical characters, events, and flower cultivation, a courtship that took place in the home of rising politician Abraham Lincoln, and a sweeping v

Annie Fisk—an only child in Los Alamos, New Mexico—spends a lot of time investigating the treasure trove of objects at the back of her garden. Her father, with whom she is close, works long hours on the nuclear bomb project, her mother seems distant and preoccupied, and Annie has trouble making friends. But she is a gifted student, and she leaves home to major in physics and astronomy at a Texas college. At around the same time, she becomes romantically involved with Evelyn, an artist. Yet Annie’s sights are set on the stars—more specifically, NASA, where the Apollo Project is underway. She graduates in 1962 and, against Evelyn’s objections, heads for Houston, where she lands a job as a secretary—it’s the 1960s, after all, and that’s what women are expected to do. There she meets Norman Gale, a relationship that opens up her future both professionally and personally. But it’s Annie’s past, more than her present, that holds her back. And in this beautifully written debut novel, Isa Arsén ties all the disparate

Today I talked to Jule Schumacher about her new novel The English Experience (Doubleday, 2023). Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he's the only professor available to chaperone Payne University's annual "Experience: Abroad" (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of winter term. Among his charges are a claustrophobe with a juvenile detention record, a student who erroneously believes he is headed for the Caribbean, a pair of unreconciled lovers, a set of undifferentiated twins, and one young woman who has never been away from her cat before. Through a sea of troubles--personal, institutional, and international--the gimlet-eyed, acid-tongued Fitger strives to navigate safe passage for all concerned, revealing much about the essential need for human connection and the sometimes surprising places in which it is found. Julie’s first novel, The Body Is Water, was published by Soho Pres

Angus McDonald had to escape from Scotland or risk arrest. In 1838, he contracted with the Hudson Bay Company to trade in the Pacific Northwest. There he discovers majestic mountains, raging rivers, and buffalo. He meets and marries Catherine, who is related to Nez Perce royalty, and together they face competing claims of British fur traders and gold seekers, settlers and Native Americans who’ve lives for thousands of years in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. The real Angus McDonald left essays and articles, and newspaper clippings and official letters that describe his friendships, horses, passion for his wife, his trajectory as a trader and interpreter, and the rise and fall of the people he’s come to love. The Shining Mountains (High Road Books, 2023) is a brilliant, fictional exploration of a family’s clash between colonial expansion and native culture, based on the author’s blended Scottish and Nez Pierce ancestors. Alix Christie, a direct descendant of Angus McDonald’s brother Duncan, grew up in Calif

The Dragons of Deepwood Fen (Daw Books, 2023) is an immersive fantasy which takes you deep into a world of duality. There are two suns, one light and one dark; and two types of dragons, one yielding a substance called umbra and one a substance called aura. There are two peoples, one subjugated by the other. The people of the woods, mostly the dark-skinned Kin, have been conquered by the people of the mountains, who are organized into an empire with five capitals and five rulers, as well as an Imperator who is elected to rule over the Holt, the subjugated wooded territory that still retains some rights. But the Empire is not as united as it seems. A secret faction of the church, called the Chosen, hopes to free the dark Lord Faedryn from his imprisonment by the Goddess Alra and depose the ruling families. To that end, they enter into alliance with the Red Knives, a group of rebels who hide out in the Holt. Three young people try to navigate this complex world—Lorelie, an investigator for the Empire; Rylan, the

In Life Between Seconds (Addison & Highsmith, 2022), Douglas Weissman explores found family and magic.  After his mother dies, Peter Berry collects memories in broken watches the way others collect photographs. Peter takes his box filled with broken watches and flees his childhood home to a battered apartment complex in San Francisco—his mother's favorite city—in an attempt to bury the box with the dark truths of her haunting memory before she returns to take him too. The night Sofia Morales's daughter disappears, Sofia begins to hear her daughter's voice. Her world crumbles—her marriage crumbles. After demanding her husband leave, Sofia runs from Buenos Aires, Argentina to San Francisco—a city she always wanted to visit—renting an apartment in a beat-up complex at the edge of North Beach and blasting the radio to escape the voice of whom she can't bear to listen. Peter and Sophia become close friends in the confined space of the city, finding companionship in the shadow of their unspoken nightmares. When Sof

The Archive Is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street Press, 2022) attempts to capture the feeling of archival research, which, despite being an attempt to access information about the past, has a way of infusing the present; research unfolds in real time as you touch and handle objects that radiate with presence. In the archive we follow a researcher who is exploring a fantastical, limitless archive and though she attempts to research the history of war crimes, she keeps encountering objects from her personal past and memory. Ultimately, it explores both the falling in love with big institutions of learning (libraries, archives, museums) and the exhilaration of discovery, but also the ways these institutions violently exclude and how to reconcile that love with the past wrongs these institutions have committed.  The Archive Is All in Present Tense is an intensely cinematic collection of poems, intensely erotic and equally cerebral, where you will descend into archival folds making the body negative space in a r

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco Press, 2023) probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants. A woman known only to her neighbors as "the Asian recycling lady" collects bottles from the streets she calls home. A young college grad ponders the void left from a broken friendship. An unfulfilled housewife in Shanghai finds a secret outlet for her ambitions in an undercover gambling den. Two strangers become something more through the bond of mistaken identity. These characters, adeptly attuned to the mystery of living, invite us to consider whether it is possible for anyone to entirely do right by another. Tomb Sweeping brims with remarkable skill and talent in every story, keeping a definitive pulse on loss, community, and what it means to feel fully alive. With her debut story collection, Chang

Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, ritual, and most of all, love. Whether they retell foundational myths about the nation, as in The Vaster Wilds, or rethink the relationship between faith, nature, and desire, as does Matrix, Groff puts love for her characters, for the planet, and for the process of writing at the center of all her fiction. She discusses an anticipated triptych of novels beginning with Matrix and continuing with The Vaster Wilds that covers 1,000 years of women, religion, and planetary crisis and care. The Vaster Wilds tells a kind of anti-captivity narrative as it follows a servant girl who has escaped from a colonial settlement in 16

The Lost Archive (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) is comprised of a cast of characters who are mostly dealing with, or in the aftermath of a crisis of some kind. Or they are making big decisions about their lives. The stories bump up against each other, some longer, others shorter, from different time periods, geographical locations, and circumstances. There are several ex-husbands trying to weasel back in or extort, several women haunted by previous relationships, and several people who need to move, want to move, or just moved. Some stories are about friendship, relationships, lost chances, and the search for love, others are about mysterious happenings, mistaken identities, and end of life decisions. The Lost Archive is a collection of stories that delve into universal themes of resentment, betrayal, and redemption. Lynn C. Miller is the author of four novels. Her third novel, The Day After Death, was named a 2017 Lambda Literary Award finalist in lesbian fiction, and her short story, “Words Shimmer,” won an Edit

Today I talked to Andy Mozina about his new novel Tandem (Tortoise Books, 2023). An economics professor at a Michigan college is struggling through a bad divorce, having a tough time with his only son, and then, through hardly any fault of his own, he must avoid getting caught by the police. He only had one extra beer and it was late and foggy outside, plus the two college kids were biking out of the entrance to the deserted beach, instead of the exit, without a headlight, so was it really his fault when he hit and killed them? Also, couldn’t he do more for the world and right his wrongs, if he was still teaching and making contributions, than if he was stuck in jail forever? Mike will do anything to avoid being caught in this moving novel about the lengths a person will go to avoid facing uncomfortable truths. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Andy Mozina majored in economics at Northwestern, then dropped out of Harvard Law School to study literature and write. He’s published fiction in Tin House, Ecotone, McSwe

Rivkah Milman is just one of the thousands of young women who fled their homes in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, looking for better prospects in New York—where the streets, people said, would be paved with gold. In Rivkah’s case, she is sixteen and pregnant, sailing to join her husband, who doesn’t even bother to meet her at the docks. Rivkah struggles, raising her daughter in a tenement and keeping that shoddy roof over their heads through endless hours of sewing piecework for a sweatshop. But tough as Rivkah’s life is, this is really the story of her daughter, Miriam, who through a colossal but familiar misjudgment falls under the spell of Frederick Winthrop, a rich and immoral playboy who seeks out underage girls. But with help from a family friend, Mimi succeeds in separating herself from her difficult childhood in pursuit of a better life. Miriam, who adopts the name Mimi to signal her break with the past, has always longed to become not just a seamstress but an haute couture designer. An