New Books in Literary Studies

Grant Us Eyes is a book-length close reading of Bloodborne by literary critic Nathan Wainstein (LA Review of Books, Cartridge Lit, American Book Review). Grant Us Eyes situates the game's oft-discussed difficulty in relation to a much longer tradition of difficult art – surrealist painting, the modernist novel, etc. Wainstein probes the difficulty of Bloodborne's fragmented narrative, the difficulty of its graphical and aural glitches, the difficulty of the philosophical problems it poses, and the difficulty of performing close analysis itself within a medium that still doesn't have established, agreed-upon methods of interpretation in the way literature and film do. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master's degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, Kim Stanley Robinson has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California. All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future, his 2020 vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity's fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. Flanked by RTB's JP, KSR's friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asked him to reflect on the book's impact in this conversation with our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue.KSR, Stan to his friends, brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.” Mentioned in this episode: Pact for the FutureCOP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of CrowdsParis AgreementDon't Look UpTobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely VoiceMary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) Listen and Read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they're together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she's caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she's writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination. Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Recommended Books: Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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/literary-studies

The collection of wisdom fables known as Kalila and Dimna began its long literary life in Sanskrit more than two millennia ago, and was subsequently translated to numerous languages. But it is the Arabic version, adapted from Middle Persian by the eighth-century scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa, that has left the most substantial literary footprint. A foundational text of classical Arabic prose and the basis for translations into Hebrew, Syriac, Castilian, Latin, Persian, and more, versions of Kalila and Dimna exists in hundreds of manuscript copies held in libraries around the world. Kalila and Dimna is the focus of Isabel Toral and Beatrice Gruendler's new work An Unruly Classic: Kalīla and Dimna and Its Syriac, Arabic, and Early Persian Versions (Brill: 2024). In this collected volume, members of the Kalila and Dimna project discuss, from different perspectives, a core aspect of their work with this textual tradition: the study of variation and mutability. The aim is to shed light on Kalila and Dimna's so-called mouvance and establish typologies of textual mobility and instability across linguistic traditions and historical periods, as well as to develop analytical tools to describe, classify, represent, and interpret these dynamics. As will be shown, the progressive digitalization of philology in the last decades has offered the unique opportunity of putting the concept of mouvance into practice. Contributors include Theodore S. Beers, Jan J. van Ginkel, Khouloud Khalfallah, Mahmoud Kozae, Rima Redwan, and Johannes Stephan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A bold, unforgettable novel of war, imagination, and survival. Thirteen-year-old Kamiran is fleeing the collapse of Syria when his body begins to harden literally—turning to chalk. As his transformation unfolds, he pours his memories, secrets, and darkly funny confessions into a piece of chalk he stole at school. Through the eyes of this precocious, resilient boy, Safe Corridor explores what it means to survive the unthinkable—with tenderness, fury, and imagination. Written by acclaimed Kurdish-Syrian novelist Jan Dost and translated by Marilyn Booth—winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize—Safe Corridor is a searing, surreal journey through displacement, coming of age, and the cost of war. Winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize. Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan. Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach's—even if we are unaware of it. In this erudite and provocative book, William Marx explores our invisible libraries—how we build them and how we should expand them.Libraries, Marx tells us, are mental realities, and, conversely, our minds are libraries. We never read books apart from other texts. We take them from mental shelves filled with a variety of works that help us understand what we are reading. And yet the libraries in our mind are not always what they should be. The selection on our mental shelves—often referred to as canon, heritage, patrimony, or tradition—needs to be modified and expanded. Our intangible libraries should incorporate what Marx calls the dark matter of literature: the works that have been lost, that exist only in fragments, that have been repurposed by their authors, or were never written in the first place. Marx suggests methods for recovering this missing literature, but he also warns us that adding new titles to our libraries is not enough. We must also adopt a new attitude, one that honors the diversity and otherness of literary works. We must shed our preconceptions and build within ourselves a mental world library. William Marx is professor of comparative literature at the Collège de France. He is the author of The Hatred of Literature, The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic, and other books. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Nonbinary Jane Austen, Chris Washington theorizes how Jane Austen envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that we can supposedly see solidifying in the eighteenth century. Arguing that her writing works to abolish gender exclusivity altogether, Washington shows how she establishes a politics that ushers in a future built on plurality and possibility. Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, USA. Washington is the editor of a recent Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley's The Last Man and is the author of Nonbinary Jane Austen, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Hope and Life in the Anthropocene (University of Toronto Press, 2019), and essays on the literature of the Romantic period and on contemporary theory and philosophy. Tristan Burke researches and teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and continental philosophy. He is the author of Byronism, Napoleonism, and Nineteenth-Century Realism: Heroes of Their Own Lives? (Routledge, 2022) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A neighborhood of picturesque content-creation houses perched on too-green lawns in a California desert; a meandering stampede of unleashed dogs on the streets of San Francisco; a skein of snow geese alighting in a state park in Missouri; an uncanny fundraising auction at an upscale suburban-DC prep school. Inhabiting these worlds of disconnection and dislocation are the "sad grownups" a middle-aged queer couple arguing over whether to have children, a college professor dying from cancer, two recent high school graduates plotting a robbery, a sixty-year-old counselor at a boys' summer camp sheltering herself from the realities of life-all connected more closely to the landscapes around them than to other people, searching fervently for liberation, understanding, and even happiness, wherever and however they might be found. Amy Stuber's writing has appeared in the New England Review, Flash Fiction America, Ploughshares, The Idaho Review, Cincinnati Review, Triquarterly, American Short Fiction, Joyland, and elsewhere. She's the recipient of the Missouri Review's 2023 William Peden Prize in fiction, winner of the 2021 Northwest Review Fiction Prize, and runner-up for the 2022 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. Her work received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XLIV, appeared on the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2021, has been nominated for Best of the Net, and appears in Best Small Fictions 2020 and 2023. She has a PhD in English, has taught college writing, and worked in online education for many years. Recommended Books: Rebecca Lee, Bobcat Joy Williams, The Quick and the Dead Sonya Walger, Lion Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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/literary-studies

In the 200 years since Blake's death, the visionary artist, poet and writer has become a household name, often beloved. Yet many struggle to comprehend his kaleidoscopic ideas; how they speak to human longings and the challenges of living in anxious times. Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon provides a fresh route into Blake, taking him at his word. Exploring this brilliant thinker's passionate writings, arresting artworks and fascinating life, Vernon illuminates Blake's vivid worldview. Like us, he lived in a tumultuous era of war, discontent, rapid technological change, and human estrangement from nature. He exposed the dark sides of political fervour and social moralising, while unashamedly celebrating love and liberty. But he also conversed with prophets and angels, and was powerfully, if unconventionally, religious. If we take this seriously--not easy, in secular times--then Blake can help us to unlock the transformative power of imagination. Written for both longstanding fans and unfamiliar readers, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst & Co., 2025) reveals Blake as an invigorating and hopeful guide for our modern age. Mark Vernon is a London-based psychotherapist, writer and former Anglican priest. A keen podcaster and a columnist with The Idler, he speaks regularly at festivals and on the BBC. He has a PhD in Philosophy, and degrees in Theology and Physics. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hidden Heroes (Anthem Press, 2025) offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of ordinary North Koreans through a collection of short stories by renowned DPRK authors. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, these works explore the theme of the “hidden hero,” a popular moniker in the DPRK to describe the average citizen who navigates the complexities of daily life with quiet dedication for their work and country. In this interview, Dr. Kim and Dr. Berthelier discuss the appeal of North Korean literature, their approach to translating the collection, and how sharing stories reminds readers of our shared humanity. Dr. Benoit Berthelier is a senior lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include North Korea's cultural industries and digital technologies. View his university profile here.  Dr. Immanuel Kim is The Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies at George Washington University. His research focuses on the changes and development, particularly in the representations of women, sexuality, and memory, of North Korean literature from the 1960s to present day. View his university profile here.  Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Image of Christ in Russian Literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Pasternak (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Dr. John Givens of the University of Rochester discusses classics of Russian literature such as The Brothers Karamazov and Dr. Zhivago, as well as texts of less renown to English-speaking audiences, such as Tolstoy's Resurrection. These texts and others, Givens suggests, portray Christ apophatically: that is, by showing who Christ was not, in order to illuminate who Christ therefore must be. In addition to the novels themselves, Givens cites sources such as personal correspondence and important theological works, thus bringing an English-speaking public to greater depth of understanding than would be possible simply by reading Russian novels in translation. Though focused on a specific topic, Givens' book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in familiarizing themselves with some of the “greats” of the Russian literary canon. Aaron Weinacht is Professor of History at the University of Montana Western in Dillon, MT. He teaches courses on Russian and Soviet History, World History, and Philosophy of History. His research interests include the sociological theorist Philip Rieff and the influence of Russian nihilism on American libertarianism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Israeli Documentary Poetry: Coming of Age with the State introduces and explores documentary poetry written by Israeli poets who came of age during the first two decades of the state and who, since the 1970s and 1980s, have recorded their experiences of that period. This study offers a literary-cultural analysis of forty-two poems by thirty Israeli poets of various backgrounds, divided into themes such as: memories of the Holocaust and portraits of survivors and their offspring; transit locations and situations both en route to and within Israel; displacement as a shared fate of Jews and Arabs; school and classroom experiences; Mizraḥi women between Levantine patriarchy and Western liberalism; and languages of the diaspora versus Hebrew. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Traversing teeming metropolises and tiny towns, Prose to the People: A Celebration of Black Bookstores (Random House, 2025) explores these spaces, chronicling these Black bookstore's past and present lives. Combining narrative prose, eye-catching photography, one-on-one interviews, original essays, and specially curated poetry, Prose to the People is a reader's road trip companion to the world of Black books. Thoughtfully curated by writer and Black bookstore owner Katie Mitchell, Prose to the People is a must-have addition to the shelves of anyone who loves book culture and Black history. Though not a definitive guide, this dynamic book centers profiles of over fifty Black bookstores from the Northeast to the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West Coast, complete with stunning original and archival photography. Interspersed throughout are essays, poems, and interviews by New York Times bestsellers Kiese Laymon, Rio Cortez, Pearl Cleage, and many more journalists, activists, authors, academics, and poets that offer deeper perspectives on these bookstores' role throughout the diaspora. Complete with a foreword by world-renowned poet and activist Nikki Giovanni, Prose to the People is a beautiful tribute to these vital pillars of the Black community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. By mapping a path less travelled but just as vital in divisive times, in n A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Gabriel Ertsgaard shows writers how they can enact nonviolent heroism in their characters, model civil resistance in their stories, and create worlds around a mythos that champions redemptive nonviolence. With concepts applicable to writing for fiction, drama, the screen, and narrative poetry, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace deconstructs the necessity for violence in popular works, explores key concepts in peace studies, and helps writers establish their own peace poetics. Focused around the narrative craft techniques of character arcs, campaigns, duels, and worldbuilding, the book features numerous creative writing prompts and examples from key works. These include films such as Trading Places, Selma, Lage Raho Munna Bai, and Frozen and literature ranging from Shakespeare's plays to Dickens' A Christmas Carol to Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels. A timely and important expansion to any writer's toolkit, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace allows storytellers to understand the complex dynamics of, and the damage caused by, violent perspectives and actions, giving them a way into considering nonviolence as powerful and preferable. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Bringing John McGahern's 1965 masterpiece back into print in the United  States after years of inaccessibility, this new sixtieth-anniversary critical edition includes an introduction aimed at first-time readers, explanatory footnotes, McGahern's own glossary, and four scholarly essays aimed at guiding readers through the novel's famously controversial history. While the text was initially banned in Ireland for obscenity, this edition demonstrates that McGahern's novel of adolescence is not obscene, but revelatory, exposing the corruption  underlying authority structures in mid-century Ireland--from the family  to the church, to the government's willingness to ignore national and  communal trauma. The Dark follows a promising young boy's struggles to break free from the economic and social forces trapping him in a  lifestyle that is both familiar and suffocating. At the heart of the  novel is the boy's complex and stormy relationship with his abusive,  widowed father, who is left to raise a family with little outside aid. The Dark is a story of alarming brutality, surprising tenderness, and  poetic lyricism; a reflection of Irish society that maintains historical significance as contemporary Ireland continues to build its national  identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The first edited collection dedicated to the historical specifics of Irish shame Offers an anatomy of Irish shame as a cultural predicament Combines theoretical reading with historical and institutional context Includes essays by some of Ireland's leading researchers on trauma and sexuality studies Shame has haunted Ireland since the inception of Irishness itself. As such, it has come to seem an ineluctable modality of Irish life. In fact, the contours of Irish shame have evolved over time, shifting with alterations in their colonial predicament, and in their response, whether complicit or resistant, to economic, political, and cultural dispossession. Irish Shame offers an anatomy of that condition. In twelve essays, it traces the ethnic, religious, biopolitical, psychosocial and neurodiverse parameters of shame as a force in Irish life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Examining the interplay of religion, history, and literature through a case study of King Krsnadevaraya's celebrated Telugu poem Āmuktamālyada, Ilanit Loewy Shacham showcases the groundbreaking worldview that this often-overlooked poem embodies. Krsnadevaraya (r.1509-1529) ruled over the Vijayanagara Empire during its heyday, and his monumental poem situates all power and authority not in the imperial center, but in the villages and temples at the empire's outskirts; not in the royal court, but in a religious community - a worldview radically different from how literary and political histories portray the king and his empire. Empire Inside Out: Religion, Conquest, and Community in Kṛṣṇadevarāya's Āmuktamālyada explores the Āmuktamālyada as a reflection of one of South Asia's most culturally complex periods, highlighting its rich religious, political, historical and ethnographic detail. Moreover, Loewy Shacham examines the Āmuktamālyada as the work of a king imparting personal insights on empire, kingship, and individuality - specifically, that it is possible to be unbounded by the institution of kingship that he himself embodies. This book demonstrates that Krsnadevaraya's text connects the imperial domain to the village and temple settings, and to the south Indian community of Srivaisnava devotees-and indeed that it situates the source of authority and power not in the royal court but in the margins, where Srivaisnavism originated, giving the far Tamil south a central role in its imperial vision. Employing close textual analysis of the Āmuktamālyada, supplemented by a rich corpus of texts in different languages and genres, Empire Inside Out illuminates a piece of literature that has been fairly neglected, owing to the particularized linguistic and literary training required. The core of the book is based in the historical context of sixteenth-century Vijayanagara, from which it moves to the various pasts that helped shape the Āmuktamālyada, and to our contemporary times and the use of the text in constructing (at times rewriting) history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

My guest today is Jyotsna Singh, Professor Emerita of English at Michigan State University. She has written numerous books including Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues: “Discovery” of India in the Language of Colonialism (Routledge), and The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics (Blackwell), which is co-authored with Dympna Callaghan and Lorraine Helms. She has also edited A Companion to the Global Renaissance: Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, 1500-1700 (Wiley-Blackwell), which has gone through two editions. She was among a handful of early scholars who illuminated Shakespeare's works within non-western, non-canonical contexts. One such example is her early essay about Shakespeare in India, “Different Shakespeares,” originally published in Theatre Journal in 1989, and then expanded on and reprinted in Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues. Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019) tells the story of the academic study of the cultural legacy of European colonialism, showing how the literature of former colonial powers represented and often distorted colonial history and how, in turn, colonized peoples articulated and reclaimed their identity and history by interrogating European culture and history. Singh's book shows how our reading of Shakespeare's plays such as ‘The Tempest,' ‘Hamlet,' and ‘Othello' has been forever changed by theater practitioners and scholars alike, while making a a persuasive case that postcoloniality continues to have a unique, still-unfolding relevance on how we read. In part, Singh's book also memorializes the struggle of scholars for legitimacy within a sometimes-hostile field. Author of the article on The Tempest mentioned at around 35:40 is as follows: Leininger, Lorie Jerrell. "The Miranda trap: Sexism and racism in Shakespeare's The Tempest." The Tempest. Routledge, 2013. 223-230 (first published in 1980). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist and post-Maoist China. Da, who emigrated from China to the United States as a child in the 1990s, brings Shakespeare's tragedy to life on its own terms, addressing the concerns it reflects over the transition from Elizabeth I to James I with a fearsome sense of what would soon come to pass. At the same time, she uses the play as a lens to revisit the world of Maoist China--what it did to people, and what it did to storytelling. Blending literary analysis and personal history, Da begins in her childhood during Deng Xiaoping's Opening and Reform, then moves back and forth between Lear and China. In The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton University Press, 2025), the unfinished business of Maoism and other elements of Chinese thought and culture--from Confucianism to the spectacles of Peking Opera--help elucidate the choices Shakespeare made in constructing Lear and the unbearable confusions he left behind. Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Caleb Zakarin is the Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction--detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance--was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention. This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration--all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and not very far at all. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A wide-ranging study of the rich questions raised by speaking infants in medieval French literature.Medieval literature is full of strange moments when infants (even fetuses) speak. In Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature, (U Chicago Press, 2025) Julie Singer explores the unsettling questions raised by these events, including What is a person? Is speech fundamental to our humanity? And what does it mean, or what does it matter, to speak truth to power?Singer contends that descriptions of baby talk in medieval French literature are far from trivial. Through treatises, manuals, poetry, and devotional texts, Singer charts how writers imagined infants to speak with an authority untainted by human experience. What their children say, then, offers unique insight into medieval hopes for universal answers to life's deepest wonderings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews. "Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others—not to mention countless exchanges with Tim O'Brien himself—Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, 2025) provides a nearly day-by-day, gripping account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process. This meticulously researched biography explores the life and journey that turned O'Brien into a literary icon and a household name. It includes an unpublished short story about O'Brien from a college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989 attic exchange between American and Vietnamese writers on the eve of the publication of O'Brien's most beloved book, The Things They Carried, years before the two countries normalized relations. Peace is a Shy Thing is as much a history of the era as it is a story of O'Brien's life, from his small-town midwestern mid-century childhood, to winning the National Book Award and his status as literary elder statesman. A story which Vernon, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and a literary scholar trained by officers and professors of the Vietnam era, is uniquely suited to tell. Guest: Alex Vernon (he/him) graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only literature major in his class of over a thousand), served in combat as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990. Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers... Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Routledge Companion to Global Chaucer (Routledge, 2024) offers 40 chapters by leading scholars working with contemporary, theoretical, and textual approaches to the poetry and prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) in a global context. This volume provides post-pandemic, twenty-first century readers a way to teach, learn, and write about Chaucer's works complete with awareness of their reach, their limitations, and occlusions on a global field of culture. Interviewees: Craig E. Bertolet is Hollifield Professor of English at Auburn University. Susan Nakley is Professor and Associate Chair of English at St. Joseph's University, New York. Shoshana Adler is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

 Nightshining (Milkweed, 2025) Jennifer Kabat is the author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper's, McSweeney's, and The Believer. She teaches at the school of Visual Arts and the New School. An Apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department. Recommended Books: Hélène Bessette, Lily is Crying Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain Majula Martin, Last Fire Season Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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/literary-studies

What happens when the 'modern woman' ages? Modernist Poetics of Ageing (Oxford University Press, 2025) answers this question by being the first book-length study of three late modernist women's writers. Drawing on their place within wider modernist networks, this monograph is primarily framed around work by Mina Loy, H.D. and Djuna Barnes, who are often thought of as the quintessentially youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s. Taking a literary, ageing studies and cultural criticism approach, this monograph focuses on lived experience, as well as thematic representations of ageing in their work, to examine how each author grew older in the years 1940-1982. By surveying literary texts, visual art, photography, life writing and archival material, this book explores the intersection of old age as lived and as well as written to argue that modernist late writing embodies the realities of ageing and transforms them through avant-garde aesthetics. As an interdisciplinary study, this work pairs ageing studies and modernist studies to innovatively consider experimental works written about and in later life. The book suggests that a focus on older age complicates the very avant-garde or modernist aesthetics that each author was interested in: what happens when the scene of the 'new' is populated by older people? How does an embodied experience of illness inform an aesthetics of 'late style'? After fulfilling their role as the youthful 'modern woman' of the 1920s, how did each artist continue to create rich, avant-garde works that go well beyond the paradigms of 'late modernism'? Modernist Poetics of Ageing argues that the late lives of some of modernism's most prominent and networked women writers are overlooked - despite being rich, vital, and contemporary in their continuing commitment to modernist experiment. By reframing these older modernist women writers as engaged in continuing, creative experiments, Modernist Poetics of Ageing reveals that the 'new' does not always have to be 'young'. About the author: Jade Elizabeth French works on ageing, care, and intergenerationality in modern and contemporary literature. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University, developing a project on emotions, ageing, and care homes in post-war British novels since 1948. In 2021-2022, she was a Research Associate as part of the ESRC-funded project Reimagining the Future in Older Age. Jade is also the co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts project Decorating Dissidence, which explores the conceptual, aesthetic, and political qualities of craft from the twentieth century to today. About the host: Julyan Oldham is a Post-Award Member of the University of Oxford, where he recently completed a PhD on virginity in the early twentieth-century British novel. Julyan's work has been published or is forthcoming in Studies in the Novel and the Journal of Modern Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Tochi Onyebuchi's novel Harmattan Season: A Novel (Tor Books, 2025) follows Boubacar, a veteran and private eye living in French occupied West Africa, as he begins a reluctant journey to discover what happened to the bleeding woman who stumbled onto his doorway and vanished soon after. That mystery quickly drags Bouba into exactly the kind of violence and political intrigue he had been working so hard to avoid. In this interview, Onyebuchi describes finding Boubacar's voice and the different noir tropes he was most excited about. We discuss fiction as a way to examine colonialism, magic as a tool for social exploration as well as engaging set pieces, and the joy of fast-paced novels. We also talk depictions of violence, world-wise urchin kids, and experimentation and growth throughout a writing career. Harmattan Season is a compelling and thoughtful adventure and it was so much fun discussing it with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Pria Anand speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Elephant's Child,” which appears in The Common's spring issue. The piece is a vivid retelling of a Hindu myth, the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Pria talks about the process of writing and revising many versions of this ancient myth, why she felt inspired by it, and how her literary writing intersects with her career as a neurologist. Pria also discusses her debut book, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, out this month from Simon & Schuster. The book explores how story and storytelling can illuminate the rich, complex gray areas within the science of the brain, weaving case study, history, fable, and memoir. Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric, out from Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Little, Brown in the U.K. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center. ­­Read Prias's story “The Elephant's Child” in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-elephants-child. Order The Mind Electric in all formats via Simon & Schuster at simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mind-Electric/. Learn more about Pria at www.priaanand.com. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese's Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challenging hypocrisy, unlike the older Anjing, whose memories of a turbulent past remind her of the perils of going against the grain. When Anran is gifted a stylish red shirt that becomes the talk of their sleepy hometown, adolescent delight is construed by her cynical teachers as another act of defiance. As they decide the young firebrand's future, certain lessons can't be avoided. Should Anjing shield her sibling from life's hard truths, or will she let her blaze her own path? First published in China in 1984, Tie Ning's bestselling coming-of-age novella My Sister's Red Shirt (Sinoist Books, 2025), translated into English by Dr. Annelise Finegan, depicts the loss of innocence and the challenges of being true to yourself in an era of unpredictable transformation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Children's picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that produces them, as well as that society's vision of its place in the wider world at large.Children's Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (AUC Press, 2025) by Dr. Yasmine Motawy examines a new wave of Egyptian picture books that was published in the current century to see how these books responded to larger societal trends and transformations in Egypt, as well as to explore the ideologies that lie behind them. Dr. Motawy argues that a host of factors, including the growth of gated communities and international schooling, the proliferation of lucrative literary awards, returning Gulf migrants, television dramas, and nationwide reading advocacy initiatives helped give rise to a new kind of children's picture book in Egypt.Dr. Motawy focuses on three clusters of selected picture books to investigate the extent to which these books reproduce hegemonic discourses or, alternatively, open up new horizons of childhood agency and societal transformation. The first cluster includes books that directly socialize the child by showing them ‘how things are done,' in both the domestic sphere and the increasing globalized spaces that children frequent with their families. The second cluster aims at reframing cultural notions around femininity through the retelling of folk and fairy tales, while the third cluster addresses children's abilities to assess the impact of their actions on their environment, and invites them to examine their personal suitability to positions of power and stewardship. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today I'm speaking with Bernd Roeck about his book, The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance (Princeton University Press, 2025). Bernd is professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and director of the German Centre for Venetian Studies in Venice. Translated by Patrick Baker, The World at First Light is a truly magisterial work. Much ink and paint has been spilled illuminating and interpreting the cultural flourishing known as Europe's rebirth. The Renaissance was chiefly marked by a revival in classical literature and philosophy, artistic and scientific innovations embodied by polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, and William Shakespeare. In exploring this historical period, Bernd offers the most authoritative and up-to-date treatment of the Renaissance. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

A vast corpus of Jain texts lies unexamined in manuscript libraries, several of them new versions of earlier works. Though the prevalence of literary transcreation in Jain communities is striking, it is by no means a practice exclusive to them. The field of South Asian Studies has increasingly dealt with the creative engagement of authors with an authoritative literary object. Although these studies have brought to the fore important conclusions, the Jains as a literary community have remained absent from these discussions. This volume addresses this gap, highlighting the influential role of Jain authors in the multilingual literary world of South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba's Understanding of the Divine Word (Routledge, 2023) explores the role of divine love in the Quranic commentary of the Moroccan Sufi scholar Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība (d. 1224/1809). Through close textual analysis of Ibn ʿAjība's exegesis al-Baḥr al-madīd—The Abundant Ocean—and drawing on his other Sufi writings the book illuminates the scholar's theory of divine love, drawn from his scholarly antecedents, to elucidate its role and the scholar's impact on the wider field of Quranic scholarship. This close analysis is supplemented by a comparative approach focusing on several other eminent and influential Sufi commentaries. What is displayed is that Ibn ʿAjība's exegesis connected theoretical works on the concept of divine love to their practical application, a breakthrough in Sufi literature. The study situates Ibn ‘Ajība's thought in theological and historical perspective, engaging with his mystical approach which integrates his theory of divine love with other Sufi doctrines in an accessible manner. As such, the Moroccan scholar's work left an indelible impact on future generations of Quranic exegetes within North Africa and across the Islamic world. Love in Sufi Literature makes important contributions to the study of Sufism, Islam in North Africa, and late pre-modern Islamic intellectual history. Omneya Ayad is Assistant Professor of Sufi Studies at Üsküdar University in Istanbul, Türkiye. Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa, focused on issues in Sufism, theology, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression. In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings (Harper, 2025), Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women's public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women's ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks. Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers. Find author Honorée Fannone Jeffers at her website, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack. Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, Instagram, and Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Violence of Reading: Literature and Philosophy at the Threshold of Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) expounds the scene of reading as one that produces an overwhelmed body exposed to uncontainable forms of violence. The book argues that the act of reading induces a representational instability that causes the referential function of language to collapse. This breakdown releases a type of "linguistic pain" (Scarry; Butler; Hamacher) that indicates a constitutive wounding of the reading body. The wound of language marks a rupture between linguistic reality and the phenomenal world. Exploring this rupture in various ways, the book brings together texts and genres from diverse traditions and offers close examinations of the rhetoric of masochism (Sacher-Masoch; Deleuze), the relation between reading and abuse (Nietzsche; Proust; Jelinek), the sublime experience of reading (Kant; Kafka; de Man), the "novel of the institution" (Musil; Campe), and literary suicide (Bachmann; Berryman; Okkervil River). Dominik Zechner is currently an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Achilles. Agamemnon. Odysseus. Hector. The lives of these and many other men in the greatest epics of ancient Greece have been pored over endlessly in the past three millennia. But these are not just tales about heroic men. There are scores of women as well—complex, fascinating women whose stories have gone unexplored for far too long. In Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World through the Women Written Out of It (University of Chicago Press, 2025), award-winning classicist and historian Dr. Emily Hauser pieces together compelling evidence from archaeological excavations and scientific discoveries to unearth the richly textured lives of women in Bronze Age Greece—the era of Homer's heroes. Here, for the first time, we come to understand the everyday lives and experiences of the real women who stand behind the legends of Helen, Briseis, Cassandra, Aphrodite, Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso, Penelope, and more. In this captivating journey through Homer's world, Dr. Hauser explains era-defining discoveries, such as the excavation of Troy and the decipherment of Linear B tablets that reveal thousands of captive women and their children; more recent finds like the tomb of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos, whose tomb contents challenge traditional gender attributes; DNA evidence showing that groups of warriors buried near the Black Sea with their weapons and steeds were, in fact, Amazon-like female fighters; a prehistoric dye workshop on Crete that casts fresh light on “women's work” of dyeing, spinning, and weaving textiles; and a superbly preserved shipwreck off the coast of Turkey whose contents tell of the economic and diplomatic networks crisscrossing the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Essential reading for fans of Madeline Miller or Natalie Haynes, this riveting new history brings to life the women of the Bronze Age Aegean as never before, offering a groundbreaking reassessment of the ancient world. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford (UK) and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre, where she is currently leading a three-year UKRI-funded research project,Kafka's Transformative Communities. She has published widely on German literature from the eighteenth century to the present; on Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School; the history of psychology; and on photography and visual culture. Selected publications: Kafka and Photography (Oxford University Press, 2007); ed., with Ben Morgan and Anthony Phelan, Walter Benjamins anthropologisches Denken (Rombach, 2012); The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge University Press, 2013); ed., Franz Kafka in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Attention and Distraction in German Literature, Thought, and Culture (Oxford University Press 2022). She is also the editor of the book series Visual Culture with Legenda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the next-door neighbors began a crusade to push them out. The two brothers followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence. Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about proximity, care, and the line between human and animal. Illustrated with the author's own sketches, Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025) grapples not only with Reilly's place in her neighborhood, but with America's past and current political climate. Amie Souza Reilly is an American writer and artist from Milford, Connecticut. She holds an MA in Literature from Fordham University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches and is the Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The present book contains a facsimile edition of a unique modern Kashmiri translation of five chapters from Cervantes's famous Don Quijote. In this book the Kashmiri translation and the corresponding parts of Jarvis's English version are presented on facing pages. The Kashmiri text is reproduced as a facsimile of the autograph prepared by Pandit Jagaddhar Zadoo, one of the two Kashmiri translators. The Kashmiri text in the present volume was written on modern paper in easily legible Devanagari characters by using only a few more additional diacritic symbols. This publication contains an introduction written by Surindar Nath Pandita, a grandson of Pandit Nityanand Shastri. The book can be regarded as a conjoined twin of the partial Sanskrit translation of Don Quijote published as volume III of the Pune Indological Series in 2019. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Dr. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Dr. Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Isabella Andreini, Letters, ed. and trans. Paola De Santo and Caterina Mongiat Farina. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. Iter Press of the University of Toronto, 2023. Winner of the Josephine Roberts Award for a Scholarly Edition (2024) from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender  Welcome! My guest is Professor Paola Da Santo, Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Georgia, who has some fascinating things to say about Isabella Andreini (1562–1604), an actress, poet, and playwright renowned for her literary and theatrical skill.   Acclaimed as "la divina Isabella," Andreini toured Italy and France as part of the Compagnia dei Comici Gelosi. Letters (Iter Press, 2023) is a collection of epistles she wrote written in fictional, anonymous, male, and female voices, a “hermaphroditic” alternation of gender unlike any that had been seen in letter writing to that time. Andreini remade the humanistic epistolary genre into a distinctive fusion of literary and dramatic performance. The guise of epistolary intimacy cedes to a knowing artificiality, which allows for the emergence of Andreini's modern critique of the gendered self as a uniform entity. The collection centers on love and examines—from surprising perspectives—pertinent issues such as death, the birth of a girl, prostitution, patriarchal marital practices, love in old age, courtiership, country and city life, human nature, and defenses and critiques of both sexes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists' prior expectations. The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming. Kristin Mahoney 's books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti 's first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain's nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don't need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Since the 1980s, readers and scholars alike have celebrated migrant literature for not only depicting migration, but for inspiring  reflections on class, race, gender, nations, and mobility. But, beyond  depicting migration, is it possible for migrant literature to be a force of movement itself? Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion calls upon the philosophy of movement and a counter-history of migration to invent a theory and method for analysing migrant literature. The text uncovers patterns of movement that migrant texts enact and create – in other words, a movement-oriented poetics. Poetics of the Migrant understands movement as the defining force of human history; and the migrant is the primary figure of cultural and political transformation. Migrant literature makes it possible to transform how we process and interpret social history through social motion. Perhaps, from here, we can imagine a different world: one where movement and migrancy are legible and thinkable. About Kevin Potter: Kevin Potter is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Vienna. His research and teaching primarily focus on Marxist theory, migrant literature, anarchist thought, dystopian fiction, and Palestine. His first book, Poetics of the Migrant was released in 2023 through Edinburgh University Press, and received honorable mention for the 2024 Hugh J. Silverman Prize from the Association for Philosophy and Literature. About Pavan Mano: Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/p...). He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation, interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore (https://manchesteruniversitypr...). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies