New Books in Literature

Howard Lovy is a journalist, book editor, and author with forty years of experience covering everything from Jewish issues and the Mideast conflict to nanotechnology and the auto industry. His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Longreads, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, and other publications. Howard's debut novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, follows two musicians who reconnect in middle age when their 40-year-old song goes viral. The book explores themes of music, faith, aging, and second chances. In addition to writing and editing, Howard produces and hosts podcasts for the Alliance of Independent Authors. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, Heidi, and their dog, Henry. About Found and Lost: "In 1985, they met by chance.As a young guitarist and violinist, Jake and Cait created something transcendent each time they locked eyes and finished each other's musical phrases.... until the music stopped.Forty years later, the song that started it all brings them back together. But time changes everything." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aamir Hussain about his debut novel, Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn, 2025). In a battle of words and beliefs, a young woman must defend her city against zealotry during the Islamic Golden Age.After his long-time scribe retires, Khadija's father, the city's leading jurist, offers his introverted daughter the opportunity to take on the role of his assistant. In accepting, Khadija is thrust into her community, the medieval hilltop city of Medina'tul-Agham, where she, as a motherless young woman, has spent little time. Led by Imam Fatima and guided by the Circle of Mothers, it is a matriarchy — the only one in the empire. Though forced to set aside her quiet life among the books and parchments of her family home, Khadija thrives, finding her power and place in the world with the support of her new friends and strong female mentors.Yet Khadija's idyllic new life is shattered when fanatical forces weaponize Sharia law to threaten the very fabric of the society. Using only the power of her parchment and quill, Khadija must win the support of the people and write fatwas to fight against injustice, or the peace and prosperity of her city will be nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history. About Aamir Hussain: Aamir Hussain was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame (Tor Nightfire, 2025) from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret. The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her. As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control. Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can't answer but can't get out of her mind. Do you want it? More than anything? Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin: Manhunt Cuckoo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hari Krishna Kaul's short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore – with a sharp eye for detail, biting wit, and empathy – themes of isolation, alienation, corruption, and the social mores of a community that experienced a loss of homeland, culture, and language. His characters navigate their ever-changing environs with humor as they make uncomfortable compromises to survive. Two friends cling to their multiplication tables while the world shifts around them; a group of travelers are forced to seek shelter in a rickety hostel after a landslide; a woman faces the first days in an uneasy exile at her daughter-in-law's Delhi home. In For Now, It Is Night (Archipelago Books, 2024), translated from Kashmiri by Gowhar Fazili, Gowhar Yaquoob, Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Kaul dissects the ways we struggle to make sense of new surroundings. These glimpses of life are bittersweet and profound; Kaul's characters carry their loneliness with wisdom and grace. Beautifully translated in a unique collaborative project, For Now, It Is Night brings many of Kaul's resonant stories to English readers for the first time. 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/literature

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025), The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, Muscle Man Grace Byron, Herculine Edith Warton, Ethan Frome Emile Zola, Germinal The History of Sound (Film) 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/literature

Caskey Russell's novel The Door on the Sea (Solaris, 2025) follows Elan, the youngest member of once revered Flicker Clan, on a journey to find a weapon that can defend his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders threatening their existence. To reach his goal, Elan must captain a canoe crewed by an unlikely team and force the cooperation of a raven who is the only one who knows the weapon's location. Throughout their journey, the crew must navigate an increasingly hostile political landscape, as the Koosh invasion throws old laws and alliances into disarray. In this interview, Russell describes the process of developing the novel over several years and the ways that he built a world inspired by nineteenth century Tlingit culture. We discuss survivalist elements in fantasy, shifting relationships with violence, and the role of journeys and quest in fantasy. The Door on the Sea is an engaging, thoughtful story 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/literature

Lady Anne is in the Cotswolds with her 8-month-old son, there to restore a famous walled garden. The magnificent home has been hosting a television cooking special over the summer, and Anne's husband, Lord Terrence Reid, is there to enjoy a “Summer of Chefs” week with his wife and baby son. Reid's parents have also been invited to spend the week and are looking forward to delicious food, although Reid's father is recovering from a recent heart attack. Each week, a new chef prepares magnificent meals, and the mystery chef that week turns out to be the former lover of Reid's mother. Theirs is not the only family Gareth Talbot has affected with his sly machinations. He's there to settle old scores and cash in on decades-old grudges. Although the setting is serene and the food fantastic, Lord Terrence Reid is called upon to uncover a murderer in their midst, and his family members are among the suspects. The menu is the last thing on their minds. Mary Birk is a former trial lawyer and avid gardener who lives and writes in Colorado. After graduating from law school, she moved from North Dakota with her late husband to Colorado where they raised their children and dogs and together worked to turn two and a half acres into a high-country garden retreat. Ms. Birk has been named a Library Journal SELF-E Select author. Her Terrence Reid/Anne Michaels mystery series combines her love for gardening and passion for all things Scottish. The first book in the series, Mermaids of Bodega Bay, was a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers' Colorado Gold award in the mystery/suspense category and was named by Library Journal as a SELF-e Top Book of the Year. The First Cut, the second book in the series, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award in the mystery/suspense category. A founding member of the Colorado chapter of Sisters in Crime, Ms. Birk served as treasurer from 2016-2023 and is currently Vice President. She also serves as social media director for the Rockky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

A TRAGIC DOUBLE HOMICIDE, OR A HIDDEN SERIAL KILLER? SERGEANT ALICE MORROW IS DETERMINED TO SOLVE A MYSTERY SPANNING SIXTY YEARS. When Evelyn Massey is found dead in her home, it seems like an open-and-shut case: Evelyn was one hundred years old — natural causes. But Sergeant Alice Morrow learns that traces of poison were found in Mrs. Massey's blood. Then the remains of a body some sixty years deceased are discovered in the dead woman's basement. Two murders, decades apart. Are they connected? In the second book in Shane Peacock's award-winning Northern Gothic Mystery series, Morrow and former nypd homicide detective Hugh Mercer unearth stunning truths about Evelyn Massey's life and learn of other disappearances over the past sixty years. Was a serial killer quietly at work in this Ontario town? Could the murderer still be among its citizens, hidden in plain sight? About Shane Peacock: SHANE PEACOCK has been published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. The first book in the Northern Gothic Mystery series, As We Forgive Others, was published in 2024 to great acclaim and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. He has won the Junior Library Guild of America Selection seven times, the Arthur Ellis Award / cwc Award of Excellence three times, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award and the td Canadian Children's Literature Award. His young adult novels include the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Book of Us, and Show. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning author Bruce Hunter about his CanLit masterpiece, In the Bear's House (Frontenac House Press, 2025). So many different worlds emerge and converge in this lyrical, expansive novel from Bruce Hunter that we need two narrators: Trout, the deaf boy from Ogden, whose vivid imagination and wise pragmatism enhance and stimulate his unhearing world, and his young, artistic mother, Clare, a Scottish-Canadian lass from a rambunctious and sometimes unlucky but loving family of resilient pioneers at the cusp of old and new worlds in the Alberta of the early 1960s. Calgary and its recent subdivision Ogden are glorious places for a childhood. Trout and his one friend, the tragic hero Kenny Dawes, roam the prairies with temerity, and revel in a young city poised for explosive growth. When one of their early adolescent adventures turns sour, Trout faces a looming downfall that could echo the past trajectory of his father, a good but flawed man who loves him deeply. This is a new edition of the book previously published by Oolichan Books in 2009. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this double interview I talked to Michael Kinnamon, author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem and Philip Graubart author of Here There Is No Why. A Rooftop In Jerusalem: When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A year that begins a four-decade-long love affair, as complicated and heartbreaking as the political conflict with which it's intertwined. As Daniel moves through life-through marriage and divorce, career and travel-he returns periodically to Jerusalem, where his heart faithfully remains. A Rooftop in Jerusalem brings the Old City's walls, holy sites, and inhabitants to life, while putting a human face on headlines from the Middle East. Here There Is No Why: Did Chaim Lerner, acclaimed Israeli author and Holocaust survivor, kill himself in 1983, thirty-eight years after surviving Auschwitz? If so, was it traumatic memories finally catching up to him? Or despair over Holocaust denialism? Or ordinary, difficult health issues-an aching hip, a damaged knee? Or simply a deadly episode of depression? Or was it murder? In 2005, Judah Loeb, Lerner's former student and now a struggling American journalist and single father, travels to Jerusalem to investigate Lerner's death. He drags along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, and they team up with Charlie, Judah's former Hebrew University roommate, now a Jerusalem homicide detective. Their investigation takes them through the darker corners of the Israeli psyche, where they uncover secrets that threaten to destroy Lerner's reputation and alter Jewish history. While probing the mysteries of Israel's past, they encounter personal betrayal, heartbreak, and the fragile possibilities of forgiveness and redemption. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Kasia Jaronczyk about her novel, Voices in the Air (Palimpsest Press, 2025).  What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever? On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk? Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters' lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women's rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret. Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aisha Sasha John about her poetry collection, total: poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2025).  "John is brilliant at communicating. She's also really funny. Poems don't get more direct and precise and unforgettable than this." —National Post The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John. IS THERE A SYNONYM CLOSER TO COMPASSION THAN PATIENCE? A PERSON WHO LOVES BEAUTY MORE THAN THEY FEAR IT THE CLOSEST TO NOTHING YOU CAN DO FOR MONEY TO TOUCH TIME TO ITSELF About Aisha Sasha John: AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemimah Wei's debut novel The Original Daughter (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) works a dead-end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Arin, a rising movie star. Genevieve's dying mother asks her to call Arin; Genevieve refuses. Jemimah's novel then teases out the history of Gen and Arin's sibling relationship, from their first meeting in the late 90s, through their shared experience in school, to the final grievance that splits them apart. Naomi Xu Elegant, journalist and author of Gingko Season, also joins the show today. Jemimah Wei is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honouree, William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore's National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah's writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She can be found on social media at @jemmawei on socials, or at jemmawei.com. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Original Daughter. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story.Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris. You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky. Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf's friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one's own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women's friendships and laughter.A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf's ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton UP, 2025) is first and foremost a delight to read. This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context. Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of 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: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In early-seventeenth-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, dangers are plentiful—especially for those of Jewish heritage. Non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and the Inquisition has come to Portugal to impose its prohibitions. In Isabela's Way: A Novel (She Writes Press, 2025), fourteen-year-old Isabela, an obedient “New Christian” with a talent for needlework, believes she has nothing to fear from the Inquisition. But when a mysterious woman arrives with a message from Isabela's traveling father, the girl must leave her home and embroider her way along the clandestine network of sanctuaries created to conduct Conversos, or secret Jews, to safety.A host of supporters and spirit guides, as well as one special young man, assist Isabela as she escapes the Inquisitors and makes her way across countries and cultures. As she travels, she learns of the danger and importance of her work, with its coded symbols, and is shocked to discover her family's true origins.In this enthralling coming-of-age tale of resistance, love, and danger, Isabela employs her talent and fierce determination to find her way despite the powerful forces that buffet her at every turn. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is the author of the novels Mutual Interest (2025) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner. Recommended Books: Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer Michael Koresky, Sick and Dirty Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings Anna North, Bog Queen 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/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Zilla Jones about her debut novel, The World So Wide (Cormorant Books, 2025). Felicity Alexander should be charming audiences at New York's Metropolitan Opera, not under house arrest in Grenada in October 1983, as rumours swirl that United States troops are preparing to invade.Born and raised in Winnipeg, the daughter of a Grenadian woman and an absent white father, Felicity is blessed with enviable beauty and an extraordinary singing voice. Arriving in London to study opera in 1965, she finds early success and joy on stage, as well as a sense of belonging in the arms of the charming Claude Buckingham. Members of the West Indian Students Association, Claude and his friends are law students and activists. They plan to return to Grenada to overthrow the corrupt dictator, “Uncle” Percy Tibbs. Felicity and Claude's intense affair cannot survive their diverging destinies. Claude brings revolution to Grenada and becomes a minister in the new Black Pearls of Freedom government; Felicity devotes herself to music, conquering the racism and sexism of the opera world to rise to international stardom. The brighter she shines, the more she struggles to find her place and purpose in life.Her career in ascendance, Felicity accepts an invitation to perform in Grenada. The red sky of revolution calls to her almost as much as the hope of Claude's embrace. But their reunion is interrupted by a coup. Surrounded by soldiers and guns, Felicity's voice is born anew. Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian anti-racist educator, lawyer, mother, and singer of Caribbean, Chinese, and European heritage, writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). She was born in the UK and now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a winner of the Journey Prize, a finalist for The Writers' Trust Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award, and a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals including Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and Bayou Magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu about her phenomenal novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People. (House of Anansi Press, 2025). Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University's Windham–Campbell Prize Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family's exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon's Mines fame.Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions. With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic. SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and filmmaker. She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham–Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019. Her second and third novels, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. After almost two decades of living in North America, Ndlovu has returned home to Bulawayo, the City of Kings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews historical fiction legend Lucy E.M Black about her phenomenal new novel, A Quilting of Scars (Now or Never Publishing, 2025).   Filled with the pleasure of recognizable yet distinctively original characters and a deftly drawn sense of time and place, A Quilting of Scars brings to life a story of forbidden love, abuse and murder. Pulsing with repressed sexuality and guilt, Larkin Beattie reveals the many secrets he has kept hidden throughout his lonely life. The character-driven narrative is a meditation on aging and remorse, offering a rich account of the strictures and rhythms of farming in the not-so-distant past, highlighting the confines of a community where strict moral codes are imposed upon its members and fear of exposure terrifies queer youth. As Larkin reflects upon key events, his recollections include his anger at the hypocrisy of the church, and the deep grief and loneliness that have marked his path. There is a timelessness to this story which transcends the period and resonates with heart-breaking relevance. About Lucy E.M. Black: Author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella's Carpet, The Brickworks, and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth, Lucy E.M. Black's short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in a variety of literary journals and magazines. She lives in Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Guelph, Ontario author Karen Smythe about Karen's novel, A Town With No Noise (Palimpsest Press, 2025). Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.'s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day. But their visit does not go as planned. Sam's explorations of Upton's tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town's façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town's wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam's friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.'s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family's past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2. Back in the city, Sam's opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother's flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam's understanding of who she is and who she wants to become. In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides? About Karen Smythe: Karen Smythe is the author of the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen's U.P., 1992). She lives in Guelph, Ontario. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Born in Shanghai, he now lives in Toronto, New York, and Seattle. Recommended Books; Rita Bullwinkle, Headshot Aube Rey Lescure, River East, River West Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go R.O. Kwon, Exhibit 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/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interview debut Toronto author, Nadia Ragbar, about her novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor (Invisible Publishing, 2025).  The Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins' physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie's sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of "The Reuben Beast," though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents' deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor. A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world. Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Susan Glimore about her wonderful novel, The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush (Blair, 2025).  Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel. When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events--upending the lives of Leonard's rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening. Susan Gilmore's love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She's the daughter of a revival preacher's son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a "homespun Pilgrim's Progress." Susan Gregg Gilmore is the author of the novels The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Born in Nashville, she lives in Tennessee with her husband. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Emily Adrian is the author of Seduction Theory (Little, Brown, 2025) Daughterhood, The Second Season, and Everything Here Is Under Control, as well as two critically acclaimed novels for young adults. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Point, Joyland, EPOCH, Alta Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Emily currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Recommended Books: Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent Justin Taylor, Reboot Erin Somers, Ten Year Affair 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/literature

Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham's Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress. Drawing on careful research and echoing the existential questions of Kafka's “Report to an Academy,” Ham's Heaven takes us on a journey that is as thrilling as deeply moving—a testament to the bonds that define us, and the progress that so often divides us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mona's Eyes (Europa Editions, 2025) is an enchanting debut novel written by art historian Thomas Schlesser. It tells the story of a 10-year-old girl living in Paris who briefly loses her vision. After much testing, the doctor suggests that Mona might benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, and Mona's grandfather offers to take her to her appointment each week. Instead, every Wednesday afternoon for an entire year, he takes her to visit masterpieces of art from the past five hundred years, now displayed in the great museums of Paris. Henri, Mona's grandfather, carefully explains each piece, shares the history of its creator, and emphasizes a lesson to be learned from it. He hopes that if her blindness returns, she will have internalized the colors, emotions, and beauty of 52 of the world's finest and most influential pieces of art. Thomas Schlesser is the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation in Antibes, France. He teaches Art History at the École Polytechnique in Paris and is the author of several works of nonfiction about art, artists, and the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. Thomas received a PhD in History and Civilizations from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and obtained the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), a specific academic qualification in France, authorizing him to supervise doctoral research (as professor at École Polytechnique in Paris). He is the grandson of André Schlesser, known as Dadé, a singer and cabaret performer who founded the Cabaret L'Écluse. Mona's Eyes is Thomas's second novel and his American debut. It has been translated into thirty-eight languages, including Braille. Thomas was awarded 2025's Author of the Year by Livres Hebdo. In his spare time, Thomas loves cooking and organizing aperitifs, dinners, and festive gatherings. He's also passionate about retro gaming and pop culture, and he enjoys wandering and exploring at a leisurely pace. He constantly reflects on his many flaws and tries to work on them, although it's not easy. He listens to others, and if he has one message to share, it's that life is about patching things together — rigid, overly normative, and definitive frameworks should be approached with caution. He'll add that the cause of animal welfare and the rights of people with disabilities are very dear to him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This interview is with one of the translators, M. Lynx Qualey. A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation. I Want Golden Eyes (U Texas Press, 2025) is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam's house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook. Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor's library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia's crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president's expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature's selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money. Maria Dadouch is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter, and children's book author. She is the author of The Planet of Uncertainties, I Want Golden Eyes, The Heart is Behind the Rib, and other books, for which she has won several prestigious prizes. M. Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit. Her translated works include Wild Poppies, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and the Thunderbird trilogy. Sawad Hussain  is a translator from Arabic. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kavya is an Indian-American professor and single mother struggling with debilitating panic attacks. Bombarded by flashbacks of cruelty and violence that disrupt her everyday life, she is left with no choice but to confront the intergenerational trauma tormenting her. At first,  Kavya finds some relief in piecing together the legacies of her family's experiences with colonialism, colorism, and casteism. But just as she starts to recover, explosive confessions threaten to bring her world crashing down. Tilt: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts. Meghana V. Nayak is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University-NYC. Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Ahead of looming layoffs within the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save him: a podcast. Not just any podcast, but something that will demonstrate his singular thoughtfulness in an oversaturated, competitive market. When Jacob learns the true, tragic circumstances behind the mysterious death of Seth, one of his best friends from high school, his world is turned completely upside down. But when the dust settles, he realizes he has an idea worth digging into. Of course, it's not so simple. Learning the truth--or at least, the beginning of it--sends Jacob spiraling. His increasing obsession ultimately leads him back home to Chicago, where he tracks down Lee, a once up-and-coming musician who probably knew Seth best at the end of his life. As his investigation deepens, Jacob's drive to find out the truth--and whether there's a deeper story to be told about the fault lines of our memories, life and death on the internet, and the people we never forget--grows into a desperation to discover whether it even matters. If not, can he make it? A poignant and funny novel about grief, loneliness, memory, and the unique existential questions inherent to the digital age, See Friendship: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2025) introduces a new voice in fiction--a writer known for his pitch-perfect cultural criticism, with a depth of literary talent. Jeremy Gordon is journalist and senior editor, currently at the Atlantic covering music and culture. 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/literature

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award for translated literature, and Invasion! Won an Obie Award for best script. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family and teaches creative writing at New York University. In this interview we discuss his latest book, The Sisters (FSG, 2025). Recommended Books: Brian Boyd, Nabokov: The American Years Selma Lagerlöf, The Treasure Dantiel Moniz, Milk, Blood, Heat Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters 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/literature

The Beauty and the Hell of It and Other Stories (Guernica, 2025) conjures up images of women who struggle through difficult transitions, unpleasant encounters, or ghastly boyfriends and husbands. One woman is a lesbian who sees the man who raped her a decade before, another suffers from bipolar disease, and a third is harassed by her professor. Some of them are grieving and others want vindication but few of them are living the lives they'd imagined. And then there's Liam, who is devastated by his young son's death, and who'd always loved the daughter of one of his father's wives. These are beautifully written, sensitive stories about a range of human reactions to the harsh realities of life and death. Lynda Williams is a freelance copyeditor and short fiction writer based in Calgary, Alberta. Her stories have appeared in Grain, The Humber Literary Review, and The New Quarterly, among others. Her literary influences include Raymond Carver, Pam Houston, and Lorrie Moore. Born and raised on a dairy farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Lynda arrived in Calgary after a 40-hour trip on a Greyhound bus, after which she took the best shower of her life. She has called Alberta home ever since. When she's not writing, Lynda can be found experimenting with gluten-free baking and bingeing New Girl on one of many streaming services. She has been married to her partner in crime for 12 years, and they share their home (and food) with the world's most adorable mini–Australian Shepherd, Cooper. She is a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. For more information about Lynda and her work, visit her website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny. Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital, what holds them in a fatal grip is history: old mud and bones. Anton Belkin is an Investigator at the Procuracy, a sensitive job at a dangerous moment on the road to the Show Trials. He is also someone who needs to keep his head down. His artist father was once the darling of the revolutionary avant-garde, a painter whose work could inspire devotion and great sacrifice. But now his dreams are out of place, too loud and red in Stalin's world of sterile rules and rubber stamps. Anton is dragged into a murder case. A prominent archaeologist, working alongside the subway dig, has been killed in a deserted mansion. Though Anton doesn't want the job, his former lover, Vika, who is now a powerful member of the secret police, browbeats him into paying a visit to the site with her. Against his better judgement he is drawn to follow though, embarking on investigations that will almost certainly get him killed. Deep underground, he finds a priceless secret that could genuinely unlock the future but links him to a vicious internecine fight for power in the young Soviet state. In the process, he is forced to reconsider the history he shares with Vika and the bonds that bind them both. 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/literature

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Raffia Memory,” which appears in The Common's spring issue. Lily talks about traveling to the Cameroon Grassfields to research the rituals and production of ndop, a traditional dyed cloth with an important role in both spiritual life and, increasingly, economic life as well. She also discusses the book-length project she's working on, which explores loss, grief, fabric, sewing, and weaving. Lily Lloyd Burkhalter is a writer living in Lille, France. She is a Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow and holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is represented by Audrey Crooks at Trident Media Group. She learned to sew in Cameroon and learned to weave in Chicago. ­­Read Lily's essay “Raffia Memory” in The Common here. 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 here, 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 was 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/literature

In Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025) Rose Janowitz is surprised to get a production job with a radio soap opera and stunned to fall in love with the show's African American leading man. She's a pioneer of the 1950s golden age of television, challenged to hide Jonas Cain's identity and their romance, especially from her boss Irna Phillips, the woman who invented soap operas. Years later in the 1980s, Rose's daughter, Emma Kagan leaves the USSR where she was born and struggles to survive in America after the Soviet union collapses. Then it's 2012, and Emma's daughter Libby joins the women's revolution in Syria. Rose flies to join her granddaughter and shares secrets she's buried for a lifetime about her involvement in the Spanish civil war and her dreams of a fair society. Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her 1995 Regency Romance, "The Fictitious Marquis," was named a first #OwnVoices Jewish Historical by the Romance Writers of America. Her Soviet-Jewish historical fiction includes "The Nesting Dolls," "My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region" and the May 2025 release, Go On Pretending. She was a Contributing Editor for "Kveller," and has written for "NY Jewish Week," "Interfaith Family Magazine" and "Today Show Parenting," among many others. She is currently a Contributing Writer to "Soap Hub." Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and moved to the US with her family in 1977. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and three children, where her hobbies include musical theater, tracking down classic television episodes on YouTube, and writing about the underachieving American educational system, with a focus on NYC, for "The 74 Million," "The Advance," "The NY Post" and "The NY Daily News." Learn more at her website.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1964, Stanislavo, a zealous young man devoted to his ideals, turns his back on his privilege to join the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, as he trains, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Though their intense connection seems to be love at first sight, their romance is upended by a decision with consequences that will echo down through the generations.Almost forty years later, in a poor barrio of Caracas, María, a single mother, ekes out a precarious existence as a housekeeper, pouring her love into Eloy, her young son. Her devotion will not be enough, however, to keep them from disaster. On the eve of the attempted coup against President Chávez, Eloy is wounded by a stray bullet, fracturing her world. Amid the chaos at the hospital, María encounters Stanislavo, now a newspaper editor. Even as the country itself is convulsed by waves of unrest, this twist of fate forces a belated reckoning for Stanislavo, who may yet earn a chance to atone for old missteps before it's too late.With its epic scope, gripping narrative, and unflinching intimacy, Freedom Is a Feast announces a major new talent. Alejandro Puyana has delivered a wise and moving debut about sticking to one's beliefs at the expense of pain and chaos, about the way others can suffer for our misdeeds even when we have the best of intentions, and about the possibility for redemption when love persists across time. Alejandro Puyana moved to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six. In 2022, he completed his MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, New England Review, Idaho Review, among others, and his story “The Hands of Dirty Children” was selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for Best American Short Stories 2020. He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas. Recommended Books: John Hickey, Big Chief Ibrahim Nasrallah, Time of White Horses Julio Cortázar, Literature Class 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/literature

I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.King Lear, one of Shakespeare's most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia's honesty is rewarded with exile. That opening–and the other developments in Lear's tragic story–hold special resonance for Nan Z. Da, who uses Shakespeare's play as a way to grapple with China's history, and her own personal experiences with it. The result is The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, and the racism she faced in freedom. Forgotten for decades after its original, 19th century publication, Jacobs' story was so harrowing and so brave it was thought to be fiction. Only through the research of historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s was it proven, once and for all, to be a brilliant and compelling work of nonfiction. Incidents is routinely cited by historians and fiction writers alike as one of the most influential texts of our time and our history. In this latest edition published by W.W. Norton (2025), Jacobs' characters come alive for a new generation of readers, and re-readers, this time contextualized with a new introduction and explanatory notes by Evie Shockley. Dr. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is a two-time winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Review Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. You can find her on Instagram. You can find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Nell Stevens is an award-winning author of memoir and fiction. Her work has been awarded the Somerset Maugham Award, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted by the BBC National Short Story Award. She is the author of two novels, The Original and Briefly, a Delicious Life, and two memoirs: Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me. Her writing is published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. Nell lives in Oxfordshire with her wife and two children. Recommended Books: Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead Ali Smith, Gliff 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/literature

The Dime Museum (Unbridled Books, 2025) is a novel spanning several generations, told in stories that begin in the early 1900s and end during the 2020 pandemic. Set in Chicago, Reading and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Europe, the linked stories tell an overall tale of how the rich and the poor survive in a challenging modern world. Charlie, who's interested in the writing of Ezra Pound, appears in most of the stories, and is a wealthy American college graduate living in Venice. Min (Minerva), his Dominican ex-girlfriend is overwhelmed as a nurse even before the pandemic takes hold. Charlie's great-great grandmother is the source of his wealth, and his great aunt controlled his upbringing. Hinnefeld's characters strive for happiness, struggle to be connected, heal from heartbreak, seek refuge, and find solace in planting gardens, poetry and art. JOYCE HINNEFELD is the author of the short story collections Tell Me Everything (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize in Fiction) and The Beauty of Their Youth (2020), the novels In Hovering Flight (2008) and Stranger Here Below (2010), and other short stories and essays. She is Emerita Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers' Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the U.S. Find her online at joycehinnefeld.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Faithful Ones (Invictus Press, 2025) chronicles a rarely explored intersection in World War II history—the entanglement of the U.S. military, conscientious objectors, and state mental institutions. The novel unfolds in 1941, where the working-class in Port Richmond, Philadelphia, debate duty to country versus loyalty to conscience. Despite his pacifist convictions, Edward Hohlfeld complies with Uncle Sam's call, reporting for duty with a conflicted heart. However, his principled stance on the basic training firing range sets off a chilling chain of events, landing him in a barbaric state asylum. Branded mentally unfit and abandoned by the very institutions meant to protect him, Edward becomes a prisoner within his own country. His mysterious downfall drives his younger sister, Mary, on a decades-long quest to uncover the truth and reclaim her brother's stolen honor. Kathleen (Kate) Joyce Waites is a Philadelphia native, former nun, scholar, author, and emerita professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Social injustice and institutional corruption are themes in her scholarly publications and creative work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

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/literature