New Books In Literature

Cadwell Turnbull appeared on New Books in Science Fiction two years ago to discuss his debut novel, The Lesson, about an alien invasion and colonization of Earth, centered around Turnbull's native U.S. Virgin Islands. He returns to talk about his second book, No Gods, No Monsters (Blackstone, 2021), which, rather than aliens from another planet, features monsters who live among us as our friends, neighbors and even relatives. While ostensibly about the fantastical, the novel is grounded in reality with complex characters whose experiences touch on difficult but important issues like police violence, othering, and even fake news. While the two books have different characters and storylines, Turnbull calls them “sister books.” Aliens and monsters “are both versions of human fears manifested through these speculative elements,” Turnbull says. “One is dealing with a threat from without, and one is dealing with a threat from within. And they both have similar thematic concerns.” Among the topics Turnbull discusses

On Wandering Beaches (Pardes, 2020) is a novel of journeys, a novel of migration that conceals contradictions that summarize a whole world. Along the shores of Tel Aviv- Haifa-Acre-Nahariyya, all the contradictions are summarized: the Jewish nationalism versus the Arab nationalism, the individual principles versus the traditions of society, the heart versus the mind, femininity versus manliness, the ‘I’ versus the ‘Other’, geography of homeland versus geography of happiness, the end versus the beginning, and emigration versus settlement in homeland. All these contradictions seek on the shores of the novel to achieve reconciliation, affinity, identification and harmony in a deeper entity of humanity, love and happiness. Dr. Rawya Jarjoura Burbara. Born in Nazareth (1969), Dr. Burbara serves as Chief Inspector Director of Arabic (for native speakers of Arabic) at the Ministry of Education, and a lecturer at the Language Department, Oranim College. She is also a writer, and her 10th book was published in 2021 (c

Today I interview Stephen Jenkinson. Jenkinson has a new book. It's entitled A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (Orphan Wisdom, 2021) and it's a rarity among books and, to my mind, authors. Jenkinson not only attempts to reckon with our current crisis in the midst of it, which would be challenge enough, but he also attempts to reckon with his previous work, asking the ballsy question: do the books that I've written in my life—does, in some part, my life's work—stand up to the pressures of this moment? Did I write anything that withstands the test of this time? This is, to my mind, a colossal demand that Jenkinson asks of himself. He's written books about money and soul, death and wisdom, matrimony and patrimony, and the role of elders in a culture bereft of them. In A Generation's Worth, Jenkinson isn't so much summing up these previous books as leaning in more deeply to the questions that animate them. And through these questions, these wonderings, as Jenkinson calls them, he asks us t

The poet Shachar-Mario Mordechai was born 1975 in Haifa and he currently lives in Tel Aviv. He has published four volumes of poetry, all of which attracted critical attention. Mordechai is the 2017 recipient of the Prime-Minister’s award for creativity in poetry and the 2010 recipient of Tel Aviv Municipality's nationwide Poetry Competition. He was Poet in Residence at Johns Hopkins University for 2018/9. His book of poems "Make Room For The Rain" won first place in poetry by the Rachel and Leib Goldberg Foundation for 2021. The book was written in the USA when Mario lived for two years in Baltimore and one year in NYC. Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Laurie Frankel about her new novel One, Two, Three (Henry Holt, 2021). The little town of Bourne made national news seventeen years before when its water turned green and people started to get sick. The Mitchell triplets were born that year, after the factory closed, the town began to wither along with its citizens, and their father died. The three girls, each a different version of normal, have watched their mother’s endless fight for justice from the company that destroyed their town. Mirabel, number Three, is the smartest triplet, even though she can’t speak and uses a wheelchair. Monday, number Two, inherited all the library’s books when the library building closed. She eats and wears only yellow and knows exactly where in the house each book is hidden. And Mab, number One, is trying to get into college and out of Bourne. Then one day, a moving truck pulls up and the Mitchell sisters are forced to grapple with a past that was never resolved. Laurie Frankel writes novels (and reads novels

Two plays about the legal battle to decriminalize homosexuality in India. On September 6, 2018, a decades-long battle to decriminalize queer intimacy in India came to an end. The Supreme Court of India ruled that Section 377, the colonial anti-sodomy law, violated the country’s constitution. “LGBT persons,” the Court said, “deserve to live a life unshackled from the shadow of being ‘unapprehended felons.’” But how definitive was this end? How far does the law’s shadow fall? How clear is the line between the past and the future? What does it mean to live with full sexual citizenship? In Love and Reparation: A Theatrical Response to the Section 377 Litigation in India (Seagull Books, 2021), Danish Sheikh navigates these questions with a deft interweaving of the legal, the personal, and the poetic. The two plays in this volume leap across court transcripts, affidavits (real and imagined), archival research, and personal memoir. Through his re-staging, Sheikh crafts a genre-bending exploration of a litigation bat

Franz Nicolay's Someone Should Pay for Your Pain (Gibson House Press, 2021) is a moving, funny, and sometimes brutal novel about the life of a touring musician. Rudy Pauver is a punk-turned-singer-songwriter now roughly ten years past his peak. He draws a small but steady crowd in bars and venues far from the beaten track, all while enduring the thundering success of his one-time protege Ryan Orland. Nicolay brings his decades of experience as a musician to this novel, which teems with perfect tiny details of the rigors of touring. This is a coming of middle age story for anyone who's ever wondered what goes on in the van during the long stretches between the glamorous heights of a musician's life. Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.suppor

Despite the deluge of novels about World War II that has characterized the last few years, the period leading up to the war on the Pacific Front has received far less attention. One welcome exception is the Death in Shanghai series penned by Garrett Hutson, the latest book of which is No Accidental Death (Warfleigh Publishing, 2021). The series revolves around Douglas Bainbridge, a naval intelligence officer assigned to a two-year immersion program in Chinese language and culture. Doug has defied the expectations of his affluent but rigid parents by joining the US Navy instead of taking over the family business, and although he has already developed fluency in Mandarin, he is not emotionally prepared for the rich and varied life that awaits him in Shanghai’s International Settlement when he arrives in May 1935. It doesn’t help that he has barely unpacked his suitcases before a childhood friend, met by chance in a bar, winds up dead in the streets—with the local police all too willing to assign responsibility

The discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings almost a century ago revolutionized the study of ancient Egypt and its pharaohs. The splendors that surrounded the burial of this relatively minor ruler, interred in a hastily arranged tomb, sparked a furor of speculation, scholarship, and outright chicanery and draw crowds even today. For a long time, though, no one knew that the first modern person to enter the tomb was not Howard Carter, the famed archaeologist who located it, but Lady Evelyn (Eve) Herbert, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Lord Carnarvon, who funded Carter’s expedition. In The Collector’s Daughter (William Morrow, 2021), Gill Paul approaches the story of Carter’s discovery from the perspective of its long-term effects on those involved in the find. We meet Eve first in 1972, fifty years after these life-changing events, when she has just awoken in a hospital after suffering the latest in a series of strokes that sap her physical and mental strength. She barely recognizes

Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. The fruit of the tree has mysterious medicinal properties, and Andre’s mission is both scientific and personal, because his mother has suffered a serious stroke. He receives sufficient funding to create the correct conditions to care for the trees, but he’s under pressure, both from his sponsors, and from a mysterious organization that fears the apple is an omen of evil. Second in Karen Hugg’s literary thriller series focused on the world of plants, Harvesting the Sky (Woodhall Press, 2021) is a parable about what we take from nature. Karen Hugg is also the author of The Forgetting Flower and Song of the Tree Hollow. Born into a Polish family and raised in Chicago, she later moved to Seattle and worked as an editor in tech, which gave her the opportu

It’s no coincidence that one of the main characters in S. Qiouyi Lu’s In the Watchful City carries with ser a qíjìtáng, or cabinet of curiosities. Lu’s novella is, itself, a cabinet of unusual mementos, with many smaller objects carefully folded into the larger structure. On one level the plot is simple. The qíjìtáng is full of stories, and its owner, Vessel, who hovers between life and death, needs to add one more story to ser collection in order to have a second chance at life. (Vessel’s pronouns are se, ser and sers). So se asks Anima, one of eight people who provide surveillance for the city-state of Ora, for aer story. (Anima’s pronouns are ay, aer and aers). But Anima’s life isn’t so simple. Ay serves as a node in the city’s Hub, which aer monitors by entering the consciousness of animals (including a gecko, raven, and wild dog during the course of the story). In this way, Ay can travel anywhere and yet aer body is fastened by a stem to a tank of amniotic-like fluid. Lu likens Anima’s experience of bein

Today I talked to Trisha R. Thomas about her new novel What Passes as Love (Lake Union Publishing, 2021). In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white. She introduces herself as an orphan without a family. It starts out as a lark, but her adventures could destroy those she left behind. Especially after her father puts a high bounty on her head, because she is, after all, a runaway slave. TRISHA R. THOMAS won the Literary Lion Award from the King County Library Foundation. Her first book, Nappily Ever After, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature as well as being featured in O Magazine’s Books That Make a Difference. Her work has been

Is it just a coincidence that three books by the major Russian writer Maria Stepanova have appeared in English in 2021? Why does Maria Stepanova deploy such a rich variety of voices and forms? What are the challenges of translating her poetry? Who are the pantheon of deceased writers who seem to haunt her every line?  In this conversation, the editor of The Voice Over: Poems and Essays (Columbia UP, 2021), Irina Shevelenko talks about Stepanova's poetry and prose with Duncan McCargo. Irina elaborates on her wonderful introduction to the collection and explains how she assembled an outstanding team of translators to help bring this work to an international audience. Both Duncan and Irina read extracts from Stepanova's work. (Maria Stepanova is the author of over ten poetry collections as well as three books of essays and the documentary novel In Memory of Memory.) (US: New Directions, Canada: Book*hug Press, UK: Fitzcarraldo), which was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker International Prize.  Her poetry colle

Jose Hernandez Diaz speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem “Ode to a California Neck Tattoo,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Jose talks about finding his way to prose poetry, initially drawn in by its casual language and style. He also discusses the process of editing and revising poetry, his interest in the surreal, and what it’s like writing from a first generation point of view. Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of the 2020 book The Fire Eater. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011. Currently, he is an associate editor at Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. He is from Southern California. Read “Ode to a California Neck Tattoo” at thecommononline.org/ode-to-a-california-neck-tattoo. Follow Jose on Twitter at @JoseHernandezDz. Sign up for Jose’s Intro to Prose Poetry online course

Today I interview Amy Wright. Wright is an essayist and artist, one who works across a dizzying and dazzling range of subjects and media. However, in her new book, Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round (Sarabande, 2021), it's not only Wright's voice that shines, but also the voices of almost fifty other contributors. She's written—or maybe I should say assembled or orchestrated—the thoughts and reflections of a dizzying and dazzling range of thinkers, artists, scientists, and true human beings, sharing their experiences and reflections on what it means to be, to live, to make, to grieve, to laugh and, as Wright's entire book attests, to share meaningful conversations that leave us all the richer for the encounter. I'm deeply grateful to share our conversation with you. Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support ou

This is the third episode of a four-part series featuring the winners and honorable mentions of the 2021 Book Awards for the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS). This episode features two of the winners in Creative Writing Prose: Xuan Juliana Wang, whose collection Home Remedies explores the new generation of Chinese diasporic wanderers, and Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, whose collection The Foley Artist provides a new treatment of queer Filipinx diasporic lives. Xuan Juliana Wang was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her collection Home Remedies won the 2021 AAAS award in Creative Writing: Prose. Ricco Villanueva Siasoco received his MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and is finishing his Ed.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University. He has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, Lambda Literary, The

Today I talked to Joyce Yarrow about her new novel Sandstorm (D.X. Varos, 2021). The message essentially parentless Sandi Donovan learns after being dumped first at an inattentive aunt’s and then at a bootcamp for delinquent teenagers, is to never put her destiny in anyone else’s hands. After her mother dies, her father uses her for cons but can’t be bothered to raise her. She’s fifteen but passes for twenty, and the man who takes her in after she escapes the bootcamp teaches her how to create and sell counterfeit goods. She already knows how to reinvent herself and is surprised at how easy it is to lie. She’s a quick study but struggles with wanting to live a legitimate life rather than continuing to be the grifter and con artist she was raised to be. No matter how good her intentions, everything she does triggers a sandstorm in this heartwarming, fast-paced coming of age tale. Joyce Yarrow was raised in the Southeast Bronx, but escaped to Manhattan, where she wrote poetry while riding the bus through the Lo

Twenty years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the novel Rockaway Blue (Cornell UP, 2021) probes the griefs, trauma and resilience of Irish American New Yorkers wresting with the deaths and aftershocks of that terrible day. The book weaves throughout New York City, from the Midtown North precinct in Manhattan to Arab American Brooklyn, but it is so grounded in the Irish section of Rockaway in the borough of Queens that Rockaway itself becomes a kind of character Like all of Kirwan’s work, it has a strong sense of history. In Rockaway Blue, Kirwan looks back on September 11 with admiration for the genuine heroism of first responders and skepticism about the “blue wall of silence” in the New York City Police Department. Equally important, he approaches the dead of September 11, and their surviving friends, relatives and colleagues, as three-dimensional human beings with their own mix of strengths, weaknesses, virtues and flaws. Kirwan is the author of five other books, including the novel Rocki

The US military camptowns were established shortly after the Second World War in 1945, appropriating the Japanese comfort stations. The Korean government actively supported the creation of camptowns for its own economic and national security interests. Utilizing the Japanese colonial policy, the US military and the South Korean government sought to control camptown women’s bodies through vaginal examinations, isolation wards, and jails, monitoring women for potential venereal diseases. Denigrated as a “traitor” for “mixing flesh with foreigners,” camptown women and their labors were disavowed in Korean society.[1] However, the Korean government also depended on camptown women for its economic development: camptown women’s earnings accounted for 10% of Korea’s foreign currency.[2] Speaking against this silence, Grace Cho’s new memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press at CUNY, 2021), brings to light not only the pain and trauma of militarized violence as experienced by her mother who worked as a camptown woman i

Today I talked to Gervais Hagerty about her novel In Polite Company (William Morrow, 2021). Simons Smythe was born into Charleston’s powerful elite and grew up in one of its fabled historic homes. Her grandfather and father have always been king makers, and all the women she knows have been taught from day one how to dress, how to speak, and how to conform. When Simons isn’t producing the news on a local TV station, she surfs the waves of Folly beach, crabs the salty rivers of Edisto Island, and joins an old friend at King Street bars. If she manages to accept the path laid out for her by generations, she’s also supposed marry her boyfriend, Trip. But she isn’t sure of anything. She confides her confusion only to her elegant grandmother, who urges her to be brave. Simons just has to figure out what that means. Author Gervais Hagerty grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She earned her B.A. in psychology from Vanderbilt University. After a post-college stint in Southern California, she returned to the East Co