Shows / New Books in Literature
New Books in Literature
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/…
Episodes
- New Books in Literature
Mira T. Lee, “Everything Here is Beautiful” (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018)
In her first novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018), author Mira T. Lee delves into the sometimes troubled but always compelling life…
- New Books in Literature
Margot Singer, “Underground Fugue” (Melville House, 2017)
Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England…
- New Books in Literature
Stephanie Elizondo Griest, “All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands” (UNC Press, 2017)
In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely…
- New Books in Literature
Rivers Solomon, “An Unkindness of Ghosts” (Akashic Books, 2017)
Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder. That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts…
- New Books in Literature
Kawika Guillermo, “Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel” (Westphalia Press, 2018)
Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book…
- New Books in Literature
Tessa Fontaine, “The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts” (FSG, 2018)
Who doesn’t remember their first trip to the county fair? The greasy hotdogs and popcorn and cotton candy. The lights and sounds of the seemingly endless games…
- New Books in Literature
Margo Catts, “Among the Lesser Gods” (Arcade Publishing, 2017)
Margo Catts’ new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA…
- New Books in Literature
Jacqueline Friedland, “Trouble the Water” (SparkPress, 2018)
Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is…
- New Books in Literature
K.R. Richardson, “Blood Orbit,” (Pyr, 2018)
For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning…
- New Books in Literature
Bob Brody, “Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age” (Heliotrope Books, 2017)
There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And…
- New Books in Literature
Cat Rambo, “Hearts of Tabat” (WordFire Press, 2018)
Cat Rambo‘s Hearts of Tabat (WordFire Press, 2018) is rich in emotions and description, though it revolves around a murder mystery as well. We experience the…
- New Books in Literature
Nick Dybek, “The Verdun Affair: A Novel” (Scribner, 2018)
In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State…
- New Books in Literature
Zhang Tianyi (tr. David Hull), “The Pidgin Warrior” (Balestier Press, 2017)
“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated…
- New Books in Literature
Tony Romano, “Where My Body Ends and the World Begins” (Allium Press, 2017)
Where My Body Ends and the World Begins (Allium Press, 2017) imagines what it might have been like for one of the survivors of a tragic fire that took place on…
- New Books in Literature
Sumana Roy, “How I Became a Tree” (Aleph, 2017)
Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the…
- New Books in Literature
Mary-Kim Arnold, “Litany for the Long Moment” (Essay Press, 2018)
In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man…
- New Books in Literature
Sharon Solwitz, “Once, in Lourdes” (Spiegel & Grau, 2017)
Sharon Solwitz‘s novel, Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel & Grau, 2017), is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide…
- New Books in Literature
Martha Wells, “Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries” (Tor, 2018)
The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it…
- New Books in Literature
Julia Fine, “What Should be Wild” (Harper, 2018)
“What should be wild” is really asking who should be wild? Simultaneously a plea against the domestication of women, a unique fairy tale, and impressive…
- New Books in Literature
Sam J. Miller, “Blackfish City” (Ecco, 2018)
Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City…
- New Books in Literature
Robert Goolrick, “The Dying of the Light” (Harper, 2018)
“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018). The house is…
- New Books in Literature
M. L. Liebler, “Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond” (Wayne State UP, 2016)
In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about…
- New Books in Literature
Daryl Gregory, “Spoonbenders” (Knopf, 2017)
If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.”…
- New Books in Literature
Kelly Sundberg, “Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Abuse and Survival” (Harper, 2018)
If you’ve read the news or been on the internet at all this year, you’ve probably come across the hashtag #MeToo, the rallying cry of a movement aimed at…
- New Books in Literature
Maggie Shen King, “An Excess Male” (Harper Voyager, 2017)
Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of…
- New Books in Literature
Sandra Allen, “A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia” (Scribner, 2018)
What is it really like to have a family member with serious mental illness? Sandra Allen’s unique book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about…
- New Books in Literature
Fonda Lee, “Jade City” (Orbit, 2017)
Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts. Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with…
- New Books in Literature
Danielle Teller, “All the Ever Afters: The Untold Story of Cinderella’s Stepmother” (William Morrow, 2018)
Most of us hear the Cinderella story in childhood: a mean stepmother favors her own daughters and controls her hapless husband, turning the sweet and innocent…
- New Books in Literature
James Cook, “Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s” (Unbound, 2018)
Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The…
- New Books in Literature
Douglas Lain, “Bash Bash Revolution” (Night Shade Books, 2018)
The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to…
- New Books in Literature
Ellen Notbohm, “The River by Starlight” (She Writes Press, 2018)
When Annie Rushton heads west to keep house for her older brother on his Montana homestead, she expects to leave marriage and motherhood behind her. After all…
- New Books in Literature
Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti, “Low-Fat Love Stories” (Sense Publishers, 2017)
Patricia Leavy and Victoria Scotti‘s Low-Fat Love Stories (Sense Publishers, 2017) is a collection of short stories and artistic portraits focusing on women’s…
- New Books in Literature
Annalee Newitz, “Autonomous” (Tor, 2017)
Jack Chen is a drug pirate, illegally fabricating patented pharmaceuticals in an underground lab. But when she discovers a deadly flaw in Big Pharma’s new…
- New Books in Literature
David Wanczyk, “Beep: Inside the Unseen World of Baseball for the Blind” (Swallow Press, 2018)
We all know baseball as one of America’s fondest pastimes, but did you know there’s a version of the sport designed specifically for the blind? It’s called…
- New Books in Literature
E.J. Swift, “Paris Adrift” (Solaris, 2018)
Paris has a way of resisting history, absorbing change gradually instead of being transformed by it. The same can be said of Hallie, the protagonist of E.J…
- New Books in Literature
Koritha Mitchell, ed., “Iola Leroy Or, Shadows Uplifted” by Frances E.W. Harper (Broadview Editions, 2018)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s nineteenth-century novel Iola Leroy has not always been considered a core text in the canon of African American literature…
- New Books in Literature
Patrice Sarath, “The Sisters Mederos” (Angry Robot, 2018)
There is something almost sweetly Victorian about the new fantasy novel, The Sisters Mederos (Angry Robot, 2018), by Patrice Sarath, which concerns two young…
- New Books in Literature
Adrienne Sharp, “The Magnificent Esme Wells” (Harper, 2018)
At six, Esme Wells has never attended school, but she has already learned how to take care of her father: accompany him to the racetrack, load up on hot dogs…
- New Books in Literature
Mur Lafferty, “Six Wakes” (Orbit, 2017)
Rob Wolf interviews Mur Lafferty about Six Wakes (Orbit, 2017), her novel about murdered clones that received nods for this year’s Philip K. Dick and Nebula…
- New Books in Literature
John Richard Bell, “The Circumstantial Enemy” (Endeavour Press, 2017)
We all imagine that, when put to the test, we will end up on the right side of history, however we define it. Nowhere is that statement more true than in…
- New Books in Literature
Tim Pratt, “The Wrong Stars” (Angry Robot, 2017)
Rob Wolf interviews Tim Pratt about his Philip K. Dick Award-nominated space opera The Wrong Stars. Pratt is the author of over 20 novels, picking up a Hugo…
- New Books in Literature
Claudia H. Long, “Chains of Silver” (Five Directions Press, 2018)
From the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, the Catholic authorities in Spain and its colonies, including Mexico, took a hard line against the…
- New Books in Literature
Ryan Wieser, “The Glass Blade” (Kensington, 2018)
Lean, mean, and a fighting machine. That could describe lovely Jessop, psychologically and physically scarred at the hands of a former Infinity Hunter with the…
- New Books in Literature
Henry Jay Przybylo, “Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia” (W.W. Norton, 2017)
For many of the 40 million Americans who undergo anesthesia each year, it is the source of great fear and fascination. From the famous first demonstration of…
- New Books in Literature
Jo Woolf, “The Great Horizon: 50 Tales of Exploration” (Sandstone Press, 2018)
Hello from Gabrielle at the NBN Fantasy and Adventure channel. This podcast will be about adventure, and what could be more adventurous than traveling to a…
- New Books in Literature
Meg Elison, “The Book of Etta” (47North, 2017)
Born into a world where men vastly outnumber women, Etta is expected to choose between two roles: mother or midwife. And yet the protagonist of Meg Elison‘s…
- New Books in Literature
Thomas Mira y Lopez, “The Book of Resting Places: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead” (Counterpoint Press, 2017)
We’ve all participated in the rituals of the dead at some time or another in our lives, going to funerals and wakes, visiting loved ones in cemeteries. Some of…
- New Books in Literature
Interview with Australian Poets Leni Shilton and Renee Pettitt-Schipp
In this special episode of New Books in Australian and New Zealand Studies, we are joined by two fantastic Australian poets. In her new poetic narrative…
- New Books in Literature
Robert J. Sawyer, “Quantum Night” (Ace, 2016)
In this episode, Rob Wolf interviews Robert J. Sawyer, the author of 23 novels, about his most recent book, Quantum Night (Ace, 2016). Sawyer is considered, as…
- New Books in Literature
Carla M. Wilson, “Curious Impossibilities: Ten Cinematic Riffs” (Black Scat Books, 2017)
In Impossible Conversations: Imaginary Interviews with World-Famous Artists (Black Scat Books, 2015), Carla M. Wilson imagined discussions with (you guessed…
- New Books in Literature
Gwen C. Katz, “Among the Red Stars” (Harper Teen, 2017)
Valentina (Valka) Koroleva and her cousin Iskra share a dream: to fly in defense of their Soviet motherland against the Nazi forces that have launched a…
- New Books in Literature
Omar El Akkad, “American War” (Knopf, 2017)
Set 50-plus years in the future, Omar El Akkad‘s debut novel American War (Knopf, 2017) has been widely praised, becoming one of those rare books with science…
- New Books in Literature
Jason Arnopp, “The Last Days of Jack Sparks” (Orbit, 2016)
A modern morality tale lurks under this fast-paced horror novel. Jason Arnopp‘s The Last Days of Jack Sparks (Orbit, 2016) consists of the diary of a fictional…
- New Books in Literature
Linda Grover, “Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year” (U Minnesota Press, 2017)
Onigamiising is the Ojibwemowin word for Duluth and the surrounding area. In this book of fifty warm, wise and witty essays, Linda LeGarde Grover tells the…
- New Books in Literature
David Walton, “The Genius Plague” (Pyr, 2017)
Everyone knows that wild mushrooms can be dangerous, but David Walton in his new novel The Genius Plague (Pyr, 2017) raises the dangers to a new plane. While…
- New Books in Literature
Angela Davis-Gardner, “Butterfly’s Child” (Random House, 2011)
Today I talked with Angela Davis-Gardner, an award-winning North Carolina-based novelist writing about Japan. Her book Butterfly’s Child (Random House, 2011)…
- New Books in Literature
Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb, “Last Christmas in Paris” (William Morrow, 2017)
When we first meet Thomas Harding in 1968, he is facing what he believes will be his last Christmas and mourning the loss of an unnamed woman who clearly meant…
- New Books in Literature
Becky Chambers, “A Closed and Common Orbit” (Harper Voyager, 2017)
Rob Wolf interviews Becky Chambers, author of the Wayfarer series. The first book, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Harper Voyager, 2016), was originally…
- New Books in Literature
Octavia Randolph, “Silver Hammer, Golden Cross” (Pyewacket Press, 2017)
Silver Hammer, Golden Cross (Pyewacket Press, 2017) is sixth in the series of the Circle of Ceridwen series. It begins by exploring the friendship of two young…
- New Books in Literature
Mindy Fried, “Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir” (Vanderbilt UP, 2016)
In her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Mindy Fried shares her experiences with providing care for her father…