New Books In Literature

Popular public conception of war has a long and problematic history, with its origins in ancient texts like The Art of War to bestselling books like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Though many stories depicting the brutality of war—and its toll on soldiers and civilians alike—are written in the spirit of anti-war sentiment, these works often inadvertently frame combat as exciting and dramatic while painting individual soldiers as heroes on the battlefield. But the reality of war is much more nuanced than the typical narratives might have you believe. In truth, life in a war zone is often much more frustrating and tedious than most civilians can fathom. So what are the ethics of writing about war? What are the responsibilities of writers depicting war in their work? Winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction, writer Steven Moore’s stunning debut, The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Solider (University of Georgia Press, 2019), considers these que

In science fiction, “near future” usually refers to settings that are a few years to a few decades off. But Craig DiLouie’s Our War (Orbit, 2019)—about a second U.S. civil war that starts after the president is impeached and convicted but refuses to step down—feels as if it might be only weeks away. Born in the U.S., DiLouie now lives in Calgary, Alberta. He is the author 18 books of science fiction, fantasy, horror and thrillers. Our War came out in August, a month before the U.S. House of Representatives launched its impeachment inquiry. When he started writing in 2017, “I was looking at the growing polarization in America and political tribalization, which is considered one of the five precursors to civil war,” DiLouie says. “I hope it stays in fiction.” The story is told through the eyes of a young brother and sister who are used as soldiers by opposite sides. He set the book in Indianapolis because “it's a quintessential American city… a very blue city in a sea of red, rural areas.” He says he strove to

As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might called "fundamental research." Their authors--dedicated researchers one and all--provide the scholarly stuff upon which many non-fiction trade books are based. So when you are reading, say, a popular history, you are often reading UP books at one remove. Of course, some UP books are also bestsellers, and they are all well written (and, I should say, thoroughly vetted thanks to the peer review system), but the greatest contribution of UPs is to provide a base of fundamental research to the public. And they do a great job of it. How do they do it? Today I talked to Kathryn Conrad, the president of the Association of University Presses, about the work of UPs, the challenges they face, and some terrific new directions they are going. We also talked about why, if you have a scholarly book in progress, you should talk to

In her new novel Pigs (Red Hen Press, 2019), Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs. Four filthy, starving children wearing rags and living in squalor are responsible for sorting the trash, feeding the pigs and taking care of each other, while the island’s adults indulge in fantasies, gorge themselves, and live in the comfort of a huge mansion. Although this isn’t the first time that pigs are depicted in literature, it is probably the first time their presence forces readers to consider how much trash we create, how difficult it is to dispose of it, and how we are going to cope with a world in which recycling is too expensive, refugees are treated as disposable, and the earth is facing the crisis of climate change. Originally from New York, Johanna Stoberock completed her undergrad education at Wesleyan, earned an MFA in Fi

Tamara J. Madison, both on the page and in voice, is magical. In her most recent collection, Threed, This Road Not Damascus (Trio House, 2019), she seamlessly bridges the gap between past and present while remaining grounded in the here and now. Via her use of religion, familial history, and rhythm she is able to give voice to those women who oft times were forced to remain silent in order to survive. It is through her poetry that these women, and those still to come, are allowed to be wholly free. Madison creates a new mythology here. A mythology that begins to lay the groundwork for us to create the worlds in which we want to move. She leaves us with the lingering sense that the makings of the universe are in our hands. All we need to do is mold it and name it. Tamara J. Madison is an internationally traveled author, poet, performer, and editor currently teaching as a professor of English and Creative Writing at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida. Her critical and creative works have been published in var

Writing novels—never mind entire series—takes determination, persistence, imagination, and craft. Charles Todd has added to those natural challenges the joys and complications of creating a single persona from a mother/son team. In A Cruel Deception (William Morrow, 2019), the eleventh in their beloved Bess Crawford series, the strengths of their long collaboration are on full display. Bess, a British nurse, worked with the wounded throughout the First World War. In A Cruel Deception, the war has ended, and Bess faces the future with some trepidation. So it comes almost as a relief when her former matron requests help finding Lawrence Minton, the matron’s son, who has gone missing during the peace talks in Paris. The search goes well, and Bess tracks Minton to a rural farmhouse, where she confronts him with his addiction to laudanum. He wants nothing to do with her efforts to cure him. Despite his refusal to heal, she soldiers on, aided by a young Frenchwoman who loves him. Bess soon realizes that the root of

While all fiction writers can pull characters from their imaginations and commit them to the page, most readers can’t do what Charley Sutherland can: pull characters from the page and commit them to the real world. Sutherland’s fantastical ability is at the center of H.G. Parry’s debut novel The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (Redhook, 2019). It is both a mystery (Sutherland and his brother must find and stop a stranger who shares Sutherland’s ability but is using it for nefarious ends) as well as a celebration of literary criticism. While the ability to bring characters to literal life might seem like a wonderful talent, it's been a problem for Sutherland. Ever since he was little, he has tried—with the encouragement of his family—to suppress the urge. “There's a long tradition of characters with magical abilities who are being told to keep it hidden and to stay normal, and it comes from the fact that a lot of people grow up feeling like what makes them special is something that's weird or strange, and they t

Welcome to New Books in fantasy and adventure, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today we’ll be talking with Emily Roberson about her debut YA novel, Lifestyles of Gods and Monsters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), a mythological retelling. In this modern version of the myth of Theseus and Ariadne, Ariadne is a complacent Daddy‘s girl when we meet her. As her father’s favorite, she’s spared the humiliation her sisters accede to when they star in their own reality TV show, the Paradoxes. Sure, Daddy might have a martini-stocked bar in each room of his fabulous palace, as well as a sacrificial altar for augury in case the mood to sacrifice a dove seizes him. But when your mother is infamous for coupling with a bull, while hidden in wooden cow statue, Father looks like the better bet, even if he does have an agenda for everyone. Ariadne is also the Keeper of the Labyrinth, which means that every year she leads the chosen Athenians into the Labyrinth for their televised demise. Each year, the fourteen

Ben Novotny was born with a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused profound mental retardation and seizures. He is severely limited but forms a tight bond with his older brother Hugo, who invents fun distractions and games that become dangerous as Ben gets older and bigger. Ben’s mother, Caroline, a lit professor at Emory, is barely holding herself together with mind-numbing drugs. His father, Percy, a successful contractor in Atlanta, keeps hoping to find an institution that will provide the kind of care Ben needs. His sister, Ivy angrily longs to escape after graduation, and his brother, Hugo gives up his own dreams to take care of Ben. Degrees of Difficulty (Fomite Press, 2019) follows the family over several decades as they each come to an understanding of how Ben affected their lives Born and raised in England, Julie Justicz moved to the Bahamas when she was ten, and then to the United States as a teenager. Julie comes from a family of Olympians: Her father George Justicz rowed for Great Britain in the

As revealed by the title of Talia Carner’s latest novel, The Third Daughter (William Morrow, 2019), her heroine, Batya, has two older sisters. Both ran off with men their parents could not tolerate, placing a heavy burden on Batya to compensate for her sisters’ failings by making her parents happy. When her family is forced to flee its home in a Ukrainian village to escape a pogrom, losing most of its goods, Batya helps out by taking a job at a local tavern. There she meets Yitzik Moskowitz, a smooth-talking, well-respected, and obviously well-off visitor who soon convinces Batya’s father to give his third daughter’s hand in marriage. Moskowitz promises to wait two years before making Batya his wife, but he insists she travel with him now, because who knows when he will return to Ukraine? Although only fourteen, Batya agrees to accompany her future husband on his journey. But after one night on the road, she discovers that what the “Man from Buenos Aires” wants from her has nothing to do with marriage. After

"Poetry gave me back a way to find my culture, my history,” says Jason Bayani while discussion his new book Locus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019), which blends memoir and poetry into a stunning exploration of fragmented identities and the Pilipinx-American experience. Drawing inspiration from hip-hop and delving into the knotted complexity of family history and relationships, Bayani is able to recover a migrant identity and experience that is often silenced and shape a confident declaration of selfhood in American culture. In my grandfather’s last days He wandered the rice fields alone. What was left of his mind bringing him back to what he spent his entire life building. We are the land—lupa ay buhay, land is living. When my father talks of his poverty, he presents a bowl of rice and says, ‘Your Inang would put one piece of fish on the table, and we would press our fingers against it for flavor.’ Mimicking his hand scooping rice out of the bowl. — fragment from “The Low Lands” Bayani’s recommended poets and artis

“There are only two ways to live your life,” said Albert Einstein, “One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is a miracle.” Oren Harman clearly agrees with Einstein’s sentiments. In Evolutions: Fifteen Myths That Explain Our World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), Harman takes scientific facts, as we know them today, and weaves them into narratives that have the tone, grace and drama of myth. Harman recognizes that despite the astounding achievements of science we are as humbled as the ancients by the existential mysteries of life. Has science revealed the secrets of fate or immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy insight into love? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe, and the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Here are the earth and the moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, and the loneliness of consciousness em

Alan Bradley’s first mystery, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, came out in 2009, and received the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award, the Agatha Award, the Barry Award, the Dilys Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Macavity Award and the Spotted Owl Award. This book introduced the intrepid 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous manor house in England, with her widowed father and two sisters. It’s 1950, and England is still rebuilding itself after WWII. Another book has followed each year. Golden Tresses of the Dead, the 10th novel in the series, was released in early 2019, and continues the escapades of now orphaned Flavia, who is being cared for, along with her annoying little cousin Undine, by a staff of servants. Flavia collaborates with the estate gardener, Dogger, who was her father's previous army companion and has a surprising repertoire of talents. Together, they solve whatever crimes pop up in the seemingly peaceful little English town of Bishop’s Lacey. In

Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Wiley Cash discusses his novel, The Last Ballad (William Morrow, 2017) writing fiction inspired by the South, and exploring the complexities of southern class, race, and gender relations against the backdrop of the 1929 Loray Mill strike. Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America—and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers. Beth A. English is director of the Liechtenstein Institute's Project on Gender in the Global Community at Princeton University. She also is a past president of the Southern Labor History Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After writing more than 30 books, including memoirs, military science fiction, alternate histories, and a book of writing advice, John Birmingham was ready to try his hand at the sweeping and dramatic science fiction subgenre known as space opera. But you’d never know The Cruel Stars(Del Rey, 2019) is his first attempt at epic, interstellar, battle-of-the-ages storytelling. His deft hand has produced a tightly paced, suspenseful, and bitingly funny adventure full of wild military tech, high-stakes conflict, and five eloquent characters. “I'm a huge fan of the [space opera] genre, but it took me a while to get the confidence to write my own,” Birmingham says. The conflict at the core of The Cruel Stars pits the Sturm—who believe with Nazi-like conviction in keeping humans “pure,” i.e. free of genetic or technological enhancements—against the rest of humanity. “I very much based [the Sturm] on the ultra-right, which was coming to scary prominence as I was first putting this book together. But in a way, the syst

A man turns himself into the police for kidnapping an underage girl. The police chief tell him to go home but Walter insists on being arrested and charged. Back to the beginning of the story in 1999, Walter is an eighteen-year-old math prodigy who has already earned two doctorates but is told to get some work experience before going to law school. An investment banker on Wall Street, by nineteen he’s married, and by twenty, the father of a daughter, Olivia. Then 9/11 happens, Walter loses his best friend, he becomes disillusioned with the banking world, and he focuses on fatherhood. Then he includes the little next-door neighbor in all of Olivia’s activities. Later, as his marriage crumbles and his wife takes Olivia with her to Maine, Walter finds himself more and more drawn to the neighbor. This is a novel about family dynamics, growing older, struggling with loneliness, and forbidden love. K. C. Maher always knew that she wanted to write. She learned grammar in parochial school and did a BA at St Johns Coll

Francie Meeker and her best friend, Vi Carothers, bought into the promise offered to middle-class, especially white, women in the mid-twentieth-century United States: find a man with a good career, marry young, stay at home, raise the children, keep house, and all will be well. By 1952, despite some successes, reality has killed this dream. So at the beginning of Lies in White Dresses (William Morrow, 2019)—the sparkling new novel by Sofia Grant, who is also the author of The Dress in the Window and The Daisy Children—Francie and Vi are boarding a train to Reno, Nevada. There, after six weeks residency, they can file for divorce. On the train they meet a young woman, June Samples, traveling with a small child. Unlike Francie and Vi, June has almost no means of support. Vi takes a liking to the younger woman and, when they reach Reno, she invites June to share her hotel suite. The first night, a babysitting job brings the threesome to the attention of Virgie, the hotel keeper’s daughter and a self-styled detec

Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation that has become a model of economic development, governance and management of inter-communal relations. Part travelogue, part history, Walton charts the opportunities and pitfalls confronting small states that have become particularly acute in an era of identity politics and civilizational leadership. Potential threats include not only the Singapore’s struggle to insulate itself from global trends as well the impact of the rise of ultra-conservative attitudes in its majority Muslim neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia, but also increased difficulty in balancing rival powers China and the United States. If that were not enough, Singapore is juggling multiple issues at a time that it is transiting to a new generational leadership faced with the challenge of ensuring that Singapore remains relevant to its neighbours as well as the international community at large.To do

The stories and fables in A Girl Goes into the Forest (Dzanc Books, 2019) twist and turn with the sorrows and challenges of family, lovers, growing up, and aging. Sometimes wry, sometimes charming, occasionally a story will make you gasp, especially the one-pagers. In 78 pieces of fiction, flash fiction and micro-fiction, Alford’s writing is soothing, sparkling, opaque or mysterious, but it always packs a punch.Peg Alford Pursell, author of Show her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow,the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction, has had work published in many journals and anthologies. Her micro-fiction, flash fiction, and hybrid prose have been nominated for Best Small Micro-fictions and Pushcart Prizes. She is the founder and director of WTAW Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary books, and of Why There are Words, the national literary reading series. Also, she enjoys walking through her neighborhood with its redwoods and Little Free Libraries. One of the most fascinating dreams she's had was creating a

Amid a wave of time travel books published this year, Annalee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline(Tor, 2019)stands out for its focus on a woman’s right to obtain a safe abortion.The book opens in an alternate America in which women gained the right to vote in the 1870s (rather than 1920), but abortion never became legal.“I was imagining that if women had gotten the vote earlier, there might have been a backlash, which would have prevented a reproductive rights movement from really taking hold,” Newitz says.In the novel, time travel has gone mainstream. Anyone with the proper training can do it, although technically it’s only supposed to be used for research. That doesn’t stop Tess, under the guise of studying cultural history, from trying to “edit” the timeline to thwart men’s rights activists from trying to subjugate women through their own illicit edits.And hidden within Tess’s agenda is another secret, which she hides even from her trusted friends. That secret is revealed slowly to the reader, through