New Books In Literature

Audrey Schulman’s Theory of Bastards (Europa Editions, 2018) uses a scientist’s relationship with bonobos—and her struggle to keep them alive following a civilization-shattering dust storm—to explore climate change, over-dependence on technology, and the challenge of a body that produces more pain than pleasure.The novel, which won this year’s Philip K. Dick Award and Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award from Dartmouth, was almost never written.. Despite the fact that her four previous books had been well received, Schulman found it a continual challenge to get published and was on the brink of abandoning writing altogether. But Kent Carroll, the editor at Europa Editions who oversaw the publication of her novel Three Weeks in December, reached out, saying he wanted to publish a new book by her.“I've always wanted to write—there's nothing more I've wanted—and so given the opportunity, I couldn't say no.”Schulman’s work returns again and again to a few themes. “I feel like every writer—if they're very lucky—fi

It’s the late 1990’s and Alice Stein is a grad student in New York City. Her father died the previous year, leaving her mother with 8-year-old twins to raise. Alice is in charge of looking in on her dying grandmother, and then is first, after the thieving caregiver, to sort through her grandmother’s apartment after her death. There, Alice discovers a purse with a hidden compartment. As she struggles to study, write, teach, take care of the little girl from downstairs, and figure out her grandmother’s secrets, Alice uncovers layers of secrets about herself, her family, and everyone around her.Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers' Federation's 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a PhD from New York University and has published articles on Mary Borden, James Joyce, First World war lit

If you’ve ever flipped a large rock over to see what was underneath and encountered dark sludge, the movement of insects, and the stirring of your own fascination, then you know something about the project that Chelsea Biondolillo undertakes in her debut essay collection, The Skinned Bird (Kernpunkt Press, 2019). In it, Biondolillo peels away both her own, and her reader’s, tidy understandings of the self and the natural world, and reveals messy and difficult narratives, memories, and revelations. This is a book that makes connections between the writer’s personal and familial histories and biology, meteorology, anatomy, astronomy, and even pseudosciences like phrenology. In one essay, Biondolillo immerses her reader in a juxtaposition of the phases of birdsong acquisition with memories and questions about childhood and inherited heartbreak. In the title essay, Biondolillo details how to turn a dead bird into a scientific specimen. She instructs her reader, “When both wings are free from the body, gently peel

Rin, an orphan raised by a family that treats her badly, is no Harry Potter, despite the superficial similarities. No kindly wizards await her; there are no summons from a cute feathered familiar. She studies day and night to be able to attend the military academy at the city of Sinegard, the capital of Nikara. She wins a coveted place at the Academy through sheer endurance, but once she arrives, she realizes how far she still has to go. The rich and educated students are dismissive or downright cruel to Rin, because she comes from a farming district in the south of Nikara, and has darker skin.After several strenuous years at the Academy, another student’s taunts and bullying lead to a fight, during which Rin displays supernatural ability during combat. Until that moment, Rin displays no unusual traits other than exceptional endurance in the face of pain and disappointment. Only the eccentric Lore teacher, Jiang, understands that she has the ability to call down a god to inhabit her body, allowing her to figh

Julie Zuckerman’s moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah (Press 53, 2019), tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler—the son of immigrants, brilliant political science professor, husband, and father. Jeremiah has yearned for respect and acceptance his entire life, and no matter his success, he still strives for more. As a boy, he was feisty and irreverent and constantly compared to his sweet and well-behaved older brother, Lenny. At the university, he worries he is a token hire. Occasionally, he’s combative with colleagues, especially as he ages. But there is a sweetness to Gerstler, too, and an abiding loyalty and affection for those he loves. When he can overcome his worst impulses, his moments of humility become among the best measures of his achievements. Spanning eight decades and interwoven with the Jewish experience of the 20th century, Julie Zuckerman charts Jeremiah’s life from boyhood, through service in WWII, to marriage and children, a professorship and

In Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019), Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement, but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence speaks in the voice of international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.“I’ve tried to hard to erase myself.That iconography—my facein Technicolor, the m

Today, I speak with Hilary Plum. She’s the author of Watchfires (Rescue Press, 2016), which isn’t so much a book as an exploratory biopsy of our body politic and our collective psyche. Plum examines our moment at the cellular level—whether that’s a cancerous cell or a terrorist cell—with the aim of understanding what’s happened to us in the Iraq War, in the attacks on 9/11, at the Boston Marathon bombings, or in the time-out-of-time we experience when we suffer from chronic illness. How do we make sense of a global world where drones, autoimmune disease, migrants, suicide, and mass violence all feel interconnected? That’s exactly what Plum sets out to do. In prose as keen and incisive as a scalpel, she locates and exposes the malignancies of our time. She doesn’t offer us a cure—who could?—but she gives us a brilliant diagnoses of how deeply the disease and diseases from which we suffer run.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic litera

Caitlin Starling’s debut The Luminous Dead (Harper Voyager, 2019) takes readers along with her young protagonist, Gyre Price, to a place few would voluntarily go—into a deep, pitch-dark cave inhabited by avalanche-inducing, rock-eating worms from which only one human being (among many) has emerged alive.Still, Gyre thinks the risk of scouting for minerals is worth it. Not only does the job pay extraordinarily well, but she’s wearing a state-of-the-art suit, which protects her from the cave’s potentially lethal environment.Normally, there’s a whole team of experts guiding cavers like Gyre, but when she’s deep underground Gyre learns her team consists of only one person—a woman name Em, whose motives and reliability become increasingly murky as the days pass.“The more that it is only Em there with her, the worse things get because Em isn’t sleeping, Gyre isn’t getting to talk to anybody else …, and they’re getting more and more drawn into each other’s problems as opposed to it being a professional sort of inter

In his own description of his book, And Then I Got Fired: One Transqueer’s Reflections on Grief, Unemployment, & Inappropriate Jokes About Death, J Mase III writes, “Feel free to scream directly into this book if you need to.” It is in this invitation that J Mase III takes on themes of the messiness of grief, Black trans spirituality, and what it means to be an independent artist. Written after the passing of both his grandmother and father within the span of three months, this book is honest, brave, and full of love.J Mase III is a Black trans queer poet and educator and is the founder of awQward, a talent agency exclusively for trans and queer people of color. You can check out his amazing work and purchase his book here.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When a strange man knocks on Deborah Tyler’s door one January evening in 1888, she faces a difficult decision. She can guess that her visitor is a criminal, because who else would travel to her isolated Utah community in the dead of winter? And her husband, who normally handles such situations, left home five months ago and has not returned. She is tempted not to answer, but that will only send the unwanted traveler to the next house in Junction, endangering her younger sister and her sister’s children.Besides, most of the criminals who arrive on Deborah’s doorstep are not thieves or murderers but polygamists evading arrest for what the US government has recently declared a felony. Deborah has little sympathy for plural marriage or the men who practice it, but she is a loyal Mormon who distrusts those inclined to persecute her faith and cares about the families left destitute when their breadwinners flee.Deborah makes her choice. But the next day, a federal marshal arrives in pursuit. Threatened with prosecut

Meg Elison’s The Book of Flora (47North, 2019) trilogy is as much about gender as it is about surviving the apocalypse.The first installment, the Philip K. Dick Award-winning The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, set the tone with a pandemic that destroyed civilization, leaving behind 10 men for every woman. To avoid rape and enslavement in this male-dominated landscape, the eponymous midwife must present herself as a man to survive.In the next volume, The Books of Etta, set a century later, gender remains fraught but the rules have changed. The midwife’s legacy lives on in the town of Nowhere, where women are decision-makers and leaders. In this evolved world, Etta is allowed to choose the traditionally male job of raider, although she must still pretend to be a man to travel across a sparsely populated Midwest. Fortunately, this isn’t as heavy a lift for Etta as it had been for the midwife since Etta prefers to be called Eddie and identifies as male.The notion of choice is one that Elison takes a step further in

In this episode, I talked with Patricia Leavy on her new book, Spark (The Guilford Press, 2019). The book is a highly original novel about an unexpected yet extremely fruitful journey of a sociologist professor, Peyton Wilde. Peyton, together with a diverse group of companions, was charged with answering a perplexing question in a five-day seminar held in Iceland. As they worked to address the question from very different perspectives, the experience also transformed each and every one of the team members. This innovative text offers far more than what a typical novel could offer: The author seamlessly incorporates into it a process of social inquiry. Readers can relate to the book on multiple levels—It can be read for fun, for a book club discussion, or adapted as a required text for qualitative inquiry courses in fields such as education, social work, and communication.Pengfei Zhao holds a doctoral degree in Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University-Bloomington. Among her research interests are qualitativ

The Genuine Storiesis a linked collection centered around Genevieve “Genuine” Eriksson, a woman with an uncanny ability to heal people. Her gift begins to unfold at the age of eight despite the lingering disbelief of her parents. Though she grows up under the watchful eyes of her parents and the jealous protection of the Catholic Church, she strikes out on her own after healing, and falling in love with, Kevin Saunders, a man fifteen years her senior. In her own voice, and those of family, friends, and the healed, Genuine’s experiences peel back and expose the gritty aspects of power and privilege, the far-reaching limit of parental love, the perpetually oscillating balance in relationships, and the ineffable nature of grief.Susan Smith Daniels, author and freelance journalist, is the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize for The Genuine Stories (New Rivers Press, 2018). Born and raised in Philadelphia, she moved to Iowa with her husband and family in 1981. Susan began her writing career as a columnis

If there is one thing more fun than discovering a new (to oneself) author, it is discovering a new author with a series already well underway. In City of Ink (Minotaur Books, 2018), the third of Elsa Hart’s mystery novels set in early eighteenth-century China during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor and featuring former imperial librarian Li Du and his storytelling friend Hamza, Li has returned to his former home of Beijing.His intention is to learn more about the events that led to his own exile from the capital years before, the result of guilt by association. But he soon discovers that the imperial library has been closed since his departure, and to make ends meet, he takes a job with his former brother-in-law, in charge of the North Borough Office. When, on the eve of the imperial examinations, a young woman is murdered at a tile factory in the North Borough, Li accompanies the investigator. The case appears to be clear-cut, since the victim turns out to be the wife of the tile-factory owner, and she is fou

Grey Held writes of Frances Donovan's book, Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore (Reaching Press 2018 ), "there is hunting for love, there is basking in love, there is longing." This collection offers all of these things. It examines what it is to love romantically, sexually, as a friend, and as a resident of the world. It pulls us down into the micro-moments of our lives and then catapults us out into the universe. In this episode, we touch upon marginalization, hope for inclusion, the writer's journey, and how we come to the page on our own terms.Mad Quick Hand of the Seashore was named a finalist in the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards. Her publication credits include The Rumpus, Snapdragon, and SWWIM. An MFA candidate at Lesley University, she is a certified Poet Educator with Mass Poetry and has appeared as a featured reader at numerous venues. She once drove a bulldozer in a GLBT Pride parade while wearing a bustier and combat boots. You can find her climbing hills in Boston and online at www.gardenofwords.com.Bor

Sunil Chandaria is struggling to write his PhD dissertation in philosophy at Harvard University. He feels his father’s disapproval because he didn’t become a doctor, and his mother’s disapproval that he doesn’t have a job or a wife. The Chandaria family lives in Columbus, Ohio. They are emigrants from Nairobi, Kenya, but they are Gujarati-speaking Jains whose grandparents left India for jobs in Africa at the end of the 19th century. Sunil’s father is now a successful doctor and his mother owns a giftshop that sells African-made art, clothing, and gifts. When Sunil’s cousin gets injured in a horrible car accident, the family returns to Nairobi, where Sunil surprises everyone by announcing that he and his Jewish-American girlfriend are married. Then he in turn is surprised to learn that his cousin is actually his brother. The Limits of the World (Delphinium Books, 2019) is a rich novel about how we navigate the bonds of family, culture and religion in a world made smaller by immigration and technology.Jennifer

Anand Prahlad was born on a former plantation in Virginia in 1954. This memoir, vividly internal, powerfully lyric, and brilliantly impressionistic, is his story.For the first four years of his life, Prahlad didn’t speak. But his silence didn’t stop him from communicating—or communing—with the strange, numinous world he found around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. Ever so slowly, he emerged, learning to talk and evolving into an artist and educator. His journey takes readers across the United States during one of its most turbulent moments, and Prahlad experiences it all, from the heights of the Civil Rights Movement to West Coast hippie enclaves to a college town that continues to struggle with racism and its border state legacy.Rooted in black folklore and cultural ambience, and offering new perspectives on autism and more, The Secre

Many of you listening to this now probably recall growing up in a household of faith. You may have fond memories of the familiar rituals, the holidays, the shared family values. A weekly service at a church, a temple or a mosque. For many worshippers, religion can provide a sense of comfort in an otherwise uncertain universe. But for some, being in communion with God can mean placing your faith above all else—including your own children.Such was the case for writer Kelly J. Beard, whose family struggled to feed themselves under the fundamentalist purview of the Desert Chapel. In a new book, An Imperfect Rapture, Beard describes growing up in a community that required its members to participate in excessive tithing, among other practices designed to prey on those who had the least to give. As a child of the 1960s with a strong spirit, Beard defied the religious tenants of her upbringing, seeking to learn more about the world beyond the church and discovering her love of music, travel, and writing in the proces

The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018) is a debut novel of Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist and composer. The novel narrates a story of a priest Joseph Flynn, who undergoes a deep emotional and psychological confusion that arises out of his devotion to religion and his desire to be happy and content in his private life, which goes against traditional and conservative beliefs and principles. Performed at times in a shocking and destabilizing manner, the novel includes references to music and literature, theatricalizing the text that allows space for clashing ideas. The novel has a profoundly provocative energy, inviting the readers to explore the nature of self and existence. One of the key questions that The Final Retreat poses is connected with the pursuit of peace and harmony: the quest, however, is inseparable from struggles and frustrations. What is happiness? And what is the role of the other for the individual’s self-content? These questions are explored through delving into the dreary

In The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes (StrangeHouse Books, 2018), Sara Tantlinger intertwines fact and speculation to examine inner workings of H.H. Holmes, a man who committed ghastly crimes in the late 19th century and who is often credited with being America’s first serial killer. Narratively arranged, these poems offer up an evocative and chilling imagining of life and times of Holmes along with his wives, victims, and accomplices. A profound and fascinating collection for anyone interested in the riveting realm of true crime.“The building shiversbeneath each curve of my footstep,my home, my castlefit for Bluebeard himself,entwining murder and luxurylike salt and sugarplaced gently on the tonguewhere each tiny grain dissolvesin a way blood never will.”— from “Shades of Wild Plum”Sara resides outside of Pittsburgh on a hill in the woods. Her dark poetry collections Love for Slaughter and The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes are published with StrangeHouse books. She is a