New Books In Literature

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone? Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland (FSG, 2024) is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introd

What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wages of Sin (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024), by Dr. Harry Turtledove, a patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows how: it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease. The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devastating destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognisable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom. This interview was conducted by Dr.

Kate Quinn and Janie Chang are independently acclaimed authors of historical fiction, both of whom have previously appeared on this podcast channel. Here they combine their skills to tell a story about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake from multiple points of view. One line follows the story of Alice Eastwood, a botanist whom we meet in London five years after the tragedy. Her perspective is contrasted with that of Gemma Garland, an aspiring opera star whose unique voice can’t quite compensate for the migraines that sideline her just as she’s about to make her mark on the world. The third narrator is a young Chinese-American named Feng Suling (“Susie” to the rich white customers who can’t be bothered to learn her name), with a gift for embroidery and a grand ambition: to escape the arranged marriage her uncle plans for her and reunite with Reggie, the love she has lost. How these three stories intersect and overlap, united by the Phoenix Crown and the man who owns it, I’ll leave for readers to discover. Each

Chandrica Barua is the Nonfiction and Online Editor for MQR. A PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature, her dissertation focuses on encounters between imperial objects and colonial bodies in the British Empire, especially in British India. She hails from Assam, India. What draws an editor to a particular essay? In Chandrica Barua’s case, her criteria definitely include: whether the essay is inventive in form (for instance, by being a hybrid or “braided” essay that brings together different topical strands) and if it surprises the reader by where it goes. Also of note are factors like: does it have a compelling title, a strong start, and a satisfying moment of closure? The first of the essays discussed here comes from a special, forthcoming African literature issue. Does Emelda Nyaradzai Gwitimah’s “My Hairdresser Is Dead” have an intriguing title? Absolutely, along with a sense of humor missing in many memoirs. In turn, another African essay, “Side Pieces” by Chike Frankie Edozien,

Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding. He had been a genius, renowned for his research in nuclear fusion and respected at Princeton, until he fell apart. She remembered him being alternatingly kind or violent when bipolar disease gripped him. Her mother packed up and left the house with Mako and her sisters, later remarrying a wonderful man and brilliant chess player who Mako considered the father she always wanted. Mako wants to understand him; why he cross-dressed, why he was so passionate about fusion, why he alienated his daughters so that he hadn’t even been invited to Mako’s wedding. Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. Her novels have been translated into six languages; awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Counci

In this fantastic recent episode from our colleagues at Novel Dialogue, Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and John to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Colour (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.” if you enjoyed this Novel Dialogue crossover conversation, you might also check out earlier ones with Joshua Co

Today’s book is: Whiskey Tender: A Memoir (Harper, 2024), by Deborah Jackson Taffa, who was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Deborah Jackson Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.”  Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Quechan (Yuma) reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through edu

Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s fourth short story collection, Cravings (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), contains twelve beautifully-written tales. They each start simply before delving into universal human struggles of love, aging, repercussions, and community. Characters mull over or confront decisions and recognize or bemoan past mistakes. A little girl’s life changes while she’s sneaking olives from the pantry, a woman is plunged back in time while attending the book release of her ex, parents of a disabled child struggle as their marriage frays, the daughter of an ex appears on television, and a woman destroys the reputation of her only friend. The collection is about cravings of one kind or another, but also covers a range of complex emotions that arise over the course of a lifetime. Garnett Kilberg Cohen was born and raised in Ohio and feels a strong connection to the Midwest, a place in her memory that is replete with farms, small towns, car factories and fields of corn and purple clover. As a child, sh

Luna Levi is an ordinary 19-year-old with extraordinary problems. Her mother's acting career is more important to her than the stage of real life. Her father struggles with PTSD as an ex-combat soldier and is equally MIA when it comes to his daughter. The Levis jump from financial crisis to financial crisis until in one-split second someone enters their lives and throws them into the biggest disaster of all. When Luna tries to warn her mother, she is pushed aside and it's the first hint that her mother has every intention of going full steam ahead with a partner who lies--about everything. This family drama is part crime fiction and part domestic noir. Gila Green's novel With A Good Eye (AOS Publishing, 2024) will make you question: can you ever save anyone but yourself and do any of us ever really leave home? Israel-based Gila Green grew up in Ottawa then moved to Johannesburg before settling outside of Tel Aviv. She is the author of dozens of short stories, three novels and one novel-in-stories: White Zion

The New England Review bills itself as a “snapshot of the literary moment,” which for my guest Elizabeth Kadetsky means great writing, of course, but also work that’s relevant to today and showcases a writer able to get out of her or his own head by getting out into the world at large. Fittingly, this episode jumps in locale from Greece to India to Sudan and, finally, to New York City. In every case, a reckoning is taking place—a chance to ponder objects, people, events to try and grasp their value and meaning. In Greece as explored by Joseph Pearson in “The Island That Eats Its People,” a treacherous local landscape doesn’t prove to be nearly as daunting as the war-torn Syria some refugees the writer encounters have come from. In “Stories: South Sudan by Adrie Kusserow,” the key is realizing that as a NGO worker in Africa and a witness to the trauma-aid being insufficiently offered to refugees relocated to Vermont, she’s an outsider always. The episode also includes two pieces by Kadetsky outside the scope o

Josie Belle Gore is only six years old when we meet her in 1908, yet her father has tied a rope around her waist and is lowering her into a dark well to retrieve a dead animal that is poisoning the water. The third daughter of a growing family, Josie has moved with her family from western Texas to Arizona, then eastward again, settling in the New Mexican desert region known as the Jornada del Muerto. Her father, a railroad engineer, spends much of his time away, and it is her mother who holds the family together through poverty, sickness, and drought. From an early age, Josie learns that her lot in life is to subsume her own interests to those of her family. Although she yearns to become a teacher, even mastering basic literacy is a challenge in a region where schools are few and far between, household chores never-ending, and such basic needs as food and water not always met. As her father falls prey to alcoholism, loses one job after another, and repeatedly uproots the family in search of a better future, J

Mrs. Lowe-Porter (Jackleg Press 2024) was an American writer (1876-1963) who, after proving her ability, was contracted by publisher Alfred A. Knopf to translate the brilliant books and stories of Thomas Mann from 1924 -1960. Her flowing German to English translations led to Mann’s growing reputation and helped earn him the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1911, she married paleographer Elias Lowe, with whom she had three children and many good years, but he was also another dominating man in her life (in addition to Mann and Knopf). Lowe-Porter wrote numerous stories and one original play that was performed in 1948, but her struggle to write and publish was stymied by convention and the requirements of her time. On a side note, she was also the great-grandmother of former U.K. prime minister, Boris Johnson. Jo Salas is a New Zealander now living in upstate New York. She has a BA in English literature from Victoria University in New Zealand and an MM in music therapy from New York University. As the cofound

After her prize-winning debut, Karen Rigby returns with a beguiling ars poetica and tribute to the dazzling. From Dior to Olympic figure skating, Bruegel to British crime drama, Rigby’s poems revere memorable art, where “performance masks the hours.” Here, thread galvanizes air. A poem is a diamond heist. And menace and elegance are twin gloves directing each cinematic moment. A book of feminine ardor, teenaged MDD and survival, Fabulosa (Jackleg Press, 2024) embroiders beauty out of ache, raises culturally difficult topics with poise, and helps readers feel seen with elegance and originality. Born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, Karen Rigby now lives and writes in Arizona. Her latest poetry book, Fabulosa, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2024. Her debut poetry book, Chinoiserie, was selected by Paul Hoover for a 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize.Karen’s work has been honored by a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and an Artist Opportunity Grant from t

Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin are English professors at Brigham Young University. Madden’s latest book is Disparates (U Nebraska Press, 2020) and Franklin’s is The Writer's Hustle: A Professional Guide to the Creativity, Discipline, Humility, and Grit Every Writer Needs to Flourish (Bloomsbury, 2022). They serve as co-editors-in-chief of Fourth Genre. Two guest voices in this episode means twice the fun, as Patrick Madden and Joey Franklin reinforce as well as diverge somewhat in their essay preferences. Madden is more in the Montaigne reflection vein, whereas Franklin admits he can prefer a narrative-driven memoir approach. Together, we worked our way through three essays from a recent issue of Fourth Genre, one of three magazines that spearheaded a renewed appreciation for the essay form beginning a quarter of a century ago. Both editors enjoyed the surprises that bubble up in Peggy Shinner’s essay, “The Rest Is History,” which explores the conflation of female sexuality and nuclear testing during World

Barely able to walk and rendered mute by the cancer metastasizing in his throat, Ulysses S. Grant is scratching out words, hour after hour, day after day. Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family might have some financial security and he some redemption, Grant journeys back in time. He had once been the savior of the Union, the general to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a twice-elected president who fought for the civil rights of Black Americans and against the rising Ku Klux Klan, a plain farmer-turned-business magnate who lost everything to a Wall Street swindler, a devoted husband to his wife Julia, and a loving father to four children. In this gorgeously rendered and moving novel, Grant rises from the page in all of his contradictions and foibles, his failures and triumphs. Moving from blood-stained battlefields to Gilded Age New York, The General and Julia (Atria Books, 2023)explores how Grant's own views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. "A graceful, moving narrat

Cynthia Sylvester's The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press 2023) is a collection of stories, flash fiction, and poems revolving around the journey of a travelling band, The Covers. The stories are songs on the album, beginning with “Live at the House of Towers,” about a woman’s memories of her mother and home. The story of Shima (and her husband Claude) begins with all of her six daughters being taken by missionaries. The 10-year-old youngest, whom she calls The Last One, and the missionaries call Ruth, keeps running away. Shima is afraid because the missionaries will teach them to forget the songs and stories of their people. In Live at the House at the Edge of the World, Ruth is grown and eating dinner with Albert. We meet Margarita, who was born with cerebral palsy and is confined to a wheelchair and a parade of other characters who struggle to love, live, and survive in a harsh world. These are stories of hope and despair, family and banishment, based out west in what was once the wide-rangi

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy

Leo Ríos speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Lencho,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio from the immigrant farmworker community. Leo talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores the friendship between two high school seniors in a rural community in California’s Central Valley. Leo also discusses his family’s generations-long history in farm labor, and how a class on reading poetry made him rethink prose writing on the sentence level. Originally from the Central Valley of California, Leo Ríos studied English at UCLA and received an MFA from Cornell University. His first published story was selected by ZZ Packer as winner of The Arkansas International’s Emerging Writer's Prize. His second published story appeared in The Georgia Review and was noted as a distinguished story in The Best American Short Stories 2022. Other publications include stories in The Rumpus, The Masters Review, and Joyland Magazine. A recent recipient of a MacD

Alix E. Harrow’s new novel Starling House (Tor Books, 2023) is named for the infamous old mansion in the otherwise unremarkable town of Eden, Kentucky. For years the house has haunted the dreams of our protagonist, Opal, a reluctant resident of Eden who is focused on building a better life for her younger brother–one that would get him both out of the motel room where they live and out of Eden entirely. When the elusive Arthur Starling offers Opal a job caring for the manor, she decides the money is worth the risk. In this interview, Harrow explores the role of the gothic in fantasy and writing at the intersection of genres. We discuss the portrayal of sibling relationships in fiction, writing about contemporary Kentucky, and the legacy of coal companies. We chat about the way rumors around powerful women in small towns develop, the differences between libraries in stories and in real life, and the role of cleaning in fantasy novels Starling House is a thoroughly good time and it was so fun getting to talk ab

Betsy Bird is the Collection Development Manager of Evanston Public Library and the former Youth Materials Specialist of New York Public Library. She writes for the School Library Journal blog A Fuse #8 Production and reviews for Kirkus. She is the host of the Story Seeds podcast as well as the co-host of the Fuse 8 n' Kate podcast that she creates with her sister. Betsy is the author of nonfiction, picture books, anthologies, and the historical middle grade novel Long Road to the Circus (Knopf, 2021), illustrated by David Small. Her new picture book Pop Goes the Nursery Rhyme is out Fall 2024. You can follow Betsy @fusenumber8 on Instagram, Threads and TikTok or @fuse8.bsky.social on BlueSky. In our animated conversation, we talk about what makes a great picture book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature