New Books In Literature

In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political, and philosophical connections that were accompanying the history of the countries constituting the USSR. Mark Andryczyk’s research offers an insightful analysis of Ukrainian literature that was taking shape right after the collapse of the Soviet Union and during the emergence of Ukraine as an independent state. The Ukrainian literary scene of the 1990s was to some extent responding to a new political and social environment, revealing, and at times instigating, paradigmatic transformations. Becoming open to the West after almost seventy years of international isolation, Ukraine appeared to be building dialogues that involved identity and self-identification concerns locally and globally. In this process of awakened nationalconsciousness, which undoubtedly entailed a number of c

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers and traces a transnational post-Holocaust network. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of Yiddish and Jewish cultures in the post-War era. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history. Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan Kai, and the Business of Women in Late-Qing China (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016) looks carefully at the work of Zhan Xi and Zhan Kai, brothers and late-Qing writers of fiction and other forms. Widmer contextualizes that work within a larger frame of the lives and writing of their parents, associates, and (in one case) children, weaving together seemingly-disparate literary and historical threads in order to create a richly detailed and evocative account from sometimes-fragmentary evidence. The result is a riveting contribution to the studies of women, gender, fiction, and reform in modern China. Over the course of our conversation we spoke of the particular challenges and opportunities offered by the kinds of

In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to Israeli, Palestinian and postcolonial writers. She examines how representations of Jewishness in contemporary fiction have wrestled with topics such as the Holocaust, Israeli-Palestinian relations and Jewish diaspora experiences. By bringing an in depth look at ideas of Jewishness into dialogue with postcolonial analysis this book makes an important intellectual contribution. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K. Elder lives in Oak Park, and for the colorful and interesting Hidden Hemingway: Inside the Ernest Hemingway Archives of Oak Park (Kent State University Press, 2016), he and his co-authors Aaron Vetch and Mark Cirino dug into multiple locations of the Hemingway archives. The legendary author’s life was as big as his fiction, and Elder and the documents preserved in the writer’s hometown help tell his story. Garrison Keillor said of the book, “Ernest Hemingway was the genuine literary giant of my youth: we groundlings studied him closely, we imitated and then we parodied him, we admired the fine figure he cut and envied his celebrity, and now fifty years later, it’s a privilege to look through his closet and read his stuff and discover him as a morta

John Jodzio, oft and rightly compared to George Saunders, is lauded by Chuck Klosterman as “the best best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” It’s no wonder this hilarious and profound Minneapolis writer has cultivated a cult following who flock to his reading events. His most recent collection Knock Out: Stories (Soft Skull Press, 2016) features a cast of complex, compelling, and strange characters (an alcoholic bed and breakfast owner, a recovering meth addict and a kidnapped tiger, an agoraphobic mother raising her baby completely indoors, a former soap opera star paralyzed in a human cannon ball stunt gone bad, and a son trying to keep the opium den family business afloat– just to name a few) who ultimately reveal their own raw humanity, as well as our shared emotional experience without the baggage of sentimentality. Jodzio walks a tightrope between comedic gold and hitting the sweet spot of crack-your-ribcage-open-and-shatter-your-hear

My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might call junk, but when she was there the town was the small center of a lot of small family farms, including her own. In her years there, she helped run the farm, started a dry-cleaning business, drove the school bus, served as an EMT and worked in the sheriff’s office. She was one of the folks everyone knew. On Sundays, she cooked biscuits for the prisoners in the local penitentiary. For me, growing up, she was just grandma. I didn’t realize the richness of her character until years later, with age and distance, maybe even a little wisdom. In her latest poetry collection, Amy Wright takes this kind of realization and transforms it into powerful, moving, and often times hilarious art. She was raised in the Appalachian region of Southwest Virginia, an

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi), and on a particular set of ritual practices known as Thunder Ritual, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel (University of Hawaii Press, 2015) explores the entanglement of literature, religion, and community in China. Thunder rituals were used to capture unruly and uncanonical spirits that enthrall local communities and to transform them into sacred beings aligned with cultural institutions that transcend any single locality or region. These rituals were part of a Daoist liturgical structure that was supported by early Ming emperors, and they helped shape the story and significance of Canonization of the Gods. Meulenbeld situates this focused case within larger contexts of Ming imperial politics and culture, and explores larger themes that include the hist

In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward. The central focus of the book examines the tension between the theories posited by scholars of assimilation sociology and Chicano/a writers whose literary works, focusing on the Mexican American experience, have advanced rival interpretations of the process of assimilation and immigrant incorporation into American society. Whereas the founders of assimilation sociology (Robert Park and Ernest Burgess among others) characterized American culture as homogenously Anglo-Saxon and presumed assimilation was a desirable and natural social process, Cutler shows how Chicano/a literary works have depicted culture as dynamic, multi-faceted, and uncircumscribed by static notions of authenticity or national unity. More than mere anti-assimilationist, Cutler argues that Chicano/a literary work

What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through our culture’s perceptions of hair. In this personal story that weaves together the cultural and political history of dreadlocks with the authors own mid-life journey to lock his hair, Ashe addresses the significance of black hair in the 20th and 21st centuries through an engaging and humorous literary style. Professor Ashe’s research focuses on late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century literature and culture. He teaches and writes about contemporary American culture, primarily post-Civil Rights Movement African American literature and culture (often referred to as post-blackness or the post-soul aesthetic), as well as the black vernacular triumvirate of black hair, basketball, and jazz. His first book, From Within the Frame: Storyte

Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era. As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay, “There’s a New Movement in American Poetry and it is Not Kenneth Goldsmith”: “poetry is becoming progressively fluid, merging protest and performance into its practice. The era of Conceptual Poetry’s ahistorical nihilism is over and we have entered a new era, the poetry of social engagement.” This anthology stands with a significant few who are helping to usher in or marking this renewed time of social engagement through poetry. Up and coming poets are balking at the instruction to stay away from the political, the politicized, and the instigative. We are writing about the body as we have come to understand it, not a version sanitized for comfortable consumption. With two editors–Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith–at the helm who were fully prese

The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence. Pi-Ching Hsu’s new translation Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour (Brill, 2015) makes the collection available for English-language readers in a volume that contributes to how we understand both early modern China and the history of humor. In the course of our conversation we talked about the craft and challenges of translation, Feng Menglong’s approach to morality, and the linguistic textures of the collection, among many other things. Pi-Ching was generous enough to read some of her translated jokes for us, so stay tuned until the end!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the fictional battles between humans and machines, the divide between good and bad is usually clear. Humans, despite their foibles (greed, impulsiveness, and lust for revenge, to name just a few), tend to find redemption, proving mankind’s basic goodness through love, friendship and loyalty. Machines, on the other hand, despite their superior physical and mental capacities, usually prove themselves to be (largely through the absence of the aforesaid capacity for love) to be dangerous and unworthy of the empires they seek to rule. But what if the humans and machines were combined – not merely cyborg-like in a jigsaw mix of man and robot but more elegantly, through a perfect blending of mind and matter? Ramez Naam does just that in his Nexus trilogy by wedding a human being’s soul – her memories, feelings and intellect – to the most powerful computer ever built. In Apex (Angry Robot, 2015), the trilogy’s third installment and winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Awar

Sara Thibault and her new husband, Philippe Lemieux, grew up in Vouvray, amid the French vineyards that dot the Loire Valley. But when the phylloxera blight of the 1870s devastates their families business, Philippe decides to try his luck in California. Sara soon follows, driven by a tragic series of events detailed in The Vintner’s Daughter. The California Wife (She Writes Press, 2016),the stand-alone sequel to that earlier novel, traces the later history of Sara, Philippe, and the group of wholly or partially orphaned children whose care they undertake. The California wine industry, although somewhat healthier than the French, has also suffered from the blight. Its reputation is less secure than that of its European rival, and the existence of too few outlets has driven prices down to the point where many vintners can hardly afford to harvest their crops. Meanwhile, Sara fears for the survival of the vines on her childhood estate, and Philippe worries about the cost of developing his current lands. In

“Poems of Nomadic Dispersal” This latter phrase in the title of Janice A. Lowe‘s new book–LEAVING CLE: Poems of Nomadic Dispersal (Miami University Press, 2016)– has hung around me, following me through my home, around the rural town where I live and have not yet become fully accustomed. The insistence on “landing somewhere” has resonated with me. The notion of understanding that place enough to call it home has altered the way I see myself geographically. The poems themselves have hung around me, in their narrative, in their varied terrain of verse topography. And then I heard the poet read her work, and the lines that had been trailing me rose up to eye and ear level. I understood the many levels on which these poems are operating. my House was small her secrets full of wildflower memory of Hungarian table wines her backyard of mint and rose breath singing through humble cracks a milk chute for bottles no longer delivered her garage a sentry box weary from Black sig

What is explosion? What does language look like when it mimics a gas leak, a bang, or rubble? What does language look like when it orbits other sounds, mediums, and musicality? How can it then react to and converse with itself? Rodrigo Toscano is a poet who trusts his creative impulse, trusts the place in time, space, and his mind where art is born allows this wave to carry the poet where it will. It is this ceding of will that permits a collection like Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016) to fully realize itself. How can we better understand how a mid-day, multi-structure gas explosion took no lives? But this is isn’t about the explosion that took no lives. This has everything to do with the explosion that took no lives. And everything to do with dialogue, and the cosmos, and ancient civilizations. Interconnectedness is expressed at its most fundamental level. How can we better understand the philosophical impact of each word, each turn of phrase, each image it conjures, and how this languag

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read, “Tears and Hugs as 5 Abducted Japanese Go Home to Visit.” From a chance look at this photo, a project that spanned several years and many months in Japan and South Korea was born. The resulting book, The Invitation-Only Zone: The True Story of North Koreas Abduction Project (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), is an fascinatingly and compellingly written account of a series of abductions from Japan (as well as other parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East) from the late 1970s through the their contemporary after-effects. Boynton’s book weaves the story of the abductees and abductors together with a modern history of Japanese/Korean relations that contextualizes the abduction story within a broader frame of colonialism and its

Padma Mehta, the hero of Adam Rakunas’ Philip K. Dick Award-nominated novel Windswept, is part Philip Marlow, part Norma Rae, part Jessica Jones. Theres no question that Mehta needs the skills of a union leader, noirish sleuth and action hero. Without them, how could she manage both the day-to-day machinations of helping run a blue-collar planet and simultaneously battle an interstellar corporate conspiracy? Windswept is a fun book, full of action, plot twists and humor. But that doesn’t mean it shies away from grappling with important issues, including a looming environmental disaster — specifically a crop-killing plague that threatens to destroy the monoculture crop that the entire universe depends on. Just as Mehta jumped through numerous hoops to save her world, so did Rakunas to get Windswept published. After working on the novel for several years, he sent the manuscript to 65 agents, and was rejected by 64 of them. The wisdom of the 65th to take him on was vindicated this past January,

A hundred years before Ellis Island became a processing center for immigrants wishing to enter the United States, Philadelphia had the Lazaretto, a quarantine hospital where every ship entering the harbor from June to September had to stop while those aboard were checked for signs of infectious disease. In a city already known for its diversity by the mid-nineteenth century, the Lazaretto represented both openness to and fear of the outsider. This deep ambivalence, to change and to the other, forms the heart of Lazaretto (Harper, 2016), the sparkling new novel by Diane McKinney-Whetstone, who already has five acclaimed works of fiction to her credit. The US Civil War has just ended. In the home of a well-respected midwife, a white attorney has brought his young black servant, Meda, to abort the child he has fathered on her. But the pregnancy is too far along for such a solution, and the child arrives that very night. The father takes the child, ordering the midwife to tell his servant that her daughter is dea

A ghost haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre, near Times Square in New York. She wears a green outfit in flapper style, and she’s just a little annoyed to realize that no one is scared of her, even though she mostly rearranges the scenery rather than clanking chains or leaping out and scaring people. Her name is Olive Thomas, and she is one of the first silent movie stars, although her early death means that she is much less famous than her sister-in-law, Mary Pickford. Born near Pittsburgh, Olive moves to New York to escape a teen marriage and a life raised in poverty. After winning a contest as the Most Beautiful Girl in New York, she becomes an artist’s model before securing a position with Flo Ziegfeld, the mogul behind the Follies. Ziegfeld takes a shine to Olive, and soon she is not only dancing for him but has become a regular in the much racier Midnight Follies. Soon she and Ziegfeld are involved in an affair, but when Ziegfeld goes back to his wife, Olive takes off for Hollywood. In Santa Mon