New Books In Literature

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it linger. Watch it spiral thinly as it bruises the blue-faded mind of the buffalo sky. We must be the pupil that swells in the coming darkness. The cargo worth carrying across the distances. There is not a single moment where it is safe to pull yourself from the collection, not a moment to disengage with shifting landscape, memory, and the ruthless bonds of family. This chapbook will make you want to write and remind you of when this country was experienced viscerally, when we refused the lure of complacent stasis and chased pure adventure. Watch their video here and wish them well at the Nappa Valley Film Festiva

At a time when science fiction is more likely to portray ecosystems collapsing rather than flourishing, Jane Lindskold‘s Artemis series is an anomaly. Its eponymous planet is not an ecological disaster but rather full of so many wonders that it was once a vacation paradise for a now vanished society. Of course, like any good science fiction (or fiction, in general, for that matter) Lindskold’s Artemis is full of surprises. But Lindskold takes care not to bludgeon readers with messages about the dangers of science run amok or human interference in nature. “I thought it was completely possible to tell a story without lecturing people,” she says in her New Books interview. “I wanted to put together an exotic and interesting world and let people go adventuring on it with me and if along the way they figured out that ecosystems don’t work if they’re exploited, great but I’m not going to write lectures.” Artemis is a genuine character in the story, one with an e

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should read like, or effect in the reader. Ridge’s novella-length work is something more like a Lonely Planet travel guide, or the recovered fragments of some distant, arcane encyclopedia. But even Ridge isn’t quite sure what it is. It just is. American Homes. It starts at Part III and moves through a prose-schematic of domestic spaces: walls, windows, attics, blinds, roofs, porches, chimneys, doors. American Homesoffers ontological conundra (“A Door is not a Door when Ajar.”) It offers sage statistical insights (the Front Door “…accumulates more Annual Knuckle Precipitation than both the Back Door and Side Door combined.”) It offers its own literary criticism, of itself (“The Porch Swing is a Post-Cynical literary device… It is also the symbol of freedom in t

What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common? Answer: Melinda Snodgrass. The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. But after studying opera in Vienna, she came to the conclusion that “I had a nice voice, [but] I didn’t have a world-class voice.” She then went to law school and worked for several years as a lawyer. Unfortunately, “I loved the law but I didn’t love lawyers,” she explains on New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Her first published books were romance novels, which taught her the “extremely valuable lesson of how to finish what you start. Because that actually is a real problem for people. They’ll have brilliant ideas and write the first three chapters and they’ll never finish.” Her first science fiction novels, the Circuit Trilogy, drew on her knowledge of the law as she chronicled the adventures of a federal court judge riding circuit in the solar s

In her first novel, The Lovers and the Leavers (Fourth Estate, 2015), Abeer Hoque undertakes a literary challenge that I suspect even the most seasoned writer would find daunting: how do you tell the stories of those people, old and young, cosmopolitan and rural, living throughout the world in the South Asian diaspora? She meets this challenge through a series of interconnected stories, in which the links among characters emerge subtly but inextricably, a web of family ties that reaches from Bangladesh and India around the globe. Moreover, she captures these stories not only in prose, but also in poetry and photography, making The Lovers and the Leavers a multimedia, multi-genre experience. It’s an ambitious undertaking, spirited and subtle. Yet for all of Hoque’s impressive artistry, she seeks very recognizable ends: to give us a vivid sense of place as rich as the people who inhabit it and to render the inner lives of those people, to let us feel their passions and their pains–those that m

For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future. Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead or takes place on other planets, a book about the near future presents a world that varies only incrementally from the present. The risk, of course, is that the author’s vision will all-too-quickly be proven wrong. In his New Books interview, Cambias explains why he was drawn to the near future and how he navigated those tricky shoals in the writing of Corsair (Tor Books, 2015), which follows space pirates as they hunt and plunder treasure (hydrogen mined on the moon) using remote-controlled spacecraft. Cambias is certain that space piracy will come to pass. “I absolutely expect that some point that space piracy or space hacking… will become a criminal enterprise. Space hardware is just too valuable,” he says. Cambias also discusses the Hieroglyph Project, which is trying to get science fictio

There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking world through their contributions to Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep (Affront Publishing, 2015), a collection of short stories by Swedish authors. Until recently, the world of science fiction in Sweden was so small that it was possible to keep up with everything that was published. But no more. The genre, thanks in part to self-publishing, is “blooming,” Lund says. The few big Swedish publishers are starting to catch up. “The big publishing houses think [science fiction and fantasy] is something that stops with young adults… and there’s not any status for a writer to be writing science fiction or fantasy,” Lund says. But Kallner says, “Game of Thrones is beginning to change that.” Lund says writing a story in English provided a chance to use more or

Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks. “The big event of my life was of course 9/11,” Khakpour says. “I experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from it and think about it constantly.” It’s no surprise that the assault on the Twin Towers features prominently in her writing. Through non-fiction essays and two novels, the Iranian-born writer has tried to understand the tragedy’s impact on her, the nation, and the world. But while her essays are rooted in facts, her fiction takes flight. In The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury USA, 2014) there are, in fact, multiple references to flight. The main character, an albino man named Zal, is raised by his abusive mother in a cage among a balcony full of birds. Although he cannot fly, he yearns to. Rescued by an American and brought to New York in the years before 9/11, he tries to unlearn his

If you’re a reader, then you know the joy of discovering books. You also know that some of those discoveries stand out. Yes, there’s the pleasure of finding a good book. And there’s even those rare occasions where you find the right book: the right book at the right time in your life, the one that somehow shapes or bolsters who you are. And then there are those other moments, where the book you find feels more like you’ve uncovered a hidden gem. You’re Keats, on first looking into Chapman’s Homer, feeling “like stout Cortez” discovering a new world. In my case, the feeling resembles something less epic and more out of Indian Jones, as though, descending into the shelves of the Strand Bookstore in New York or Powell’s Books in Portland, I emerge with a lost treasure, a forgotten totem or relic. It’s a great feeling, one I love sharing with other readers. And that was very much my experience with Mark Ehling‘s new collection, River Dead of Minnea

Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails.” In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his novelette Sauerkraut Station. And now he is exploring new waters with the publication of his first novel, Flex (Angry Robot, 2015), which tells the story of a father desperate enough to use illegal magic to heal his badly burned daughter. The title refers to crystalized magic that, when snorted, gives the user the power to manipulate objects for which he or she has a particular affinity. Cat ladies become felinemancers. Weightlifters become musclemancers. Graphic artists become illustromancers. And the protagonist, a paper-pushing bureaucrat by the name of Paul Tsabo, becomes a bur

Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it. First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, a stunning achievement for a first-time author with a small, independent press. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press, 2014) is set in the American West after an epidemic has killed all but a fraction of humanity. Among the survivors, men vastly outnumber women, setting in motion a desperate journey of survival for the eponymous midwife. To avoid the serial rape and enslavement that threatens all females in this male-dominated landscape, the midwife sheds her name and even her sexuality, presenting herself as a man and continuously changing her moniker to suit the circumstance. Communication falls apart too quickly for anyone to even know the name or nature of the illness that’s destroyed civilization and made childbirth a fatal event for female survivors. The midwife’s focu

Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them all. He is perhaps best known for short stories like The Paper Menagerie, which (according to his Wikipedia entry) was the first work of fiction to earn Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. But this year he’s making waves with two longer projects, which are the focus of his New Books interview: his translation of Cixin Liu‘s The Three-Body Problem and his debut novel The Grace of Kings. The Three-Body Problem has been a break-out success in China for Cixin Liu, who has won China’s Galaxy Award for science fiction nine times. The Three-Body Problem is also the first hard science-fiction novel by an author from the People’s Republic of China to be translated into English. Ken Liu (who is not related to Cixin Liu) says sales numbers for science fiction in China would be the envy of American pub

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August). InThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2006), Michael Gorra takes the reader on a reverse journey, for it is by slipping in “incognito” that we will begin to find Germany in all its imponderables. The result of a year’s sabbatical residence in Hamburg, this book is a deep and discursive exploration of a country with millennia of history, and it explores how Germany’s dark role during the twentieth century weaves in and out of the everyday in the twenty-first. The travel companions Gorra invites along are an exceptional group: Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, W. G. Sebald, Bruce Chatwin. They all have looked at traveling through a kaleidoscopic lens and do not follow the linear as much as channel the essence of ph

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work and a boon for scholars and teachers working in the field of modern Chinese studies. Waverings is the second work in the Eclipse trilogy, three books that were published serially in The Short Story Magazine beginning in 1927. These are the first works of fiction written by Shen Yanbing, the man who would later take on the pseudonym Mao Dun. Waverings offers readers a perspective on the 1926-1927 revolution – and problems of labor and women’s rights therein – but that perspective shifts depending on which version of the text that the reader encounters: while the first version was written very quickly in 1927 while the author was in hiding in Shanghai, another 1954 revision of the text is, in many ways, quite different. In his prefatory remarks, Hull thoughtfully reflects on how to navig

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, first by her teachers at Stonecoast Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern Maine, where she wrote Elysium as her final thesis, and later by the committee that selected Elysium as one of six nominees for the Philip K. Dick Award. (The winner will be announced April 3). “I wasn’t sure there was a space for me in this writing world. And to a certain degree I still sort of wonder. But the idea that I could write and that my stories are worthy of being told was something [Stonecoast] really helped to foster in me,” Brissett says in her New Books interview. In some respects, Elys

While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past. In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age. Against this backdrop, Duncan introduces Elizabeth Barnabus, who outmaneuvers the restrictions placed on her as a single woman by pretending (with the help of quick-change-artist skills) to be her own brother. “Gender identity and gender presentation is a theme that runs through Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter because in order to do certain things in her world she needs at times to cross-dress and do it in a convincing way,” Duncan says. Elizabeth’s mastery of disguise–and her knowledge of deception acquired from her circus-owning father–allow her to earn a living as a private inves

It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel. Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedonism, depression or suicide. And then there’s Hank Palace, a detective on the Concord, N.H., police force and the eponymous star of Winter’s trilogy. Faced with the end of the world, Palace does the almost unthinkable: he keeps doing his job. “He’s taken an oath to uphold the law … and to him an oath is an oath, a promise is a promise, and it doesn’t matter what the context is,” Winters says in his New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy interview. Palace remains dedicated to his job as he tries to: determine whether an apparent suicide is actually a murder

Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and articulate presence on Twitter. Hurley has lived with some of the concepts and characters in her newest novel, The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot, 2014) since she was 12. But it took patience and lots of hard work (including multiple revisions) for the story about mirror worlds on the brink of genocidal war to emerge. Although her first book was a success, the other two books in the series, Infidel and Rapture, were hurt by the financial troubles of the publisher. Hurley rallied, finding a new agent and a new publisher, but the path wasn’t easy. As she says in her New Books in Scienc

This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise. London’s novels about class conflict, debt, and rebellion are set in a grim future. A significant portion of Proxy takes place in a city where the poorest citizens dwell in a violent shantytown known as the Valve while the wealthy thrive in well-guarded neighborhoods of private speedways, luxury homes, and high-tech toys. The sequel, Guardian, is set in a crumbling Detroit exponentially more decrepit than the Motor City of today. As London explains, the horrors of the Valve are his “futuristic re-imagining” of slums outside of Nairobi, which he witnessed while researching one of his non-fiction books, One

Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions. In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows. Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), tries to turn back the clock, inventing a world where astronomy and astrology harmonize once again. The novel centers on two best friends (both astrologers), who conspire to raise their children (both astronomers) so that when they encounter each other as adults, they fall hopelessly in love. All this takes place in the shadow of the Toledo Institute of Astronomy, a “world renowned Mecca of learning and culture” that’s as fanciful as Netzer’s fictional Toledo, a city where “astronomers and mathematicians wa