Burned By Books

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 introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at Yale University.Recommended Books: Tea Obreht, The Morning Side Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century.In American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (FSG, 2023), the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner--the American Kalashnikov--as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry.Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia.Zusha Elinson is a national reporter, writing about guns and violence for the Wall Street Journal. Based in California, he has also written for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area section.Recommended Books: Robert Caro, The Path to Power William Shawcross, Sideshow Dexter Filkins, The Forever War Adam Winkler, Gun Fight Tim Mak, Misfire Doug Stanton, Horse Solidiers Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate. So are the marks of civilization far below, encrusted on the planet on which we live.Profound, contemplative and gorgeous, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and a moving elegy to our humanity, environment, and planet.Samantha Harvey is the author of five novels, The Wilderness, All Is Song, Dear Thief, The Western Wind and Orbital. She is also the author of a memoir, The Shapeless Unease.Her novels have been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian First Book Award, the Walter Scott Prize and the James Tait Black Prize, and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, among many others. She lives in Bath, England, and teaches Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.Recommended Books: Jenny Erpenbeck, Kairos Allen Rossi, Our Last Year Miranda Pountney, How to Be Somebody Else Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, founded by a provocateur billionaire, that hosts academics other schools have thrown out?Helen decides she must go--her work is too important. She brings along her partner, Hew, who is much less sanguine about living on an island where the disgraced and deplorable get to operate with impunity. On campus, Helen finds herself drawn to an iconoclastic older novelist, while Hew stews in an increasingly radical protest movement. Their rift deepens until both confront choices that will reshape their lives--and maybe the world.Irreverent, generous, anchored in character, and provocative without being polemical, How I Won a Nobel Prize (Little, Brown, 2023) illuminates the compromises we'll make for progress, what it means to be a good person, and how to win a Nobel Prize. Turns out all of it would be simple--if you could run the numbers.Julius’s writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, and some other places. For a while he was a lawyer. Julius attended Yale Law School and Pomona College. He lives in New York.Recommended Books: Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding Tom Holland, Dominion Kabat, The Eighth Moon Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, 2023) explores the weight of the devil's bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom.Hugo Contreras's world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo's debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffles between his efficiency apartment, La Carreta (his favorite place for a cafecito), and a botanica in a strip mall where he works as the resident babaláwo.One day, Hugo's nemesis calls. Alexi Ramirez is a debt collector who has been hounding Hugo for years, and Hugo assumes this call is just more of the same. Except this time Alexi is calling because he needs spiritual help. His house is haunted. Alexi proposes a deal: If Hugo can successfully cleanse his home before Noche Buena, Alexi will forgive Hugo's debt. Hugo reluctantly accepts, but there's one issue: Despite being a babaláwo, he doesn't believe in spirits.Hugo plans to do what he's done with dozens of clients before: use sleight of hand and amateur psychology to convince Alexi the spirits have departed. But when the job turns out to be more than Hugo bargained for, Hugo's old tricks don't work. Memories of his past--his childhood in the Bolivian silver mines and a fraught crossing into the United States as a boy--collide with Alexi's demons in an explosive climax.Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens explores questions of visibility, migration, and what we owe--to ourselves, our families, and our histories.Raul Palma is a second generation Cuban American, born and raised in Miami. His short story collection In This World of Ultraviolet Light won the 2021 Don Belton prize. His writing has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, the Greensboro Review, Hayden Ferry Review and elsewhere. He teaches Fiction at Ithaca College, where he is the associate dean of faculty in the School of Humanities and Sciences. He has also taught at the Elmira Correctional Facility through Cornell University’s prison education program. He lives with his wife and daughter in Ithaca New York.Recommended Books: Alejandro Nodarse, Blood in the Cut Claire Jimenez, What Ever Happened to Ruthie Ramirez Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rosemary Candwell's past has exploded into her present. Down-and-out and deteriorating, she drifts from anonymous beds and bars in Providence, to a homeless shelter hidden among the hedge-rowed avenues of Newport, and through the revolving door of service jobs and quick-fix psychiatric care, always grasping for hope, for a solution. She's desperate to readjust back into a family and a world that has deemed her a crazy bitch living a choice they believe she could simply un-choose at any time. She endures flashbacks and panic attacks, migraines and nightmares. She can't sleep or she sleeps for days; she lashes out at anyone and everyone, especially herself. She abuses over-the-counter cold medicine and guzzles down anything caffeinated just to feel less alone. What if her family is right? What if she is truly broken beyond repair? Drawn from the author's experience of homelessness and trauma recovery, It's Not Nothing is a collage of small moments, biting jokes, intrusive memories, and quiet epiphanies meant to reveal a greater truth: Resilience never looks the way we expect it to look.Courtney Denelle is the author of IT’S NOT NOTHING (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2022), a novel-in-fragments drawn from her experience of homelessness and recovery, and the forthcoming novel Real Piece of Work, an art world satire that explores image-craft and the unbidden toll of a life lived in persona. Her stories have appeared in the Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere. Courtney was also winner of the 2021 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen award, and she has been granted a Hawthornden Fellowship and a MacColl Johnson Fellowship, as well as residencies from Hedgebrook and the Jentel Foundation.Recommended Books: Naomi Klein, Doppelganger Kate Doyle, I Meant It Once Isle McElroy, People Collide Kerri Schlottman, Tell Me One Thing Kimberly King Parsons, We Were The Universe Lucas Mann, Attachments Yiyun Lee, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life Emily St. John Mandel, Last Night in Montreal Sarah Manguso, Liars Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jim Finley--a recently retired English teacher living alone on the shifting edge of San Francisco--has been set, unwittingly, on the back porch of life. Trying to harmonize the voices in his head, he sits most days by his stack of "to-do" books until, one day, his daughter comes home with the worst news of her life. Everything changes. As his broken heart reengages, he steps back into a new world. He sees his ex-wife has launched into a larger life than the one they'd shared. He is surprised to find it easier to talk to his son's immigrant girlfriend, or even the remains of a Russian saint, than to the young man he's raised. He misconnects with Carol--his first date in decades--a woman he enjoys talking with but doesn't quite hear. Set in the pre-tech calm before the turn of this century, Outer Sunset (U Iowa Press, 2023) is a deeply felt story about the intimate place where long-lasting growth occurs in our lives; how we revise, or live without, our dreams; how to love the flaws of those closest to you and watch a child grow away into someone better than you'd imagined; and how to be shaken by beauty amidst unimaginable loss and remain standing.Mark’s work has won a Nelson Algren Short Story Award, been long-listed for the Pirates Alley/Faulkner — William Wisdom prize, and been published in the Chicago Tribune, LitHub, Santa Clara Review, Connotation Press, Kindle Singles, and elsewhere.Mark grew up in Western Massachusetts and New York's "North Country," earned a BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and moved to San Francisco in 1987, where he earned an MFA from SF State. He worked nearly 30 years in nonprofit communications, including a wonderful spell with the California Council for the Humanities. He lives with his wife and kids in San Francisco.Recommended Books: Joy Williams, Harrow Jaime Cortez, Gordo Stuart O’Nan, Last Night at the Lobster Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced.With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner of hauntings, these stories traverse a boarding school in the Vermont woods, the jagged coast of Maine, an attic in suburban Massachusetts, an elevator stuck between floors, and the side of an unlit highway in rural South Carolina.At the center of almost every story is the landscape of night, with all its tantalizing and terrifying potential. After dark, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, boundaries loosen, expectations fall away, and even the greatest skeptics believe-at least fleetingly-that anything could happen. These stories will stay with you.Rebecca Turkewitz is a writer and high school English teacher living in Portland, Maine. She is the author of Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, July 2023), a collection of thirteen spooky literary stories. Her fiction and humor writing have appeared in The Normal School, Chicago Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, The New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from The Ohio State University. She has been a resident at Hewn oaks Artist Residency and won a 2020 Maine Literary Award in the short works category. She loves cats, the ocean, and ghost stories.Recommended Books: NANA KWAME ADJEI-BRENYAH, Chain Gang All-Stars Talia Lakshmi Kolluri, What We Fed to the Manticore Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later--long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against him have run out--the long shadow of Dylan's trauma still looms over the fragile life in the city he's managed to build with his fiancé, Moans, who knows little of Dylan's past. His continued existence depends upon an all-important mantra: To survive, you live through it, but never look back.Then a groundbreaking new law--the Child Victims Act--opens a new way foreword: a one-year window during which Dylan can sue his abusers. But for someone who was trafficked as a child, does money represent justice--does his pain have a price? As Dylan is forced to look back at what happened to him and try to make sense of his past, he begins to explore a drug and sex-fueled world of bathhouses, clubs, and strangers' apartments, only to emerge, barely alive, with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.By turns harrowing, lyrical, and beautiful, Hertz's debut offers a startling glimpse at the unraveling of trauma--and the light that peeks, faintly, and often in surprising ways, from the other side of the window.Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School.Recommended Books: Megan Nolan, Ordinary Human Failings Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death.After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand's theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse.Things look better in Hollywood--until the money starts running out, and with it Anna's faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother's house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna's odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom - communal love, communal toilets - and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself."A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.Lexi Freiman is the author of the novel Inappropriation, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the Miles Franklin Award. She is a graduate of Columbia’s MFA in fiction and worked as fiction editor at George Braziller for five years. She also writes for television.Recommended Books: Jordan Castro, The Novelist Herve Guibert, Crazy for Vincent Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices