New Books in Literary Studies

Amy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Means (Mariner Books, 2022), is her first novel. Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing at New York University.Book Recommendations: Holly Pelesky, Cleave Violaine Swartz, Papers Sheng Wang, Sweet and Juicy(Netflix Stand-Up Comedy) 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sindya Bhanoo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Tsunami Bride,” which appears in The Common’s new fall issue. Sindya talks about her experience reporting from India after the 2004 tsunami, and how that experience eventually became a story about a journalist in the same position, told from a local’s perspective. She also discusses how the training and techniques she developed as a journalist have shaped her drafting and revision process for fiction, how food often makes its way into her stories, and how her 2022 story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere came together.Sindya Bhanoo is the author of the story collection Seeking Fortune Elsewhere. She is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A longtime newspaper reporter, she has worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. She teaches at Oregon State University.Read Sindya’s story in The Common at thecommononline.org/tsunami-bride.Read more from Sindya at sindyabhanoo.com.The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She is a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The eight-legged essay (bagu wen) was the one genre of writing that dominated in late imperial China. As the primary mode of expression in which men were schooled, writing and reading shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) epitomized literary production in Ming-Qing China, and it was vitally important for every  student, examination candidate, and examiner to master and know the genre intimately — but this genre hasn't yet been approached from a literary perspective. Alexander Des Forges' new book Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China (Harvard UP, 2021) does just that. Focusing on literary practice (the work of writing, reading, and commenting), this book explores how features such as literary voice, parallelism, subjectivity, and aesthetic originality were constructed in a genre not typically thought of as literature. Through careful reading, rich analysis, and the deft translation of eight-legged essays, Alex looks at prose aesthetics not as settled conclusions, but as features that prose writers developed, adhered to, and/or contested, all while they developed as a social class of literary producers.   Sarah Bramao-Ramos is a PhD candidate in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. She works on Manchu language books and is interested in anything with a kesike. She can be reached at sbramaoramos@g.harvard.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight (Mariner Books, 2022). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida.Recommended Books: Sheila Heti, Pure Color Claire Keegan, Foster Namwali Serpell, The Furrows Giada Scodellaro, Some of Them Will Carry Me 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation (U California Press, 2022) provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art from South Asia.This book is available open access here. Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the book business. Where once having a translator’s name on a book cover would be sure to kill interest, now there are movements to display author’s and translator’s names together.Ann reads an excerpt in Italian from Primo Levi’s The Truce, followed by her re-translation of the autobiographical story for The Complete Works of Primo Levi. She then offers an extraordinary walk through of her decision-making process by honing in on the difficulty of translating one key word “scomposti.” Listening to Ann delineate and discard choices, we are reminded of Italo Calvino’s assertion (echoed by Ann) that translation is indeed the closest way to read. This season’s signature question on “untranslatables” yields another brilliant meditation on word choice and the paradoxical task of arriving at precise approximations. Plus, Ann and Saskia reveal some of their favorite Italian women writers, several of whom Ann has brought into English for the first time.Mentions:--Elena Ferrante--Jennifer Croft--Primo Levi, The Periodic Table--Primo Levi, The Truce, from The Complete Works of Primo Levi--Stuart Woolf, original translator of Levi, If This is the Man--Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story--Italo Calvino--Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia--Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island--Emily Wilson, only female translator of The Odyssey--Jenny McPhee--Cesare GarboliFind out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism?John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently.They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized?Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity.Discussed in this episode: The Camp of the Saints, Jean Raspail A Republic, Not an Empire and The Death of the West, Pat Buchanan Dune, Frank Herbert “Living on a Lifeboat,” Garrett Hardin The Lobster Gangs of Maine, James M. Acheson The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome Libra, dir. Patty Newman “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis,” Jason W. Moore The Wall, John Lanchester Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture, eds. William Callison and Zachary Manfredi Economy of Words: Communicative Imperatives in Central Banks, Douglas R. Holmes The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin Read here: RTB Slobodian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961 that 'Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,' meaning that the violence of colonialism can only be counteracted in kind. As colonial legacies linger today, what are the ways in which we can disentangle literary translation from its roots in imperial violence? In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), twenty-four writers and translators from across the world share their ideas and practices for disrupting and decolonising translation.Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Ruth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book explores the dharmas of singleness, friendship, marriage, parenting, and ruling. Bhakta poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Rahim and Raidas drew on ideas and characters from the epics to present a vision of oneness. Justice is indivisible, all bodies are made of the same matter, all beings suffer, and all consciousnesses are akin. This book makes the radical argument that in the epics, kindness to animals, the dharma available to all, is inseparable from all other forms of dharma.Raj Balkaran is a scholar, online educator, and life coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of love in the early Renaissance. As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio's collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero's words, a "symphony of life." Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio's world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron's cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo, the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio's stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies