New Books in Literary Studies

Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity (Edinburgh UP, 2025) examines a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria Closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up a new poetics which challenges received ideas about modern Arabic poetry Rereads along transnational lines the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ Offers a substantial rethinking of key terms in comparative literary studies — translation, translatability, vernacular —as seen through the lens of everyday poetics Describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works Expands the scope of postcolonial poetry in the globalised age by factoring in relationships between first-, second-, and third-world literary cultures This book distinguishes a Syrian style of qaṣīdat nathr (prose poem) as a piece of collaborative performance called shafawiyya, vernacularised poetic speech. It describes the poetic lineages, stretching from early Syrian independence to the 21st century, whose task it was to bring poetic expression closer to everyday life.

These poets are shown cultivating genres and translational practices rooted in a plebeian civilian identity that counters both heroised images of the prophet-poet and stern authoritarian rule. A comparative analysis is provided to understand shafawiyya poetics as a transnational mode of creative engagement. This analysis includes aesthetic affinities and instances of transmission between Arabic poetry and poetries written in formerly Soviet countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria). From this vantage point, matters of perennial debate in comparative literature - vernacular, translatability, postcolonial poetry - are shown from a new perspective.

The book closely examines a wealth of unknown primary poetic texts from Syria that make up the new poetics and challenge received ideas about modern Arabic poetry. It describes the institutional culture of poetry translations in Syria and analyses the modes of circulation by which translations pollinated original works. Behar rereads the works of famous Arabo-Syrian poets such as Nizār Qabbānī and Muḥammad al-Māghūṭ along transnational lines, offering a substantial rethinking of the key terms in comparative literary studies as seen through the lens of everyday poetics. Daniel Behar is Assistant Professor of Modern Arabic Literature in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is interested in comparative analysis of modern Arabic poetry, theories of translation, and socialist literary imaginaries in Syria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The road novel is often dismissed as a mundane, nostalgic genre: Jack, Sal, and other tedious white men on the road trying to recapture an authentic youth and American past that never existed. Yet, new road novels appear every year, tackling unexpected questions and spanning new geographies, from Mexico, Brazil, Bulgaria, Palestine, Ukraine, and former-Yugoslavia. Why did the road novel emerge and why does it persist? What does it do and why has it traveled so widely? In Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford University Press, 2025) Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson draws from an archive of more than 140 global road novels from over twenty countries, challenging dominant conceptions of the road novel as primarily concerned with American experiences and subjectivities. Grounding her analysis in materialist theories of genre, world-ecology and commodity frontier frameworks, and post-45 American literary studies, Dr. Tucker-Abramson persuasively argues that the road novel is a genre specific to, coterminous with, and revealing of US hegemony's global trajectory. Shifting our focus from Americanness to the fraught geopolitics of US Empire, from the car to the built environment through which it moves, and from passengers to those left behind, Dr. Tucker-Abramson remaps the road novel, elucidating the genre's unique ability both to reveal the violent and vertiginous processes of capitalist modernization and to obfuscate these harsh truths through seductive narratives of individual success and failure. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Widow City: Gender, Emotion, and Community in Renaissance Italy (University of Delaware Press, 2025) investigates the ever-evolving role of the widow in medieval and early modern Italian literature, from canonical authors such as Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the numerous widowed writers who rose to prominence in the sixteenth century—including Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Gambara, and Francesca Turina—and radically changed the conversation on public mourning. Engaging with broader intellectual discussions around gender, the history of emotions, the politics of mourning, and the construction of community, Widow City argues that widows served as key models demonstrating to readers not just how to mourn, but how to live well after devastating loss. At the same time, widows were figures of great anxiety: their status as unattached women, and the public performance of their grief, were viewed as very real threats to the stability of the social order. They are thus key to broader intellectual understandings of community and civic life in the Italian Middle Ages and Renaissance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

How are David Lynch's films as much in dialogue with literary and musical traditions as they are cinematic ones? By interrogating this question, David Lynch’s American Dreamscape: Music, Literature, Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2025) broadens the interpretive horizons of Lynch's filmography, calling for a new approach to Lynch's films that goes beyond cinema and visual art to explore how Lynch's work engages with literary and musical works that have shaped the American imagination. As much as Lynch stands as a singular artistic voice, his work arises from and taps into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that illuminates not only his approach to creativity but also the way works interact with each other in an age of mass media. From children's literature to teen tragedy ballads, Nathanael West and Cormac McCarthy to folk music and mixtapes, David Lynch's American Dreamscape investigates the cultural frequencies Lynch's films tune into and positions Lynch's work as a conduit for American popular culture, a medium or channel through which the subconscious of American life finds its way into full view. The book expands upon this approach by discussing how artists such as David Foster Wallace and Lana Del Rey graft Lynch's affiliative, cinematic sensibility onto their own projects. Reading their work as intertextual engagements with Lynch's films further illustrates the versatile interactions among creators and audiences to generate more works, readers, and readings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Join me for a conversation with Dr. Seulghee Lee (Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, University of South Carolina) about his recently published book, Other Lovings: An AfroAsian American Theory of Life (Ohio State UP, 2025). Some topics of our discussion include Adrian Tomine's graphic novel Shortcomings (2007), Gayl Jones' novella Corregidora (1975), and the cultural phenomenon of "Linsanity" and the lasting impact of NBA player Jeremy Lin's rise to fame. In Other Lovings, Seulghee Lee traces the presence and plenitude of love embedded in Black and Asian American literatures and cultures to reveal their irreducible power to cohere minoritarian social life. Bringing together Black studies, Asian American studies, affect theory, critical theory, and queer of color critique, Lee examines the bonds of love in works by Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, David Henry Hwang, Gayl Jones, Fred Moten, Adrian Tomine, and Charles Yu. He attends to the ontological force of love in popular culture, investigating Asian American hip-hop and sport through readings of G Yamazawa, Year of the Ox, and Jeremy Lin, as well as in Black public culture through bell hooks, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cornel West. By assessing love’s positive function in these works, Lee argues against critical regimes, such as Afropessimism and racial melancholia, that center negativity. In revealing what Black and Asian American traditions share in their positive configurations of being and collectivity, and in their responses to the overarching logic of white supremacy, Other Lovings suggests possibilities for thinking beyond sociological opposition and historical difference and toward political coalition and cultural affinity. Ultimately, Other Lovings argues for a counter-ontology of love—its felt presence, its relational possibilities, and its lived practices. This episode was hosted by Asia Adomanis, a PhD student in the Department of History of Art at Ohio State. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues to push against the limits of genre categories, balancing on that delicate edge between science fiction and literary realism. In dialogue with Cleary—a prolific translator of contemporary Latin American fiction who is also a critic and scholar of translation—Trías unfolds the many different ideas explored in Pink Slime, including the ethical complexities of writing about illness and disability, the difficult intimacies of mothers and daughters (and other potentially toxic relationships), how it is that we experience time and memory, and what it means to live with the looming threat of ecological collapse. Pink Slime, like Trías’s other novels, is also interested in the narrative potential of confined spaces, which constrain the movement of plot and allow for new possibilities in building characters’ psychological depth. The conversation also gets into the question of time and narrative tense when it comes to narrating the experience of disaster—a question that was crucial for the novelist as much as the translator. Together, Trías and Cleary also get into the intricacies of translation, including word choice, sound, rhythm, breath, and how to make jokes work across languages. Mentioned in this episode: The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction Prader-Wilis syndrome Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir N. Pino Luna The other pink slime Trías, El monte de las furias Plumsock Endowed Residency, Yaddo Artist’s Community (the residency that Trías briefly names toward the end of the conversation) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Leonard Bernstein, in his famous Norton Lectures, extolled repetition, saying that it gave poetry its musical qualities and that music theorists' refusal to take it seriously did so at their peril. In Play It Again, Sam: Repetition in the Arts (MIT Press, 2025), Samuel Jay Keyser explores in detail the way repetition works in poetry, music, and painting. He argues, for example, that the same cognitive function underlies both how poets write rhyme in metrical verse and the way songwriters like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn (“Satin Doll”) and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“My Funny Valentine”) construct their iconic melodies. Furthermore, the repetition found in these tunes can also be found in such classical compositions as Mozart's Rondo alla Turca and his German Dances, as well as in galant music in general.The author also looks at repetition in paintings like Gustave Caillebotte's Rainy Day in Paris, Andy Warhol’s Campbell's Soup Cans, and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Finally, the photography of Lee Friedlander, Roni Horn, and Osmond Giglia—Giglia's Girls in the Windows is one of the highest-grossing photographs in history—are all shown to be built on repetition in the form of visual rhyme.The book ends with a cognitive conjecture on why repetition has been so prominent in the arts from the Homeric epics through Duke Ellington and beyond. Artists have exploited repetition throughout the ages. The reason why is straightforward: the brain finds the detection of repetition innately pleasurable. Play It Again, Sam offers experimental evidence to support this claim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of High Theory, Jason Schneiderman talks about Nothingism. A term of his own coinage, a tongue-in-cheek manifesto, nothingism is an invitation to refuse the values of digital culture in favor of the values of print. You can read more about poetry at the end of print culture in Jason’s new book, entitled Nothingism (Michigan UP, 2025). In the episode Jaason refers to M.B. Parkes’s book Pause and Effect An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West and the poetry of his teacher Agha Shahid Ali. Jason Schneiderman is a poet and teacher. He is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He also edited an anthology of queer theory for first year writing courses called Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford, 2016). He works as a Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. The image for this episode was made by Saronik Bosu. It shows a blue blur on a pink floral print background. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Today we bring you a masterclass in audiobook narration and acting with acclaimed actor, casting director, audiobook narrator and audiobook director, Robin Miles. Miles has narrated over 500 audiobooks, collecting numerous industry awards and, in 2017, was added to the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. She’s the most recognizable voice in literary Afrofuturism, having interpreted books by Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Nnedi Okorafor. Miles holds a BA and an MFA from Yale. She has taught young actors and narrators at conservatories across the country and she has an amazing talent for doing accents—something we really dig deep into on this podcast. In this conversation we talk about technique, the audiobook industry, and the politics of vocal representation. How do we avoid the misrepresentation of marginalized people on the one hand and vocal typecasting on the other?For our Patrons we have almost an hour of additional content, including our What’s Good segment where Robin unsurprisingly makes some really great book recommendations! If you want hear all the bonus content, just go to patreon.com/phantompower. Membership starts at just three dollars a month and helps pay the expenses of producing the show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

For nearly five decades after the Second World War, the Iron Curtain divided Europe, forming the longest and most heavily guarded border on earth. No physical combat would take place along this frontier: the risk of nuclear annihilation was too high for that. Instead, the war was fought psychologically. It was a battle for hearts, minds, and intellects. Few understood this more clearly than George Minden, head of a covert intelligence operation known as the “CIA book program,” which aimed to undermine Soviet censorship and inspire revolt by offering different visions of thought and culture.From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden’s “book club” secretly sent ten million banned titles into the East. Volumes were smuggled aboard trucks and yachts, dropped from balloons, hidden aboard trains, and stowed in travelers’ luggage. Nowhere were the books welcomed more warmly than in Poland, where the texts would circulate covertly among circles of like-minded readers, quietly making the case against Soviet communism. Such was the demand for Minden’s books that dissidents began to reproduce these works in the underground. By the late 1980s, illicit literature was so pervasive in Poland that censorship broke down: the Iron Curtain soon followed.Charlie English narrates this tale of Cold War spycraft, smuggling, and secret printing operations for the first time, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who fought for intellectual freedom—people like Mirosław Chojecki, who suffered beatings, imprisonment, and exile in pursuit of his clandestine mission. The CIA Book Club: The Best-Kept Secret of the Cold War (Random House, 2025) is a story about the power of the printed word as a means of resistance and liberation. Books, it shows, can set you free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies