New Books in Literature

The Final Retreat (Sylph Editions, 2018) is a debut novel of Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist and composer. The novel narrates a story of a priest Joseph Flynn, who undergoes a deep emotional and psychological confusion that arises out of his devotion to religion and his desire to be happy and content in his private life, which goes against traditional and conservative beliefs and principles. Performed at times in a shocking and destabilizing manner, the novel includes references to music and literature, theatricalizing the text that allows space for clashing ideas. The novel has a profoundly provocative energy, inviting the readers to explore the nature of self and existence. One of the key questions that The Final Retreat poses is connected with the pursuit of peace and harmony: the quest, however, is inseparable from struggles and frustrations. What is happiness? And what is the role of the other for the individual’s self-content? These questions are explored through delving into the dreary abyss of loneliness and alienation. The Final Retreat offers an insight into a soul tormented by doubts, fears, and frustrations which become part of the individual’s journey to the self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes (StrangeHouse Books, 2018), Sara Tantlinger intertwines fact and speculation to examine inner workings of H.H. Holmes, a man who committed ghastly crimes in the late 19th century and who is often credited with being America’s first serial killer. Narratively arranged, these poems offer up an evocative and chilling imagining of life and times of Holmes along with his wives, victims, and accomplices. A profound and fascinating collection for anyone interested in the riveting realm of true crime.“The building shiversbeneath each curve of my footstep,my home, my castlefit for Bluebeard himself,entwining murder and luxurylike salt and sugarplaced gently on the tonguewhere each tiny grain dissolvesin a way blood never will.”— from “Shades of Wild Plum”Sara resides outside of Pittsburgh on a hill in the woods. Her dark poetry collections Love for Slaughter and The Devil’s Dreamland: Poetry Inspired by H.H. Holmes are published with StrangeHouse books. She is a poetry editor for the Oddville Press, a graduate of Seton Hill’s MFA program, a member of the SFPA, and an active member of the Horror Writers Association. Sara’s poetry, flash fiction, and short stories can be found in several magazines and anthologies, including the HWA Poetry Showcase Vol. II and V, The Horror Zine, Unnerving, Abyss & Apex, the 2018 Rhysling Anthology, 100 Word Horrors, and The Sunlight Press. She embraces all things strange and can be found lurking in graveyards or on Twitter @SaraJane524 and at saratantlinger.com.Andrea Blythe bides her time waiting for the apocalypse by writing speculative poetry and fiction. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems created from the pages of Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyers, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She is co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast, serves as an associate editor for Zoetic Press, and is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association. Learn more at: www.andreablythe.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Circe is an immortal naiad, the daughter of the Sun God, Helios. Ignored or belittled by her divine kin because of her human-sounding voice, dull-colored hair, and quiet manner, she turns to her little brother for company, and then eventually, meets a human man who seems to offer her adoration. Yet her good will and nurturing are wasted on these relationships.Stung because the man she loves does not recognize her worth, Circe uses her newly found power of witchcraft to transform her romantic rival into a monster. This act has serious consequences; the new gods of Olympus are angered, and demand that her father punish her. She is exiled to the island of Aiaia. Alone at last, without the mockery of the gods, Circle develops inner resilience and wisdom, refining her plant lore, and finding companionship among the animals of the island.But Circe is immortal, and her island paradise will not remain undiscovered forever. Through the ages many mortals visit her; some seek to exploit her, and others appreciate her.  Gods visit her island as well. Hermes becomes an occasional lover, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom, a frightening opponent.In her wonderful book Circe (Little, Brown and Company, 2018), Madeline Miller makes the ancient myths come alive with her vivid luscious writing style, and her sympathetic portrayal of the witch Circe, a peripheral character in the Odyssey.Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series and the upcoming epic fantasy, Girl of Fire. She blogs about travel and her books at http://gabriellemathieu.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Andrea Miller is the deputy editor of Lion's Roar magazine (formerly the Shambhala Sun)  and the author of two picture books: The Day the Buddha Woke Up and My First Book of Canadian Birds. She's also the editor of three anthologies, most recently All the Rage: Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance. I spoke with Andrea on the heels of her trip to India to attend the International Buddhist Conclave, which afforded her the chance to attend sacred Buddhist sites. She has a brand new piece out in December, 2018 called “The Buddha Was Here.” This conversation discusses the impetus and creative process behind The Day The Buddha Woke Up, out now from Wisdom Publications (2018).Greg Soden is the host “Classical Ideas,” a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Lindsay Townsend is doing well at her high school in Wollongong, Australia. She’s pretty and popular and smart enough that she can spend as much time at the beach as she does hunched over her books. Only she knows that the confident self she projects to her friends and fellow students conceals life with an abusive father and a mother determined to keep the peace at all costs. When Lindsay’s handsome young gym teacher takes an interest in her, she lacks both the maturity to resist and the experience she needs to protect herself from harm. Soon she’s caught up in a scandal, facing pressure from the adult world to accept a decision no teenage girl should have to make.In The Swooping Magpie (Triskele Books, 2019), the second of a trilogy set in southeastern Australia, Liza Perrat explores in gritty, compelling prose the rapid social changes of the 1960s and 1970s and the tragedy, loss, and grief that the collision between rules and reality sometimes caused.C. P. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today, I spoke with LaTanya McQueen, whose new collection of essays reckons with intriguing and timely questions about history, race, family, place, and self. It’s called And It Begins Like This(Black Lawrence Press, 2018), and I immediately found myself asking, “What’s it? What’s this?” Not until over halfway through the book did McQueen make the answer clear, when she writes: “There is a story I once believed and it begins like this—a woman named Leanna Brown was a slave to Bedford Brown, Senator of North Carolina. Sometime during her enslavement she had a relationship with a white man who lived on a neighboring farm, and the results of their relationship produced three children, one of them my ancestor.” McQueen’s book is, in part, her attempt to learn the full and complicated truth of this story, to discover, as much as the record will allow, the history of her great-great grandmother. This search, it turns out, asks her no less than to grapple with the history of race relations in the United States and the ways in which it manifests in her own life and family. And It Begins Like This is a clear-eyed and powerful account not only of the experience of being an African American woman right now, but also a testament to the importance of this experience and the insight it brings for all Americans.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. His work ranges from food writing to electronic literature. He is the author of three books, most recently In Praise of Nothing: Essay, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014). He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

That the Roman leader Gaius Julius Caesar is so well remembered today for his achievements as a general is largely due to his skills as a writer. In The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works (Pantheon, 2017), the distinguished classics scholar Kurt Raaflaub provides readers with a new translation of the collection of writings known as the Corpus Caesarianum, which he supplements with footnotes, maps, and images designed to make Caesar’s writings accessible for the modern-day reader. Raaflaub situates the books within the context of Caesar’s life, explaining how the first and most famous of them, the Gallic War, was a political tool designed to bolster Caesar’s stature back in Rome. In the aftermath of the civil wars that followed his crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BCE, Caesar wrote his follow-up Civil War, which was largely complete when he was assassinated five years later. Though Caesar died before writing the later works attributed to his authorship, Raaflaub presents them as extensions of Caesar’s labors, with the Alexandrian War written from his notes and early materials he drafted, and the African War and the Spanish War authored by men who served in both campaigns and who were firsthand witnesses to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Against the backdrop of a gritty 1890’s Chicago teaming with labor problems, filthy sweatshops, and putrid stockyards, two young immigrants struggle to survive. Chaya and her brilliant younger brother Asher escape the tedium of the Wisconsin farm to which their parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Guided by a kind, wealthy young man to the Jewish neighborhood of Maxwell Street, the two siblings, still speaking with Yiddish accents, scrape together a living until they each find a way to reconcile their convictions with their lives.The Lake on Fire (Sarabande Books, 2018) is about whom to love, the struggle between rich and poor, and the choices we make about how to live in an unfair world. Although set in the 19th century, Rosellen Brown’s writing, as intriguing and luminous as Chicago’s “White City,” has something to say about our still unfair, turbulent times.Rosellen Brown currently teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and lives in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, home of the Columbian Exposition, the University of Chicago, and the Obamas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Since being sold into slavery as a child and working her way up to becoming concubine and mistress for several different men, Lady Juliana's survival has depended on her allure. Then her place in the world is shattered by a debilitating illness and she is spurned by the entire Polish royal court. Enter Felix Ossolinski—scholar, diplomat, Renaissance man. A riding accident in his teens forced him to redirect his energies from war to the life of the mind, and alone among the men of the sixteenth-century Polish court, he sees in Juliana a kindred spirit, a woman who has never appreciated her own value and whose inner beauty outweighs any marring of her face. Then the Polish queen offers Juliana a way out of her difficulties: travel to Moscow with Felix and spy for the royal family in return for a promise of financial independence. Facing poverty and degradation, Juliana cannot refuse, although the mission threatens not only her freedom but her life. Felix swears he will protect her. But no one can protect Juliana from the demons of her past. Join me for a discussion with C. P. Lesley about her new novel Song of the Siren (Five Directions Press 2019).Carolyn Pouncy (who holds a PhD in Russian history from Stanford University) writes under the pen name C. P. Lesley (who doesn’t exist and has no degrees). Carolyn (aka C.P.) is the author of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess , The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum. Song of the Siren is the first in her newest series, Songs of Steppe & Forest, based on 16th-century Russian history. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, she edits other people’s manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet. That love of ballet finds expression in her Tarkei Chronicles. A historian by profession, she also hosts New Books in Historical Fiction for the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tade Thompson’s The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019) takes us deep into the heart of an alien invasion that divides humans among those who welcome the extra-terrestrials and those who want to stop them.The book is the second in Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy. The first, Rosewater, earned the inaugural Nommo Award for Best Novel, Africa’s first-ever prize for speculative fiction.In most alien invasion stories, mankind and the invaders battle to the death. In Thompson’s tale, however, there is more inter- than intra-planetary conflict, with the insurrection in the title referring to the city of Rosewater’s rebellion against greater Nigeria. Meanwhile, the alien invaders have their own conflicts, with Wormwood—a powerful consciousness that reads minds and invades human bodies—battling for its survival against a fast-growing plant from its home planet.The book reflects a subtle grasp of war and politics with characters capable of eliciting a reader’s empathy even as they sometimes behave in less than admirable ways.“What someone told me this week about The Rosewater Insurrection was that they don’t know who to root for. To me that just means that I've been successful in showing the different points of view and the reasons for them doing what they're doing without bias,” Thompson says.There are hints of Thompson’s own life in the storytelling—as a working psychiatrist, as a Londoner of African heritage, as a student of history. The most powerful characters in The Rosewater Insurrection are women, reflecting his upbringing. “I had really strong sisters,” he says. “If you think about your average sub-Saharan African country now, you know there is lots of misogyny... However, the women actually hold the society up.”For Thompson, human nature is largely to blame for the civil war at the heart of his story.“They were dealing with something they don't understand, and the human tendency when they don’t understand something is to lash out one way or the other. … Any time when you get prolonged uncertainty with human beings, conflict is usually the outcome.”***Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He has worked as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform. Follow him on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature