New Books in Literature

If you read a lot of nonfiction, you may be familiar with what some call the “memoir quandary”—the complaint that memoir and autobiography are too narrowly focused on the writer’s life to be of real interest to anyone but themselves. To avoid this criticism, many nonfiction writers attempt to achieve greater relatability and universality in their writing. But is this appeal really more desirable than the art of telling a good story? While there’s nothing wrong with seeking common ground, one of the magical qualities of writing is how it can not only transport the reader to new places and experiences, but also introduce them to perspectives they might not have considered before.As a recent entry in the University of Nebraska Press’ award-winning American Lives Series, Micah McCrary’s Island in the City (2018) challenges us to consider both personal and political implications of one man’s life experiences through intimately intersectional prose. As a black and queer-identifying man, McCrary examines these identities through keen exploration of gender, sexuality, race, class, geography, and more in order to comment on the simultaneous singularity and ubiquity of human experience. Though McCrary is careful to note that his is an autobiography of one man, and that he can speak for no one but himself, Island in the City is nevertheless a radical exercise in empathetic connection.Today on New Books in Literature, join us as we sit down with author Micah McCrary to hear more about Island in the City, available now from the University of Nebraska Press (2018).Zoë Bossiere is a doctoral student at Ohio University, where she studies creative nonfiction and teaches writing classes. For more NBn interviews, follow her on Twitter @zoebossiereor head to zoebossiere.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Although World War II has long been a favorite subject in both literature and history, a new interest seems to have developed in the multiple roles played by women during the war. In The Lost Girls of Paris (Park Row Books, 2019), Pam Jenoff examines from three different fictional perspectives a little-known, real-life British secret service called the Special Operations Executive (SEO). Originally developed to send male saboteurs and radio operators behind enemy lines in France, the SEO had to change its focus when unexpectedly high casualties revealed that men had become so scarce in rural France that its agents were instantly identifiable as people who did not fit in. The director then chose to recruit and send women instead.The novel opens from the perspective of Grace Healey, detoured into Grand Central Station on her way to work. Grace discovers a suitcase sitting by itself under a bench and, while she’s trying to find out where it belongs, extracts a set of photographs. When she goes to replace them, the suitcase is gone. Grace’s curiosity is piqued, especially when she realizes that a connection exists between the photographs and Eleanor Trigg, whose death in a car crash caused Grace’s detour in the first place.Eleanor, the second point-of-view character, turns out to have been the head of the female agents at SEO, a job for which she recruits the third character we meet, Marie Roux—a single mother forced to choose between spending time with her daughter and financially supporting her child while serving her country. As we move ever closer, from Grace’s distance in time and place to Eleanor’s founding role to Marie’s experiences on the ground, the danger and the potential for betrayal confronting the SEO agents become increasingly clear.C. P. Lesley is the author of eight 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 in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. 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

The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s, in the state of Perak, The Night Tiger closely follows three narrators, mysteriously interlinked by their names. There is a clever orphan named Ren who works as a houseboy, a spunky and funny young beauty, Ji Lin, and a British surgeon, William Acton.Though the novel is grounded in mundane concerns, such as Ji Lin’s effort to pay back her mother’s gambling debt before her step-father discovers it, there are also numinous aspects, such as the waking-dream states that Ji-Lin and Ren enter, during which they communicate with Ren’s dead brother. Even as Ji Lin tried to cope with the restricted options available to a woman of that time period, and surgeon William Acton grapples with his lusty urges, a shimmer of the supernatural imbues the narrative, and a sense of transcendent beauty weaves its way through the chapters.One of the supernatural aspects concerns were-tigers. Ren’s former master, a colleague of the surgeon William Acton, has recently died. Before his passing, he implored Ren, his loyal houseboy, to locate his missing finger. It seems if he is buried without it, his spirit will roam as a were-tiger. Ren has only forty-nine days during which he can bury the finger with the corpse; should he not suceed, the spirit of his former master will never find peace.The book opens as Ji-Lin has discovers the missing finger in her pocket, as a result of a chance encounter with a salesman. She is unaware of its significance but would like nothing better than to be rid of this macabre item. Through a series of events, Ji-Lin and Ren meet, exchange stories, and befriend each other. Their fates are linked through ancient Confucian tradition with other characters. Ji-Lin, Ren, and William Acton all have names which denote Confucian virtues; there is also Ji-Lin’s alluring step-brother, whose motivation for helping Ji-Lin is shrouded, and Ren’s dead brother, Yi. One of the five is deeply flawed and may bring doom onto the rest.Yang-sze’s characters are engrossing, beckoning you into look deep into their psyches, and the setting of colonial Malaysia is a refreshing change to Eurocentric fantasy literature.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

Dayne has the highest respect for the order he’s joined, the Tarians. The Tarian warriors adhere to a chivalrous code of honor, though they live in a time period vaguely suggestive of post-Renaissance Europe during the Age of Discovery. When Dayne, a Candidate, returns to the order’s home in the city of Maradaine, he finds events of the past year prevent him from advancing to the level of Adept. Despite Dayne’s best effort, the boy he was to rescue from a criminal’s trap died when Dayne failed to protect him. Now the boy’s relatives are determined to block his ascent in the Tarian order, which means that Dayne will not be allowed to stay for good.Though Dayne is saddened about his pending departure, he still takes the way of the shield and sword seriously. The shield, which appears in the title of the book, symbolizes protection, while the sword should only be drawn as a last resort. Dayne believes that protecting lives doesn’t mean taking other lives, though he is always willing to sacrifice himself, if needed.His ideals will be challenged as he is drawn into events orchestrated by a conspiracy featuring ten masked men and women, most of them highly placed. What appears at first to be a movement to give more power to the commoners is actually a secret conspiracy to replace the King and achieve new alliances in the Parliament to further the aims of the Traditionalist Party, the political arm of the nobility. The plot is set into motion through pawns that are unaware of the true goal.As Dayne rushes forth, despite the Tarian Grandmaster’s injunction, to save the day, he’s helped by another Candidate, Jerinne, as well as the daughter of his lordly sponsor, the Lady Mirianne, and an assortment of politically-radicalized writers.Listen in as we talk to author Marshall Ryan Maresca about The Way of the Shield(DAW, 2018).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

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes.The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of questions about consciousness, identity, and reality.The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his brother-in-law, a real-life special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.“A lot of his investigations are essentially solved when a victim or someone who knows a criminal tells the investigators what happens and why, but if people don’t talk, the investigation becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible to solve,” Sweterlitsch says. “And so [my brother-in-law] was musing that if he could go forward in time, he could talk to a lot of the witnesses after the emotions had cooled, and they might be more willing to talk.”Sweterlitsch gives Moss the ability to jump forward in time, but any future she visits is only a possibility, one of an infinite number of options. That means the clues she collects aren’t hard-and-fast truths; at best, they are hints that may (or may not) allow her to solve the crime. In the present, such futures are referred to as “Inadmissible Future Trajectories,” since the evidence they generate can’t be used to prosecute a case. The only certainty, as far as Moss and her fellow time-traveling agents are concerned, is the present—or “terra firma,” as they call it.The notion that the present is “solid ground” remains a cornerstone of Moss’s beliefs even as the case of the missing girl grows more complex and Moss’s trips to the future start offering more question than answers. Sweterlitsch introduces a host of fascinating concepts, such as “echoes”—duplicates brought from Inadmissible Future Trajectories who already exist in terra firma. “Thin spaces” are dangerous places where slivers of different times and places intersect, and “lensing” is the idea that a future trajectory is always warped by a time traveler’s psyche, much as dreams are shaped by the unconscious.Sweterlitsch has found inspiration in everything from Dante’s Inferno to J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition to Alfonso Cuarón’s film Children of Men. In the Inferno, “the punishment for the heretics is that they can see far off into the future but can’t see the present … And that was the perfect literary precedent for what I was hoping to write about in this novel in terms of the mechanism of time travel, but it also put the idea of heresy and belief into the book,” Sweterlitsch says. “A lot of characters express beliefs about the nature of the universe, but in almost all cases, those beliefs are proved incorrect by the novel itself… Reality around them is very slippery.”Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Minneapolis environmental attorneys Nick Ward and Lena Grant are no longer partners in law or marriage, but their lives are still strongly intertwined. Nick and his puppet can charm his psychiatrist, his attendant at the psychiatric facility, his supervisors at his mandatory community service, and his former students, but he just keeps breaking Lena’s heart. She tries to protect him as Nick pursues ever-wilder animal rescue schemes, until it seems like everything is starting to unravel.Stephen Evans is a playwright and the author of several books, including The Marriage of True Minds, A Transcendental Journey, Painting Sunsets and The Island of Always (Time Being Press, 2019). He attended Georgetown University, and when not reading, writing or acting, works as a technical writer and systems analyst. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When Olivia Givens and her family leave Ireland in 1819, they have no idea that they are distant victims of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia four years before. They know only that the crops are failing and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars have led to the loss of their family property. Fifteen-year-old Olivia has a special reason to want to stay: her first crush on a local boy. But no one listens to a young girl in love, and soon Olivia is standing on the shores of the Ohio River with the rest of her Ulster Protestant family. The city of Cincinnati has just come into being, and that, combined with the illness of Erasmus, the family’s youngest child, convince the Givens to end their journey west in Ohio.Before long, Olivia’s mother has died in childbirth and her father has abandoned his three surviving children to head south on a paddle boat. James, the eldest son, takes responsibility for his brother and sister. But it’s not the easiest job in the world: Olivia has too much independence of thought to fit neatly into the Victorian vision of “the angel in the house,” and Erasmus cares more for drinking, womanizing, and hanging around with revivalist preachers—even preaching himself—than he does about working in James’s growing candle factory.Meanwhile, right across the river lies the slave state of Kentucky. As the years go by, the Givens family becomes ever more entangled in helping fugitives cross the water to freedom, whatever the cost to themselves, their lives, and even those they strive to protect.The Eulogist (William Morrow, 2019) opens a window onto a time when the frontier began at the Mississippi and North and South, although divided by no more than a waterway, occupied different mental and social universes. Terry Gamble’s ability to reveal the many sides of complex conflicts and gift for making even difficult characters appealingly human should not be missed.C. P. Lesley is the author of eight 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 in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. 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

The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later.Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” Valente says, and proves her point by turning Eurovision’s 50 nations and 100 million viewers into a competition that extends across the universe, attracting billions of viewers and outrageous alien performers—everything from sentient viruses and talented wormholes, to creatures that look like red pandas—but can travel through time—or like Microsoft’s much-maligned animated office assistant Clippy.Space Opera’s intergalactic song contest was founded following the devastating Sentient Wars to promote amity among species (much as Eurovision was designed to promote understanding among nations—as well as promote the newfangled technology of TV—after two world wars).Speaking of Eurovision, Valente says: “I think it’s one of the more extraordinary things that humanity has ever pulled off to look back at those two world wars and say, ‘Hey, let’s sing it out.’”However, the stakes are a bit higher in Space Opera than in Eurovision since the contest at the heart of Valente’s story is designed to test whether humans (recently discovered by the rest of the universe) deserve to be welcomed into the community of sentient beings or, for the sake of the greater good, be obliterated from existence.In the end, the job of saving homo sapiens falls to a washed up one-hit former British glam rock band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros.Under the story’s playful surface are messages about diversity and the absurdity of one clan claiming innate superiority over others when random luck is the most important factor underlying a species’ survival and success. Space Opera became “a frothy glittery book about rock and roll and comedy that has at its core a dark political vein going through it,” Valente says.Valente is a fast writer (see her blog post “How to Write a Novel in 30 Days”) and was able to turn the Twitter dare into a manuscript in two and a half months. “If I take much longer, I start to hate myself and the book and don’t finish. I’m really always trying to outrace my own self-doubt. That’s why I write fast. It’s not because it’s fun.”Her agent worked even faster than she did. He “still calls it the fastest deal in publishing because within 24 hours [of the first tweet] we had a contract.”Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. Follow him on Twitter: @robwolfbooks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The poetry and prose in Ivy Johnson’s Born Again (The Operating System, 2018) beautifully dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, this collection gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. The work blends sensuality and spirituality, merging the grounded reality of existing a physical body in the world with a sense of worship, prayer, and spell casting.I submerge my hands in ink and smear them across the wallI cover my body in rich purple paint and rub against white paperI place a sticker of the Virgin Mary on my bedroom window next to the fire escapeShe hurts with the glow of blue frostI race down the stairs to make snow angels in the dog-pissFill the silhouette of my body with marigolds— from “Take a Moment to Gather Yourself”Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA. Her book, As They Fall, is a collection of 110 notecards for aleatoric ritual and was published by Timeless, Infinite Light in 2013. She is co-founder of The Third Thing, an ecstatic feminist performance art duo. Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs published their self-titled chapbook, The Third Thing, in 2016. Her book Born Again came out with The Operating System in 2018. Her most recent chapbook, an excerpt from her current memoir project, came out with Sky Trail press and is called Precious Moments. If you'd like a copy, email her at ivy.m.johnson@gmail.com.Andrea Blythe is a co-host of the New Books in Poetry podcast. She is the author of Your Molten Heart / A Seed to Hatch (2018) a collection of erasure poems, and coauthor of Every Girl Becomes the Wolf (Finishing Line Press, 2018), a collaborative chapbook written with Laura Madeline Wiseman. She 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

An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states.  An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. They’re good people, the law is on their side, and it’s hard not to root for them, but we’re forced to ask ourselves - what defines parenthood? Is it the biological connection or is it the daily grind of feeding, changing diapers, and tending to all their needs? In addition to a mother’s love, Lucky Boy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) deals with immigration, undocumented workers, the struggle between haves and the have-nots, infertility, survival, and love.Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books. Sekaran is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and she teaches writing at Mills College. She was born in Sacramento, is the daughter of immigrants from India, and has two older brothers, a husband, two young sons, and a cat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature