New Books in Literature

The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable woman by any standards. Known for her musical compositions and mystical prayers, Hildegard was also Germany’s first recognized female physician. The daughter of minor nobility, she entered the convent in childhood as a tithe from her parents. Excited by the prospect of acquiring an education, then a goal unattainable for girls outside a convent, Hildegard suffers a setback when she confronts the strict seclusion imposed on nuns by the anchorage of St. Disibod and its ascetic magistra, Jutta of Sponheim. But relief comes from the company of Volmar, a fellow oblate who like Hildegard loves to sneak out of the abbey and walk in the nearby woods, and Brother Wigbert, the monastery’s infirmarian. It’s through the teaching of Brother Wigbert that Hildegard discovers her affinity for medicine.Alas, not every member of the abbey hierarchy believes that young women should spend time outside the walls of the anchorage, and as political threats from the outside world intensify and Hildegard’s detractors rise higher in the administration, she must fight for her right to practice medicine—and to express her opinion at all. In this charmingly personal account, P. K. Adams explores the first part of Hildegard’s life, the richly developed characters who influenced her, and the factors that gave her the strength to define her own dream and pursue it to fulfillment despite opposition from a society determined to keep her in her place. The story begun in The Greenest Branch (Iron Knight Press, 2018) concludes in The Column of Burning Spices (Iron Knight Press, 2019), where Hildegard leaves the Abbey of St. Disibod to found a convent of her own.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 pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow.The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. People start losing their memories as well—while gaining an ability to change the world with the power of their imaginations.As society collapses, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowers bloom in winter.The Book of M has garnered widespread praise, earning recommendations from The Today Show and USA Today, and making Amazon’s list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2018. A reviewer on Bustle called it a “post-apocalyptic masterpiece.”In a world of vanishing memories, Shepherd finds an unlikely hero: a patient with classic amnesia. Unlike the “shadowless”—who eventually forget everything, including how to speak or eat or breathe—the amnesiac never forgets how the world works. This allows him to explore, in a race against the seemingly unstoppable pandemic, ways to save the memories of the few who remain.For several of Shepherd’s characters, the worst thing that can happen to them is losing their connection to those they love. “Their greatest fear is the people they care about who’ve lost their shadows [will forget] their love and the memories they have together,” Shepherd says.The book is mum about the pandemic’s cause—as is Shepherd. “I sort of felt like if this really happened to all of us and the world was plunged into this kind of dream-like forgetting state, probably nobody would [know the cause] but everyone would have their theories. Some make more sense than others.”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

It’s 1999, and Ann is a guitar-playing thirty-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of having children even though she was born without a uterus. As Laura Catherine Brown's novel Made by Mary (C and R Press, 2018) opens, Ann and her husband Joel have been rejected as adoptive parents, and their plan to host and pay medical expenses for a pregnant teen goes terribly wrong. Then Ann’s 49-year-old mother Mary, a jewelry-designing, goddess-worshipping, lesbian hippie, offers to carry her daughter’s baby.Brown’s debut novel, Quickening, was published by Random House and featured in Barnes & Noble’s "Discover Great New Writers" series. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Monkeybicycle, Paragraphiti and Tin House; and in anthologies with Seal Press and Overlook Press. She received her BA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and supports her writing habit by working as a graphic designer. Her writing education came through many writing workshops including the Bread Loaf Conference and the Sewanee Writers' Workshop where she was a fiction fellow. She has also taught yoga since 2003 and has been a yoga practitioner for almost 30 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was published in 1976 and then went out of print. In this new edition, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody write the introduction, while Baldwin’s nephew and niece, Tejan Karefa-Smart and Aisha Karefa-Smart write the foreword and afterword respectively. In Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin alternately described as a children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children, we see a slice of a Harlem neighborhood through the eyes of young TJ. The story presents a complex and multifaceted vision of black childhood in America and nudges the contemporary reader to think critically about what it means to see through the eyes of a child and to be seen by those in one’s world.Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976) at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The senior thesis he wrote about it was published in the anthology James Baldwin Now (NYU, 1999). A subsequent essay on Little Man Little Man that draws on his interviews in Paris with the book's illustrator, French artist Yoran Cazac, appears in The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin (2015). This research led him to co-edit and write the introduction to a new edition of Little Man, Little Man (Duke UP, 2018), which the New York Times wrote "couldn't be more timely" and Entertainment Weekly hailed as "brilliant, essential." He was interviewed by the New York Times and Publisher's Weekly for their feature articles on Little Man, Little Man and he appeared on Madeleine Brand's Press Play on KCRW , on Black America TV , and on a panel at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture moderated by Jacqueline Woodson, National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.  The recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Camargo Foundation, he is currently at work on a literary biography of Baldwin, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Reimagined Belongings: Black Women’s Decolonial Citizenship in the French Empire examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (Delphinium Books, 2018) is set in a near-future Pakistan where a repressive patriarchy requires women to take multiple husbands and become full-time baby makers after wars and disease render women devastatingly scarce.A reviewer in the Los Angeles Times called it a “thrilling novel” with “exquisite” social commentary. Before She Sleeps was also among the books recently highlighted in an article in The Atlanticabout “The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia.”Before She Sleeps focuses on a group of women who’ve found a modicum of freedom by hiding underground with the assistance of powerful men, for whom they provide clandestine but non-sexual companionship.The book explores the boundaries of their freedom through an eastern and Islamic lens. “Western readers… are expecting some fantastic like Hunger Games-type scenario where the women come out as warriors and just smash the patriarchy. Feminism in my part of the world, in the Middle East and South Asia is a lot more subtle. We’re dealing with tremendous amounts of misogyny and … gender-based violence. So I think what women over the centuries have learned is not to directly confront that misogyny … but to subvert it, to go around it,” Shah says.The risks facing outspoken women in Pakistan today are real. Shah’s friend, Sabeen Mahmud, was murdered in 2015. Mahmud had founded a popular café-gallery and meeting space in Karachi that seeks to foster conversations about human rights, diversity, and other topics that are controversial in Pakistan. After the murder, Shah wrote with greater urgency, channeling all her “terrible feelings” over Mahmud’s assassination into the novel.While some might call Mahmud and Shah activists, Shah resists the label. “We feel like we’re just out there doing our work and saying what needs to be said and telling the truth about what we see in our lives around us and if that’s activism, then OK,” she says.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

Emery, Em for short, is a smart and dedicated college graduate. She anticipates a future in which she, and eventually, her parents, can escape the lower strata of the domed city of New Worth. She hopes her upcoming career as a data curator, someone who pores over the copious electronic exchanges which constantly overwrite the old, will make the sacrifice of her parents worthwhile. They saved their money to buy her an implant, a neurological link to the data network, so that she would be in an advantageous position.But just as she’s about to move her virtual relationship with a man she knows as Rik to the next level, after meeting him in person, her life takes a twist. Em has a secret life pursuing and punishing criminals who rip the valuable implants out and resell them. In a highly structured society, she’s taken the law into her own hands, making her vulnerable to blackmail. Aventine, a pseudo-government company which specializes in safe data-transfer by through encoding the data in the blood of its couriers, wants her to work for them. They’ll pay off her sizable school debt, and keep her past activities tracking criminals secret. They promise exciting and fulfilling work. There’s only one catch. She will be officially dead.To prevent friends from recognizing her, she’ll be outfitted with safeguards, including a slightly altered physical appearance, and a variety of false ids. Although Em misses Rik and her friends and family, she tells herself they’re better off without her. She soon becomes comfortable with her Aventine handler, Tahir, and gets to know some of the other couriers. But when a data-drop turns dangerous, and a man gets shot, Em doesn’t know who to trust anymore.Could she turn to Rik for help? She’s only met him once in person, and besides, he seems to be sympathetic to a radical contingent of Disconnects, who are calling the whole idea of implants into question.Fast paced, with a touch of romance, Lauren C. Teffeau's cyberpunk novel Implanted(Angry Robot, 2018) explores trust and intimacy in a society based on electronic connections. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When you picture the midwestern United States, what do you see? For those who live on either coast, the phrase “flyover country,” might come to mind. Wide open spaces and vast empty plains. Miles and miles of corn, as far as the eye can see. The kind of place where nothing much happens, and nobody important ever lived.At least, so goes the prevailing stereotype.But if you’ve spent much time in the Midwest, chances are you have a very different perspective of this landscape. Your vision of America’s heartland is probably populated with the friends, family, and experiences that helped shape you, and the great state you call home.For writer Erica Trabold of Stromsburg, Nebraska, the Midwest is more than the place she came of age—it’s also a landscape rich with stories. In her debut collection, Five Plots (Seneca Review Books, 2018), Trabold explores themes of family, heritage, belonging, nostalgia, and the natural world in a series of beautiful, tightly-woven essays. Through her unique formal experimentations with prose, Trabold offers a fresh perspective of this often overlooked terrain.Today on the New Books Network, join us as we welcome Erica Trabold to discuss her essay collection, Five Plots, winner of the Seneca Review’s first Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, now available from Seneca Review Books (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 @zoebossiere (https://twitter.com/zoebossiere?lang=en) or head to zoebossiere.com (http://www.zoebossiere.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On its back cover, Patrick B. Mullen’s Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music(University of Illinois Press, 2018) is aptly described as “part scholar's musings and part fan's memoir”. Mullen is professor emeritus of English and folklore at the Ohio State University and across the eight chapters that make up this book, he enthusiastically and engagingly describes his many encounters with a wide range of vernacular musics throughout the north American continent and details his experiences with the musical genres, performers, events, and songs that have shaped the soundscape of his life. As his fellow music scholar, E. Cecilia Conway puts it: this “book lets us ride shotgun with Mullen on his journey from Beaumont, Texas boy to Ohio professor to dancing to 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'The Twist' amidst the diversity of American Music. Read Pat Mullen at his expansive best."Rachel Hopkin is a UK-born, US-based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Christmas is not looking bright for Charles Dickens. His latest novel has proven a massive flop, and that upstart William Thackeray doesn’t miss an opportunity to crow. Bills are rolling in, every relative in creation has his or her hand out, the kids (number steadily increasing) have their hearts set on expensive toys, and Mrs. Dickens has already started making plans for the most elaborate holiday party yet. Oh yes, and Dickens’ publisher is begging him to write a Christmas book when the spirit of Christmas seems to have packed up and moved to Scotland together with Dickens’ exasperated family.Determined not to give in, Dickens moves to a cheap hotel, rents a room under the name Ebenezer Scrooge, dons the disguise of an old man, and roams the streets of London in pursuit of a mysterious young woman in a purple cloak. And surprise, by the time December 25 rolls around, Dickens has not only recovered his joie de vivre but penned what may be the world’s most beloved holiday classic, A Christmas Carol.In Mr. Dickens and His Carol (Flatiron Books, 2018), Samantha Silva  takes events we all know from childhood and, through the application of a light touch and a gifted imagination, turns them into a story at once comfortably familiar and delightfully different.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

In her new novel This is How it Always is (Flatiron Books, 2017), Laurie Frankel tells the story of the Walsh-Adams family and how they grapple with the youngest child, the fifth son, who announces at age three that he wants to be a girl. While his four older brothers revel in typical boy behavior, Claude, who decides her name is now Poppy, wears dresses and purses to school. Local homophobia pushes the Walsh-Adams family to leave their big old farmhouse in Madison, Wi. for a smaller home in Seattle. There, they decide to keep Poppy’s trans status a family secret. When Poppy is outed, her mother takes leave from her job and travels across the world to help her daughter figure out who she wants to be.Laurie Frankel is the author of the novels This Is How It Always Is, The Atlas of Love, and Goodbye for Now. She lives in Seattle with her family. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature