New Books in Literature

In Joshua Max Feldman's thoughtful, bittersweet novel Start Without Me (William Morrow, 2017), two strangers meet at an airport restaurant, and through the course of one Thanksgiving Day, help each other grapple with love, disappointment, and family. In candid, witty, and often funny, razor-sharp dialogue, Feldman confronts the fall-out from excessive drinking, mental illness, childhood trauma, drugs, adultery, and nearly every other way a person can be wounded.  His deeply-flawed characters are recognizable and honest as they strive to understand their mistakes while continuing to make them. Adam is a former musical prodigy who comes home for Thanksgiving for the first time since getting sober. Even though his family has seen him hit rock-bottom, he still feels like he’ll never be able to get anything right with them.  Flight-attendant Marissa is in a marriage strained by tensions over race, class, and her husband’s lack of ambition. Now she finds out that she’s pregnant following a one-night-stand with her high school sweetheart. If Thanksgiving is the classic, all-American holiday, Start Without Me should be the classic, all-American tale about the struggle we face to become our best selves.Joshua Max Feldman is the author of two novels, The Book of Jonah (translated into nine languages) and Start Without Me. Joshua has written for The New York Times Book Review, among other publications, and is a former fellow of New York's Laboratory for Jewish Culture. He currently resides in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Pillow of Dreams (Nivedita Lakhera, 2017) is an intensely emotional and inspirational collection of poetry and art by Dr. Nivedita Lakhera. She experienced a stroke, divorce, and then a heartbreak all at the young age of 27. She is a doctor of Internal Medicine and is serving as a Hospitalist in San Jose, California. Her career in medicine has inspired some of her greatest work, such as a poem written about the last moments of life of a cancer patient she treated. In this book, she opens each section with a letter written to the reader. In these sections you will meet: Saibo – the one who loves, Meera- the one who yearns, Anahita-the one who heals, and Mulan – the one who conquers. One hundred percent of the book sale profits go towards developing telemedicine software for Syrian refugee camps, developing countries, tribal / remote areas and acute disaster situations. Her work has inspired many and she is a keynote speaker at multiple conferences. Jeremy Corr is the co-host of the hit Fixing Healthcare podcast along with industry thought leader Dr. Robert Pearl. A University of Iowa history alumnus, Jeremy is curious and passionate about all things healthcare, which means he’s always up for a good discussion! Reach him at jeremyccorr@gmail.com. Audio Player Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How do families decide when financial relief outweighs the risks of drilling for natural gas on their land?  In Kate Brandes’ novel Promise of Pierson Orchard (Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2017), a big energy company comes to Minden, Pennsylvania and hires the long-estranged brother of orchard owner Jack Pierson. Thinking that Wade Pierson is one of their own, some struggling neighbors start selling mining rights to Green Energy.  Jack fears what the company will do to the land and worries that Wade will try to rekindle his relationship with Jack’s wife LeeAnn, who recently left him. Jack reaches out to the mother who abandoned him and his brother when they were teenagers.  She’s now an environmental lawyer with experience in dealing with companies whose spurious promises to landowners are broken, along with ecosystems, relationships, and towns. Kate Brandes is an environmental scientist with 20 years of experience.  A geology teacher at Moravian College, she is also a painter and writer who focuses on the environment. Her short stories have been published in The Binnacle, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Grey Sparrow Journal.  A member of the Arts Community of Easton (ACE), the Pennwriters, as well as the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Kate lives near the Delaware River with her husband and two sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Draconis Memoria series is comprised of a trilogy set in a world where drake (dragon) blood is a prized commodity, the basis of the trading fortune of the Ironship Syndicate. It is a brilliant, savage adventure. When I jumped in with Anthony Ryan’s latest release, ominously named The Empire of Ashes (Ace, 2018), I soon realized I couldn’t do justice to the detailed, intricately plotted series without reading all three. In for a penny, in for a pound. August, September, and October found me delving into a world with various cultures: a decadent empire, complete with a doddering emperor, and another continent in thrall to a powerful corporation. There were steaming jungles, barren mountains, and ice floes overlaying ocean-bed volcanoes In addition to the challenges of noting the terrain and politics, there are multiple points of view, as in most adult epic fiction. From my reading, two main characters emerged, and tied together the evolving narrative. Lizanne Lethridge is a ruthless Special Initiatives Agent, an employee of the Ironship Trading Syndicate with a taste for explosives and occasional dalliances.  Clay Torcreek is an emotionally scarred young man, survivor of a slum called The Blinds. They’re both Blood-Blessed; humans that can ingest the blood of drakes and manifest superpowers. When Clay is forced into service by Lizanne’s employers, he and Lizanne are initially at odds. In the first book, Clay is sent on a secret expedition to find out what happened to an earlier force that braved the interior of the continent Arradsia intent on finding the fabled White Drake. A taste of its blood and the future becomes known. When Clay encounters the White Drake in its resting place, and unintentionally activates it, he learns that the beast has its own nefarious plans for humanity. In the second book, he and Lizanne become unlikely allies, dedicated to stopping the threat. Clay and his kin go south to a land of perpetual snow, to seek out the secret of crystals from space that are linked to the past and can induce changes in drakes and humans. Lizanne infiltrates a prison, looking for a mysterious man called the Tinkerer, who may be able to unlock the secret of an ancient music box which holds additional clues about the White Drake. In the process of breaking out of the infamous prison, she becomes known as Miss Blood, and topples an empire. Clay, on his own journey, discovers a long-lost culture and a 2000-year old survivor under the ice. In meantime, the White Drake leads the drakes in a war against mankind. The otherworldly crystals aid the transformation of its human captives into “the Spoiled.” The Spoiled, who have a linked consciousness, are under the control of the White Drake, who mobilizes them as an army, as well as occasionally feeding them to its brood. Will Clay, Lizanne, and their allies find the key to destroying the White Dragon? The third book, the last, concludes the series and the fight against the White Drake’s domination. 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  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once happened there. The youngest child disappears, the quarry is drained, and news of the missing child spreads. As the days and months pass, it becomes clear that Pansy has vanished into thin air. Then older sister Bert graduates from high school. Sure that her little sister is still alive somewhere, she convinces her brother to help find Pansy. Tiffany Quay Tyson’s debut novel, Three Rivers, was a finalist for both the Colorado Book Award for Literary Fiction and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Past is Never (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) is a 2018 Okra Pick.  Tiffany was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi and is a graduate of Delta State University. After college she worked for a brief stint as a newspaper reporter in the Mississippi Delta, where she received the Frank Allen Award for Journalism. She is the recipient of two Heartland Emmy Awards including one for writing for a children’s public television program. She is a faculty member at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the Lighthouse Young Writers Program in Colorado. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It seems clear that our dependence on the internet will only grow in coming years, offering untold convenience. But how much control will we have to surrender to access this digital wonderland? That’s one of the key questions animating the first two books in Eliot Peper’s action- and idea-packed Analog trilogy. In the first book, Bandwidth, which came out in May, a single company called Commonwealth controls the digital feed for most of the world. To imagine its power, Peper says, picture all of today’s technology and internet giants “times a thousand.” Despite its monopolistic control over the world’s information delivery system, it finds itself vulnerable to a clandestine group of hackers and psychologists, who, over many years, covertly and subtly manipulate the feeds of world leaders to influence their thinking about important policies, such as climate change. “They’re not creating fake news,” Peper says. “They are actually sorting, ordering, and surfacing true facts about the world in a way that shapes someone’s opinion.” In Bandwidth, the behemoth corporation finds itself at the mercy of wily hackers, but in the series’ second book, Borderless, (47North, 2018) published last month, Commonwealth gains the upper hand, using its massive influence to challenge the idea of a nation-state. To Peper’s credit, things are never black and white. “I dig out sources of contradiction in day-to-day life and our relationship to technology and the world,” he says in his New Books interview. Many readers might argue that the goals of the hackers in Bandwidth are good—such as forcing nations to respond to climate change. But these same readers would probably also agree that the hackers’ methods—secretly manipulating individuals’ feeds to change their opinions—violates ethical principles of privacy and autonomy. The power of Peper’s books is that their world isn’t far from our own. The algorithms that animate Facebook and Google and (and Netflix and Amazon and on and on) are a bit like Peper’s hackers, subtly guiding our thoughts to give us what we think we want while also giving the tech companies what they want (likes, clicks, views, purchases). The compromises we make with today’s internet seem to exact a low cost. But Peper wants us to stay on our toes. In the afterward to Bandwidth, he says people can remain autonomous by questioning their assumptions and remaining contemplative. “The feed,” he says, “can only define you if you let it.” The third book in the series, Breach, is scheduled for publication in May. 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

In this episode, we speak with Vernon Keeve III about his book Southern Migrant Mixtape (Nomadic Press, 2018), a collection published by Nomadic Press. Memoir comes in many forms, be it poetry or prose. Keeve’s work is a bridge between both worlds. In a manner that is simultaneously universal and intimate, his book is an unflinching view at what it is to be black, queer, disenfranchised, jubilant, and resilient. Via his deft pen, Keeve turns his focus on how his own personal history is deeply connected to, and is bolstered by, the black experience in society. It is via this collection, Keeve hopes to create a legacy for the story of his family, his culture, and the future. As he writes in “The decomposition of Emmett,” There is a dis- ease in the land. This collection dissects the diss, the unease, and the sickness of American generations as a means of healing and reconciliation. Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is Founder of Linden Avenue Literary Journal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip ticket, hockey games, and his old bedroom with free WiFi in exchange for taking care of their aging grandmother. Andrei imagines the scholarly article he’ll write based on his grandmother’s stories of Soviet intrigue. He imagines himself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping his grandmother company in the evening. But his Russian is rusty, finding a place to play hockey is difficult, and the grandmother has dementia. As Keith Gessen explains in his wonderful novel A Terrible Country (Viking, 2018), Russia turns out to be something different than he expected. Keith Gessen is the founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men. He is also the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Voices from Chernobyl. A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books, Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and sons. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

If you open Dustin Parsons’ new book, you’ll find maps, figures, footprints, a floor plan, silhouettes of roadside birds, charts of riverbed topography, origami directions for an owl in twenty-six folds, and an anatomized dog. What might surprise you—that is, what might surprise you in addition to finding all of these illustrations in a single book—is that Parsons uses them to illustrate his experience of fatherhood, not only that of being a father to two sons, but also of being the son of a father who used similar illustrations in his own work as an oilfield mechanic, a welder, an auto mechanic, a woodworker, and a host of other trades. It’s called Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams (University of Georgia Press, 2018). From this fascinating view, Parsons gives us a highly unusual and highly moving memoir about what it means to be a father. He writes with the precision of an engineer and the lyrical sensibility of a poet, and this combination marks his keen viewpoint, one that allows him to bring remarkable precision to the messy emotions and dense experience of fatherhood. 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

If you are a young moody woman who likes to wear black, you might well be a witch. Or aspire to be a witch. If you needed a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to behave, you could benefit from picking up The Winter Riddle (Black Spot Books, 2018) by Sam Hooker. Quaint, and yet somehow very modern, this is the tale of Volgha the Winter Witch. Volgha, like Greta Garbo just “vants to be alone,” in her moldering, but cozy hut in the North Pole.  Unfortunately, not only is she royal by blood, her depraved, needy sister is the Queen. The Queen enjoys teasing and tormenting her introverted sister, almost as much as chopping peoples’ heads off or getting stimulated with the Royal Tickler. (A person in the employ of the palace who is always masked.) To add to Volgha’s woes, her mind is soon shared by her familiar, a red crow, and her old mentor, which leads to some lively discussions inside her head. And that handsome Santa, with a secret past as a warrior? Volgha tries to push him away, but he doesn’t allow her rebuffs to discomfort him. There is a plot to all this farce as well. Volgha, who has spent years trying to get away from everything and everyone, is chosen by fate to become the Warden of the North Pole and mediate between nature spirits and the doings of man. With a motley crew of assistants, including the vain and talkative red crow, a terrified elf, and a practical scullery maid, she must set things to right. Gabrielle Mathieu is the author of the historical fantasy Falcon series (The Falcon Flies Alone, and the upcoming The Falcon Strikes.) 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