New Books in Literature

In Trail of Lightning (Saga Press, 2018), the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Rebecca Roanhorse draws on Navajo culture and history to tell a gripping future-fable about gods and monsters. The book launches The Sixth World, a planned four-part series set in the near future. The series title refers to the Navajo origin story, which says that our current world—the fifth—emerged after floods destroyed the previous ones. In Trail of Lightning, the six world is wrought from similar devastation, a combination of earthquakes and rising seas. The Navajo Nation survives thanks to a protective wall and a shot of magic, which transforms the barrier into four culturally resonant materials: turquoise, abalone, jet and white shell. The wall seals the nation off from not only the apocalypse but from white Euro-centric colonialism. Roanhorse considers her work a form of indigenous futurism that tells “a sovereign story, a story that exists on its own, on native land in native thought with native characters’ stories and processes that don’t have to acknowledge the larger, white western world. This is not a story that even has any white folks in it. This is a Navajo-centric story, and that’s on purpose.” In creating a magic system, Roanhorse decided not to draw on Navajo spirituality. “There’s already a mess in New Age thinking about Native American spirituality as magic and yet somehow other spiritualities are not,” she says. Still, she wanted to make the magic “distinctly Navajo” so she turned to the concept of clans, which imbue her characters with unique powers. For instance, the clan powers of the book’s protagonist, Maggie Hoskie, make her ideally suited to be a monster hunter. She is Honágháahnii, which means Walks-Around, giving her lightning speed. And she is K’aahanáanii, which means Living Arrow, making her, as Maggie herself puts it, “really good at killing people.” Maggie’s powers emerge spontaneously in response to a devastating incident from her childhood. “The clan powers answer your need,” Roanhorse says. “In Maggie’s case, her jumping off traumatic event was the murder of her grandmother, so what she needed then were those two powers … But often the coping skills that we learn in dealing with trauma—especially childhood trauma—may serve us in the moment but don’t necessarily serve us as we grow. And overcoming those and the baggage that comes with it is part of Maggie’s journey.” The novel is a gripping action-adventure that all readers can appreciate but that holds particular resonance for Native Americans. Some readers have told Roanhorse that “they’ve never seen some of the things I talk about on the rez in a book… I had one reader say she cried the whole way through because she’s never gotten to see that.” A Yale graduate and lawyer specializing in federal Indian law, Roanhorse didn’t get serious about writing until 2013. But she’s quickly made a name for herself. A couple days before we recorded her interview in August, she was honored at the 76th WorldCon with the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Welcome to your Authentic Indian Experience™.” (The story also earned the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in May and is read by Lavar Burton on his podcast.) Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In her first novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018), author Mira T. Lee delves into the sometimes troubled but always compelling life of Lucia from the perspectives of her older sister Miranda, her husband, Yonah, and the father of her child, Manny.  Miranda, who has taken care of Lucia since she was a baby, struggles to help her sister from near and far. Lucia and those who love her are forced to grapple with her recklessness and her mental illness. They also cope with immigration and cultural issues, relationships, raising Lucia’s child, and all the flotsam and jetsam of Lucia’s chaotic life.  In rich, evocative prose, Mira T. Lee has written about love that spans oceans, perspectives, and time. Her work has been published in numerous quarterlies and reviews, including the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review and Triquarterly.  She was awarded an Artists fellowship by the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2012 and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She is a graduate of Stanford University and currently lives with her husband and children in Cambridge, Mass. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Listening to NPR one day in the summer of 2005, author Margot Singer heard a report about a mute pianist who had washed up on the northern coast of England. That was also the summer of the London rush hour bombings that paralyzed the city and killed and maimed hundreds. Those news reports marinated over the years and finally led Margot to write her first novel, Underground Fugue (Melville House, 2017). The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage. Esther’s mother, Lonia, tosses in bed remembering her escape from Nazi Germany, and her beloved brother’s failure to make it out alive. Esther’s neighbor, Javad, is the Persian doctor who is consulted about a mute piano player who washed up on the beach in the north of England. He is also the long-divorced father of nineteen-year-old Amir, who comes and goes at odd hours, and seems to be involved in something secretive. The story weaves the lives and thoughts of these four characters before and after the shocking 7/7 terror attack in London’s underground. Underground Fugue won the 2017 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for American Jewish fiction. Singer’s 2007 story collection, The Pale of Settlement, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Margot Singer’s work has been featured on NPR and in many publications such as theKenyon Review, the Gettysburg Review, Agni, and Conjunctions. She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In the United States, contemporary discourse concerning “the border” almost always centers around the country’s southern boundary shared with Mexico. Rarely, in conversations public or private among Americans is there any discussion of the nation’s northern border with Canada. Whatever the reason (ignorance, indifference, or both) all this changes with the publication of All the Agents and Saints: Dispatches from the U.S. Borderlands (UNC Press, 2017). In this stunning comparison of life along the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borderlands, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, the award-winning travel writer and Professor of Creative Non-fiction at UNC Chapel Hill, busts the conceptual block that views “the border” as a place of exceptionality. Focusing on the modern-day experiences of Tejanos/as, Mexican nationals, and Akwesasne Mohawks, Griest uncovers startling similarities between people and places separated by nearly 2,000 miles. Whether the issue is drug trafficking, confrontations with the Border Patrol, assimilation, environmental pollution, or health epidemics, Griest records the echoing testimonies of northern and southern border dwellers. Yet, amidst the harrowing tales of struggle and loss, Griest finds another commonality…transcendence! In both the northern and southern borderlands, residents, artists, and people of faith stand their ground by staging individual and collective battles against the forces that threaten communities and livelihoods. Beautifully written with force, empathy, and passion, All the Agents and Saints is required reading for those wishing to transcend the ignorance and indifference that drives so much of the social and political divisions of our day. David-James Gonzales (DJ) is Assistant Professor of History at Brigham Young University. He is a historian of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, the development of multi-ethnic/racial cities, and the evolution of Latina/o identity and politics. His research centers on the relationship between Latina/o politics and the metropolitan development of Orange County, CA throughout the 20th century. You may follow him on Twitter @djgonzoPhD. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Humans might one day escape Earth, but escaping our biases may prove much harder. That’s one of the lessons from Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic Books, 2017) set on the HSS Matilda, a massive generation starship where the nightmare of slavery persists hundreds of years after humans have fled their dying planet. At the center of Solomon’s masterful debut is Aster, a young woman trying to figure out why her mother apparently killed herself shortly after giving birth to her 25 years ago. An Unkindness of Ghosts is a powerful story about oppression, racism, gender non-conformity, and the role of trauma in society and peoples’ lives. The book earned a spot on many best-of-the-year lists, including the Guardian‘s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2017. It also made the shortlist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, 2018 Locus Award for First Novel, and the Lambda Literary Award for best science fiction, fantasy or horror novel. The Matilda is as complex as a planet with social castes and languages that have evolved so much over time that people who live on different floors don’t always understand each other. “Matilda first came to me when I was reading about the last slave ship to come to the Americas,” Solomon says in her New Books interview. The Matilda’s black and brown citizens live in cramped squalor and endure constant violence at the hands of armed soldiers and the white, wealthy upper-deckers. But Aster refuses to be defined by threats and social controls. A brilliant scientist, she’s learned how to make medicines from plants that she grows herself. Despite having trouble reading social queues, she’s a fearless defender of her dignity and doing what’s right. “How do you have hope when it’s not just you and your individual life, but it’s all your friends and family and it’s your parents and your grandparents and their parents and back and so forth and it really does seem like you’re trapped?” Solomon asks. “I was the kind of child who every night, I watched the news and used to cry. I was very, very sensitive. Even as young as 10, I didn’t understand how people just went on in it. And so I think it’s no surprise that … that’s kind of an essential question of the novel.” Her next book project—which she was embargoed from mentioning during the interview but which she subsequently tweeted about —is inspired by Clipping’s song The Deep “about descendants of enslaved Africans living in the ocean’s deep.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked with Kawika Guillermo, a creative scholar and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia’s Social Justice Institute. His book Stamped: An Anti-Travel Novel (Westphalia Press, 2018) describes Skyler Faralan’s travels to Southeast Asia with $500 and a death wish. After months of wandering, he crosses paths with other dejected travelers: a short-fused NGO worker called Sophea; Arthur, a brazen expat abandoned by his wife and son; and Winston, an intellectual exile. Bound by pleasure-fueled self-destruction, the group flounders from one Asian city to another, confronting the mixture of grief, betrayal, and discrimination that caused them to travel in the first place. Stamped will appeal to progressive-minded readers of literary fiction and travel writing, especially those with an interest in Asia or the Asian American experience.  Melody Yunzi Li is an Assistant Professor at University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, an MPhil degree in Translation Studies in the School of Chinese, the University of Hong Kong, and a BA in English/Translation Studies at Sun Yat-sen University in China. Her research interests include Asian diaspora literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration Studies, translation studies and cultural identities. Her current project focuses on Chinese diasporic literature from the 1960s to the present. She has published in various journals including Pacific Coast Philology, Telos and others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Who doesn’t remember their first trip to the county fair? The greasy hotdogs and popcorn and cotton candy. The lights and sounds of the seemingly endless games and rides and shows on the midway. But maybe most of all, the sense of wonder inspired by real people who could contort their bodies into incredible shapes with ease, and show off amazing feats of agility and strength you never thought possible. Feats that made you think, “How on earth did they do that?” The trick, it turns out, is that there is no trick. Most of what you see, you can believe. This is the first of many sideshow axioms writer Tessa Fontaine learned when she left the life she knew to join the circus in 2013. Now, in her debut book of nonfiction, The Electric Woman: A Memoir in Death-Defying Acts (FSG, 2018), Fontaine’s keen descriptive powers offer a revealing glimpse into the secret world of the United States’ last traditional traveling sideshow. On the road, Fontaine met all kinds of personalities—from carnies to showpeople—who taught her about wonder, and how to inspire it through her performances as a fire breather, a sword swallower, a snake charmer, and so much more. Today on the New Books Network, join us as we sit down with Tessa Fontaine to hear more about The Electric Woman and her incredible journey traveling with the World of Wonders sideshow. 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 or 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

Margo Catts’ new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA, discovers she’s pregnant.  She considers it to be just one more mistake in a lifetime of screw-ups.  Her mother abandoned her after she accidentally set a deadly fire as a child, and she was raised by her cold distant father. She felt loved only when visiting her grandmother, who divides her time between the town of Leadville, Colorado, and a rustic mountain cabin in an old abandoned mining town.  When her grandmother writes to ask Elena to come and babysit for two children whose mother is “gone,” Elena accepts with hopes that she can put off making any real decisions about her future. Through her grandmother’s stories, Elena starts to understand her father’s remoteness, and as the children she babysits become more attached to her, she starts to understand herself.  “It seems a person is never finished learning about sorrow…”  Elena’s internal conflicts, metaphysical musings, and reflections on family and forgiveness are all part of the stunning landscape.  Then the two children go missing, and Elena is forced to confront the guilt that has followed her since childhood. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South Carolina, but Douglas finds it abhorrent. He has promised his father-in-law to care for the family business, so he can’t simply pack up and go home. Instead he becomes involved in the nascent abolition movement, using his inherited fleet and his manumitted laborers to intercept illegal slave traders on the high seas. But when his estate goes up in flames, killing his wife and young daughter, Douglas is shattered. Can any good he might do by fighting the entrenched slave culture of the US South justify the death of his loved ones? He retreats into his shell until, three years later, the arrival of Abigail Milton, another English refugee, summons him back to society. Abigail, aged seventeen, has a difficult past of her own. Her family has fallen from a comfortable middle-class existence to a life of poverty, and the wealthy uncle who helps them keep food on the table expects a price in return: Abby’s virtue. She doesn’t dare share the truth of her uncle’s advances: he’s promised to cut off all support if she tells. But the invitation to live as Douglas’s ward offers a perfect solution, even after she arrives in Charleston and realizes that not all is as it seems. Especially where Douglas is concerned … In Trouble the Water (SparkPress, 2018), Jacqueline Friedland explores the complex society of the antebellum South, the influence and consequences of slavery, and the contributions of those who strove to help its victims escape through the Underground Railroad and ultimately to end the system altogether. 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

For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab. What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s police force. The life circumstances that lead Dillal to surrender part of his body is as much a part of the story as the brutal mass murder that he must solve with his new cybernetic implants. While cyborgs are often depicted as superior to ordinary humans, Richardson doesn’t hesitate to describe the dark side of a surgery that reconfigures a significant part of a person’s body. Not only are many people repulsed when they see Dillal, but the surgery is still fresh, and he grapples with fatigue, infection, leaks, and other menacing complications. His condition “is considerably less than optimal because that’s an aspect of a highly intrusive body change,” Richardson says. She herself had undergone major surgery while working on the book. “People who’ve never been through a major surgery are unaware of how long you continue to be less than normal.” Richardson was inspired by a real-life crime, the Wah Mee massacre, which occurred in Seattle in 1983, transferring real-life ethnic tensions and police corruption to a new planet with its own culture and ethnic strife. Blood Orbit represents a change of genre for Richardson, who previously authored the Greywalker paranormal detective novels as Kat Richardson. She switched from “Kat” to the gender-neutral “K.R.” to escape the misperception that “women writing urban fantasy actually write paranormal romance.” “It was a perception I’ve been fighting since the very first book because the Greywalker novels are not particularly romantic. They’re detective noir in urban fantasy clothes. I’ve always been a detective writer, and fighting that fight every book for nine books was really disheartening.” Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature