New Books in Literature

Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery is a touching collection of personal essays exploring the impact of genetics, ancestry, and immigration on our lives. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery talks to Margaret, who is best-selling Polish-Canadian author and pediatric clinical geneticist.In Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery Margaret Nowaczyk explores different facets of her life, from listening to the radio dramas of her childhood in Communist Poland to her work now as a pediatric clinical geneticist. These are beautifully crafted essays, full of hard-won truths and insights, generously shared with the reader. Whether struggling with English as a teenaged refugee or documenting the process of permanent hair dye, Nowaczyk moves seamlessly between scientific and personal writing, bridging the gap between these two areas with elegance and humour. Marrow Memory is an invitation to readers to explore the ways in which our experiences and identities are entangled with our ancestral history.“Here is a physician who has answered the call to a perilous narrative life in the face of patients’ illnesses and her own. To tell and to write, in the end, is to see, however costly might be that sight. How fortunate are her patients and their families for her insight. How indebted is our field of narrative medicine to receive this moving testimony of the powers of shared creativity in our medicine and in our lives.” – Dr. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University.More about Margaret Nowacyk:Born in Poland, Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Canadian, Polish and American literary magazines and anthologies. She lives in Hamilton, ON, with her husband and two sons.About Hollay Ghadery:Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. He was inspired by her musicality, her poetry, and her willingness to defy musical conventions. Nearly every one of her songs spoke to him in some way. As a budding songwriter whose music was widely performed in churches around the country, he was motivated by her superb tunings, phrasing, and melodies. Later, he focused more on lyrics and prose, hers and his own, eventually earning a master’s in creative fiction and working in the world of professional writing. He continued to follow Joni’s career and never got tired of her music, which helped him navigate the ups and downs of his life. Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell (HarperOne, 2025) is a beautiful memoir about the struggle of a gay writer intertwined with the life and career of the magnificent Joni Mitchell.Paul Lisicky grew up in southern New Jersey but has lived most of his adult life in Massachusetts and New York City. He earned bachelor's and master’s degrees in English from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1990). He authored seven books, including Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, The Burning House, Famous Builder, Later, The Narrow Door, and Lawn Boy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently a professor of English in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is the editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and is passionate about music, animals, and travel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a darkly humorous thriller set in modern America's age of anxiety, by New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jason about his rambunctiously thrilling and thought-provoking novel.About I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom:Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC.But there are rules: He cannot look inside the box. He cannot ask questions. He cannot tell anyone. They must leave immediately. He must leave all trackable devices behind. As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world.About Jason Pargin:Jason Pargin is a New York Times bestselling author who used to write under the pseudonym David Wong. His first novel, John Dies at the End, became a feature film in 2012. He is also the author of the Zoey Ashe series, currently in development for TV.Jason was also the Executive Editor at Cracked.com from 2007 until 2020, when he left to become a full time novelist. He has a dog.About Hollay Ghadery:Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing. Gray also discusses how they started writing poetry, how they approach drafting and revision, and how their work in public health fits with and complements their work in poetry. We also hear a reading of Gray’s first poem in The Common, “November 19, 2022,” about the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs.Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, ONLY POEMS, Frontiers in Medicine and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.­­Read Gray’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/gray-davidson-carroll/Learn more about Gray and their work at graydavidsoncarroll.com.The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming in April 2025 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. An earlier iteration of it was shortlisted for The Novel Prize, a prize to recognize novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form.Nora’s writing has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family. And look for Nora’s in The Believer.Recommended Books: Miranda July, All Fours Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. 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 to Lisa F. Rosenberg about Fine, I'm a Terrible Person (Sibylline Press, 2025).The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter. Born in the 500-year-old Jewish community of Rhodes, she mixes Judeo-Espanol (Ladino) aphorisms into her speech and thinks she speaks Spanish, but few can understand her. With an expired license and an ancient car, she drives to Los Angeles hoping to find a treasure after the death of her father’s last wife. Aurora’s daughter Leyla is also affected by her father’s abrupt departure and spends her life seeking perfection, trying not to let her mother make her crazy, and striving to fit into their wealthy San Francisco community. When she learns that her husband might be having an affair, she takes her two young sons for a madcap weekend in Los Angeles where she’ll have to bend a few rules, grapple with her mother, sneak into her husband’s conference, and learn a bit about going with the flow. This is a charming mother-daughter novel about immigrants, overcoming family dysfunction, the cuisine of the Jewish community of Rhodes, and learning to overcome obstacles.Lisa F. Rosenberg earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in Art History, an M.A. in Graduate Humanities, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Dominican University of California. Her early professional career was in the blue-chip retail art world as a Gallerist for several prominent San Francisco art dealers including Crown Point Press and John Berggruen Gallery. She was most recently a public guide at SFMOMA and a Museum Educator on staff at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Her writing up until now has been primarily non-fiction essays for exhibition catalogs, art criticism, tours, and public talks. Her short story, Family Footnotes was recently featured in the summer 2024 edition of Amaranth: a journal of food writing, art, and design, and she was a quarterfinalist in the Driftwood Press in-house short story contest for the Spring of 2024. Her family heritage is “Rhodeslis,” Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews from the island of Rhodes. Her deep affection for her cultural legacy is reflected in the novel’s historical accuracy of language, cultural authenticity, and descriptions of mouthwatering cuisine. When she is not writing, she is reading, hiking, practicing yoga, or traveling with her husband of 35 years. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Tim Blacket about his award-winning debut short story collection, Grandview Drive (Nightwood Editions, 2024). Grandview Drive won two Saskatchewan Book Awards—the Fiction Book Award and the First Book Award.This is a pensive and darkly stunning collection that investigates the strange and unexpected intersections of loneliness and connection.From his car, a lonely, heartbroken man secretly watches strangers going about their lives in the comfort of their own homes; when caught, he wrecks his car in an attempt to escape. A man hears a car wreck outside his home and has a wild night of romance with a strange woman he meets at the scene. A reclusive old writer starts to believe he is becoming his own characters as he writes. A college student looks to his girlfriend's diary for pointers on how he should act. A mother confronted with her estranged son's death by car wreck organizes a memorial service for a list of attendees she has never met.This collection of sixteen connected short stories investigates the ways we humans so often feel lonely and alone, yet cannot avoid having our lives be contingent upon others--often in ways we can neither see nor understand. Blackett's characters long for meaningful connection and struggle to find it; they are too often unaware of the connections that are right in front of them.Grandview Drive is a collection that builds on itself; the stories stand on their own, but they are strengthened by the (sometimes secret) connections they hold with each other. Blackett's debut asks the reader to think about love and loss, loneliness and heartbreak, redemption and starting life anew.About Tim Blackett:Tim Blackett is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Briarpatch, [spaces], Grain Magazine and a small Saskatchewan journal called Swift, Flowing. He holds a Bachelor of Theology and a BA in English from the University of Regina, as well as a certificate in creative writing from Humber College. His short story collection, Grandview Drive, was shortlisted for two Saskatchewan book awards, and a pre-publication version placed second in the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award (2019). The titular story, "Grandview Drive" was longlisted for the Carter v. Cooper Short Fiction Award (2012). Blackett lives in Regina, SK.About Hollay Ghadery:Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Recently, her story “A Castle in Outerspace” was republished in Coolest American Stories 2024. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement is her debut novel.Recommended Books: Beena Kamlani, The English Problem Margarita Montimore, The Doll House Academy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well.This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me (Worth, 2024). In her literary debut, Janet Sherlund explores the complex issues so many adoptees and their parents grapple with, including the complicated emotions of rejection, loss, grief, denial, and shame.Sherlund, who was given up for adoption within days of her birth, shares her journey to fulfill her lifetime longing for connection with her family of origin, her instinctive ache for connection with her birth mother, and what it was like to have a “borrowed identity.” In poignant detail, Sherlund describes her quest to find out who she is, where she came from, and why she was given away. And she reveals the pain and courage required to discover one’s true identity.With 5 million adoptees in the U.S., many of whom are discovering their biological roots on DNA websites, Abandoned at Birth is the book for our time. The insight Sherlund derived from her journey will encourage and console others on the same path, while examining the inherent need of all of us to belong, and understand our origins, our culture, and our genetic roots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children. Sienna and her little brother Siddhartha grow up in a Miami Beach mansion without schools, doctors, or attention. It’s the 1980s and their dad uses the mansion, with its dock on the water, as a base for his drug dealing and to house the seekers and lost souls who follow his lackadaisical cult, leaving Sienna and Siddhi to raise themselves. Their dotty grandmother and distant occasionally picks up some slack but won’t take responsibility for her son’s failings as a father. Sienna realizes that she and Siddhi have to raise themselves in this intriguing and unusual story about siblings helping each other survive a dysfunctional family.Janna Brooke Wallack’s stories have been published by literary publications such as Hobart, Upstreet, Glimmer Train Press, American Literary Review, and more. Her short story "Campaigning" was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. Naked Girl’s prologue "Five Pictures" was a finalist for Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and her story "Cat and Rose" received a Pushcart nomination by The MacGuffin. Naked Girl was named a semifinalist for the 2024 Publishers Weekly Book Life Prize in Fiction. In addition to her writing career, Wallack has worked as a grant writer, a substance abuse prevention counselor, a wetlands manual editor, a theatre production assistant and an actress. After spending a couple of years in Hong Kong, she moved to Hoboken, NJ, raised five children and moved to Stone Ridge in the Catskills of New York, where she ran a permaculture gentleman’s farm. For more about Janna, visit https://jannabrookewallack.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature