New Books in Literature

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any hour of the day (“I got next”); there’s a lot of beer to be drunk and, um, other things to be ingested (some of which will, so you are told, “expand your mind” or something like that); and you don’t really have to work (other than the job you get to raise the money to buy the aforementioned beer). Oh, and the dining hall (a really magical place) always had soft serve! It never occurred to me  to leave this youthful paradise of irresponsibility. So I didn’t; I went to graduate school where I continued to live that indolent life for nearly another decade. And even when I was done there and got my first “job”, I continued to live more or less like I did in college well into my 30s, a kind of over-educated man-child. Eventually, though, there was a reckoning. And it was rough. I’ll spare you the sad, painful details. Happily for Bob Brody and his lovely family, his reckoning came sooner and he handled it with much more grace that I did. But our stories of growing up are of an American-male piece.  He tells his tale in a wonderful series of vignettes in his new memoir  Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age (Heliotrope Books, 2017). They are at moments funny, touching, instructive, wise and always heartfelt. And (spoiler alert!) the entire set ends well, because Bob grows up to be a very responsible family man. And a great writer to boot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cat Rambo‘s Hearts of Tabat (WordFire Press, 2018) is rich in emotions and description, though it revolves around a murder mystery as well. We experience the imaginary port city of Tabat through the eyes of four narrators, two merchants and two siblings from a poor household.  Adelina, the secret publisher of a newspaper, and Sebastiano, a member of the Mages’ College who handles trade negotiations, both come from Merchant families with high expectations. Neither Sebastiano’s critical father, or Adelina’s overbearing mother, are pleased with the careers their offspring have chosen. Into their lives come two people from a very different background, Eloquence and his sister Obedience. Like most of the poor, they worship at the Moon Temples, and therefore receive names based on personality traits. While Eloquence, who has the good fortune to become a fresh-water pilot, does have a gift with words, Obedience doesn’t fit her name. She struggles to escape the miserable apprenticeship the Temple finds for her. As the novel begins, Adelina is still obsessed with her former lover, the famous female gladiator, Bella Canto. When she meets the charming Eloquence, it seems she might finally move on. But will Eloquence’s rigid ideas about his younger sister, Obedience, ruin their relationship? Though Hearts of Tabat has romantic elements, it offers suspense against a background of political unrest. The book plays out against a richly developed world, one in which mythical animals serve mankind and fuel machines. Revolutionary ideas about the magical beasts are developing; the murders that take place serve as a testament to that. Far from being mere “beasts”, the wonderful magical creatures that populate Cat Rambo’s world have feelings and needs that human society will ignore at its peril. 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

In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The Verdun Affair: A Novel (Scribner, 2018). It’s protagonist is Tom, an American living in France after World War I, having served as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He has the macabre task of gathering bones from the battlefield at Verdun, in preparation for the construction of ossuary there. Families come from all over France, looking for news, or perhaps the remains, of loved ones reported missing or dead during the war. One such pilgrim is Sarah, also American, looking for her husband, Lee, whom she is convinced still lives. You can learn more about the story in the interview (or go read the book!), which also details some of the remarkable historical research that Dybek conducted as he wrote. The sense of global catastrophe, the losses of grieving families, the search for meaning, the efforts to rebuild, all conjure the atmosphere of postwar Europe. Dybek’s descriptions of Verdun, of the battles on the Isonzo and in the Dolomites, the fascist violence in Italy reflect that careful research and teach the history of the period with greater impact than all but the best works of history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s Shanghai during wartime. Hull’s translation is a sensitive and humane rendering of characters that are by turns laughable and heartbreaking, coming together in a story about what it is to be a hero – or just to be a functional human being – in times of personal and social upheaval. As you’ll hear me say on the podcast, I actually **put down the most recent climactic issues of the Saga comic book** because the story here was so gripping. That’s to say: this is not just going to be a great book to teach and learn with. It’s also a gripping and fascinatingly rendered story in its own right. In this podcast, Hull and I continued some of the conversation about translation and its joys and challenges that we started in our previous podcast about his translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings, and I recommend checking that one out as well! Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Where My Body Ends and the World Begins (Allium Press, 2017) imagines what it might have been like for one of the survivors of a tragic fire that took place on December 1, 1958, in a Catholic school on Chicago’s west side. The fire broke out just before the end of the day at Our Lady of the Angels School and went unnoticed for a critical amount of time. Ninety-two children and three nuns were killed.  The ‘Angels’ fire is still considered to be one of Chicago’s most horrendous tragedies. In his book, author Tony Romano imagines twenty-year old Anthony Lazzaro, who along with his best friend Maryann, survived the fire. The story opens with Anthony, suffering from an unnamed mental illness.  He deliberately breaks his own leg, which had started to feel foreign to his body. Lipschultz, the retired cop who lives next door, thinks Anthony may have set the fire and that his strange behavior is just another sign of his guilt.  Since the fire, Anthony’s family has fallen apart – his father disappears, and his mother takes a job far from home. In this beautifully-written, sensitive novel, Tony Romano considers how trauma can be overcome through the love of family and community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclectic, she engages with the work of Buddha, Rabindranath Tagore, D.H. Lawrence, the photographs of Beth Moon, the art of Nandalal Bose, Indian folklore, Greek myths, the scientist Jagadish C. Bose’s pioneering work on plant stimuli, Deleuze and Guattari, Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyaya, O’Henry and Shakespeare alongside autobiographical vignettes about her own gradual awareness of the plant world’s mysteries. Our conversation ranged from the rigidity of scholarly prose and what it inevitably precludes, writing with all five senses, “research” as a search for answers both existential and intellectual, and the importance of cultivating a sensibility over mere scholarship. An essayist, novelist and poet, Roy is currently a Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Her novel Missing was published in April 2018, and her poems and essays have appeared in Granta, Guernica, Los Angeles Review of Books, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner, Berfrois and The Common. She lives in Siliguri, India. Madhuri Karak is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her dissertation titled “Part-time Insurgents, Civil War and Extractive Capital in an Adivasi Frontier” explores processes of state-making in the bauxite-rich mountains of southern Odisha, India. She tweets @madhurikarak and more of her work can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to understand the experience of that girl she once was and how that girl shaped the woman she would become. Arnold writes: “I will never know for certain what transpired in those first two years of my life. I only know that I am continually drawn back, tethered to the whispy, blurred possibilities of the mother I will never know, a language I do not speak, the life I will never have.” Through a dazzling range of literary strategies, from the use of archival documents and family photographs to primers on the Korean language and the work of her fellow Korean-American artists, Arnold explores these wispy, blurred possibilities. She takes us into her need to know this never-realized self and this life she never lived. By stunning and poignant turns, her book reveals the complexities of the lives we do end up living, the hauntings that make us who we are, and the unexpected way in which great art and artists pull us apart and pieces us back together. And the book has an excellent trailer, which you can find here. 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

Sharon Solwitz‘s novel, Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel & Grau, 2017), is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide, during the summer before their senior year of high school, to make a suicide pact. The four friends are all struggling with something beyond normal adolescent angst–Kay is tormented by her weight and the new stepfamily she acquired after her mother’s death; CJ hides who he really is even from the friends; Saint struggles not to destroy everyone around him; and Vera is horrified by a shameful secret.  The two weeks of the pact take place during the tumultuous summer of 1968. As the ground shifts beneath them, the four friends confront who they are and what the world means to them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings? While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers are light years ahead of them, finding answers to these questions in their imaginations. One of the most engaging A.I.s in recent years is Martha Wells’ Murderbot, a people-averse, soap-opera loving, snark-spewing and highly efficient killing machine. The first book in Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red, earned numerous honors this year, including Nebula and Locus awards. It also made the short list for the Philip K. Dick and Hugo awards. The second and third books—Artificial Condition, which came out in May, and Rogue Protocol, out next week on Aug. 7—are equally engaging, taking Murderbot on a journey of self discovery that one hopes will eventually allow it a chance to retire from the business of saving human lives and spend its days watching its beloved “entertainment media” in peace. “Does it have a place in this world?” is the question at the back of its mind, Wells says. “It can’t go back to its corporate owner, which would destroy or erase it for going rogue; and it’s not sure it wants to go to a human who is offering it a home because it would still essentially be property.” Despite its name, Murderbot is only murderous when work requires it. As it says on the first page of All Systems Red, “As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.” Thus, even though it could seek revenge against its human taskmasters, try to amass power or wreak havoc (since it has “borked” the programs that restrain its behavior), it voluntarily elects to continue performing the function for which it was designed—providing security to “small soft” humans. Why it so often says “yes” to a dangerous assignment when it really wants to hide in a closet is as much a mystery to it as our motivations are to us. Perhaps all forms of “intelligence,” artificial or otherwise, could benefit from a few sessions on an analyst’s couch. Wells has incorporated aspects of herself in Murderbot, a fact that resonates with readers. “I have some problems with anxiety and OCD and I’ve put those into the character… and one of the interesting things that’s happened is that people who also have bad anxiety and have other issues say that they saw themselves in this character and that was heartwarming to me.” The final book in the series of novellas, Exit Strategy, is due out in October. 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

“What should be wild” is really asking who should be wild? Simultaneously a plea against the domestication of women, a unique fairy tale, and impressive literary fiction, this novel explores the taming of women through the experiences of the modern Maisie and some of her female ancestors, who sought shelter in a magical forest. Maisie Cothay, whose story unfolds in the present, is frightened of her unique gift. Just her touch will take life, but also return it. Though she can revive those she kills, her somewhat inept, father confines her to the grounds, spending their time together in devising meaningless tests, which bring neither of them much insight. In the first few chapters, Maisie is presented like an artifact in a contemporary version of a medieval tower, with a loving jailor. Deep in the forest, there is another version of Maisie, a powerful supernatural girl with black eyes, who is slowly waking while Maisie reaches the brink of womanhood. The persecuted Blakely women who have fled to this forest throughout the centuries gather around the new arrival, both hoping, and fearing change. And they should fear. For while Maisie is civilized and complaint, the black-eyed girl in the forest is a creature of appetite, feral and without compassion. She metes out death. But is she evil? Read closely, and ponder. Julia Fine‘s What Should be Wild (Harper, 2018) is a novel well suited for writing that thoughtful English paper. Should you find the symbolism and the themes too strenuous, you can always luxuriate in the beautifully writing. Here, for instance, Lucy, one of the Blakely women, finds shelter in the woods. “The usual sounds of the forest—plaintive owls, scuttling wood mice, the papery screech and flutter of young bats—have been usurped by the lullaby of ancient temperate trees, a sentient quiet, a deep and subtle whisper.” There’s even a touch of horror for those who like to be a little scared. Truly a joy to read, Fine’s bold debut has me anticipating her future work. 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. Enter the code “NBN10” and get 10% off this book and any other book at University Press Books, Berkeley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature