New Books in Literature

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series Son of a Preacher Man and Greenwood and Archer. Son of a Preacher Man takes place in 1920 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a strictly segregated oil boomtown. The preacher’s son, Billy Ray Matthias and Benny Freeman, daughter of an oil-rich rancher, befriend each other when both want to escape the shadows of their past. Billy Ray’s heart is open for love but Benny’s is fearfully shut. After the devastating race riot, Banks continues the narrative of restoration in the sequel Greenwood and Archer. Lives have been drastically changed since the riot and its citizens defiantly rebuild their piece of prosperity. Tulsa, Oklahoma is as segregated as ever but doesn’t want the whole nation watching. Additional tension festers as prohibition brings Chicago gangsters to settle in wealthy Tulsa. Now, Benny and Billy must navigate hurdles in their relationship. Marlene Banks is Kingdom writer/novelist with a unique style of storytelling. She blends engaging plots, standout characters, and memorable events from a Kingdom perspective. Although known for her historical romances, she likes to write multiple genres including contemporary, mystery, and nonfiction. ind out more about Banks’ novels here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, but it captures an idea that goes back to Aristotle. And this is the idea: a poem–at least a good poem–is a finally crafted work of art, and the way its crafted, the way its words are structured, is intrinsic to its meaning. You can’t paraphrase a poem. You can’t say it really means or basically means this or that, like you can with other sorts of communication, without distorting it, because how a poem uses language is as important as what its language conveys. In a poem, form and content are inseparable. This view of poetry is the reason those of us who love poetry end up running to our bookshelves in the middle of a dinner party and pulling down our favorite poems and reading them aloud to our unsuspecting guests, because once you mention a poem you love, it doesn’t only feel inaccurate to say its about this or that, it feels like a kind of heresy, like your clumsy paraphrase is damaging it. And that’s exactly how I feel about the poet I’m interviewing today. Leia Penina Wilson’s new book is called i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) (Red Hen Press, 2014). And if your ear or your mind popped a little when I said that title, that’s because even her titles are poetry. Here’s another title: “she eats his heart she has two hearts she doesn’t know which one to use she begins to call the second heart ‘little baby’ or ‘blitzkrieg.'” As you can hear, the sheer verbal energy, the grammatical verve and irreverent jolts, of her language are dazzling, surprising, unparaphrasable, and if you happened to find yourself at my house for dinner, you’d be hearing me read it over more than one glass of wine. Fortunately, we have her here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in the wake of the events at Chernobyl. Lola has gone through the Bolshevik revolution, the Civil War, the Stalinist purges, deportation to Kazakhstan, and the Chernobyl disaster and these are her real-life memoirs that lay the foundation for the novel. The chapters telling Lola’s story are alternated with shorter interludes from the contemporary life of the second protagonist, Julia, a representative of the generation of millennials, who are struggling to come to terms with their idealistic views on life and politics amidst the changing world order. Alekseyeva, who is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, works on avant-garde cinema in the USSR, Japan, and France, and her academic interest in visual narrative techniques has deeply affected her work on the graphic novel. The story-telling in Soviet Daughter is rich and intense, and also full of supplementary comments and explanations of various aspects of Soviet everyday life; however, the novel is very easy to read and grasps the readers attention from the very first pages. To this, the sincerity of Alekseyeva’s intonation contributes greatly. She does not shy away from being very honest about issues such as inter-generational misunderstanding, conflicts within family, and difficulties of the migrant experience yet at the same time she persistently maintains the tactful balance between a personal story-telling and a nearly academic inquiry into the experience of several generations of Soviet Jewish immigrants in America. The precursors of Alekseyeva’s novel are works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. Another major influence on Alekseyeva is actually Vladimir Mayakovsky, especially his work in Okna ROSTA. Soviet Daughter does, in fact, open by a quote from Mayakovsky. Julia Alekseyeva’s novel will be of much interest both to the broad readers audience, and also to the scholars of Soviet history, Jewish identity, and immigration. Into all of these themes it provides a fascinating insight. Olga Breininger is a PhD candidate in Slavic and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include post-Soviet culture and geopolitics, with a special focus on Islam, nation-building, and energy politics. Olga is the author of the novel There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union and columnist at Literratura. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Columbia University Press, 2016) collects and translates a range of works by Li Zhi, a fascinating and significant figure in the history of China and its literatures. His most famous books, A Book to Burn (likely first pub in 1590) and Another Book to Burn (first published posthumously in 1618), make up the focus of the work translated for this volume, which also includes other materials. In the course of our conversation we talked both about the volume and its wonderful collected contents, and also about practices of and approaches to translation more generally. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offering a compelling story and a peek into various ways of making a life from encounters with dislocation. Readers explore Ningyuan (in Hunan) along with two very different though perhaps not so different(?) figures in the teachers (Thomas) Guillard and Daniel. As their stories and lives intersect the distinctions between these men begin to blur, as do the distinctions between notions of home and away, self and other, and much more. In the course of our conversation, Carroll and I spoke about the book, the experiences that helped inspire the novel, and his experience publishing fiction with Inkshares. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment. Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stable given, Rosen and Santesso offer an account of “the ways that conceptions of selfhood have changed over time” (8). Working across modes and genres, their argument spans from the early modern period to the present day, along the way challenging current discussions of the role of literature in culture and the myth of interpretive competence that lies behind much thinking about surveillance. Through careful examination of diverse texts, from Locke’s Essay on Toleration through Orwell’s oeuvre and Tolkien’s novels to Enemy of the State and other films from our own era, Rosen and Santesso demonstrate that the “hermeneutic problems of surveillance are also literary problems” (13). Engaging thinkers who have attempted to grapple with the power of narrative to shape our lives–Swift, Bentham, Mill, Weber, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault, Baudrillard, and others–Rosen and Santesso essentially set out to rethink modernity, exploring “the effects that fiction has on reality,” and finally offering us a new way of understanding how and why we watch and read our neighbors (9). Carl Nellis is an academic editor and writing instructor working north of Boston, where he researches contemporary American community formation around appropriations of medieval European culture. You can learn more about Carl’s work at carlnellis.wordpress.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 2016). In this collection, Polly channels her experiences into rich stories that capture the essence of mental illness and the humans who deal with it. She speaks with me about the healing that can come from writing–and reading–these stories and about her unique views on life, writing, and consciousness. If you’re a writer, psychologist, or someone who’s interested in how other people experience the world differently, this interview is a do-not-miss. Polly Buckingham teaches at Eastern Washington University and is director of its Willow Springs Books. She is also founding editor at SpringTown Press, and her previous book is entitled A Year of Silence. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in LGBTQ issues, eating and body image problems, and relationship problems. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community. All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings of inferiority, fear and lack of esteem. Velvet is series of vignettes that chronicles poignant conversations and pivotal moments in the lives of four generations of women, all connected by blood, circumstance and the common tug-of-war that exists between mother and daughter. Holly Charles was raised just north of Chicago and attended Purdue University for her undergraduate studies. She later earned a graduate degree in English from Prairie View A&M University. Writing has been a therapeutic outlet for her since childhood, whether through music, poetry or prose. Her personal journey to find herself as a woman and as a writer became her graduate thesis: Velvet: the Burden of Melanin and Motherhood, which has now been transformed into her first book, Velvet. In addition to her work as a writer, Charles teaches English to high school students through a Houston-area community college. She will debut her first stage play, In All Thy Getting, this spring at Houston’s Ensemble Theater. James Stancil is an independent scholar, freelance journalist, and the President and CEO of Intellect U Well, Inc. a Houston-area non-profit dedicated to increasing the joy of reading and media literacy in young people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Back in 2013, in The New York Times, essayist Christy Wampole declared that we are in a moment of “the essayification of everything.” She noted how not only the genre, but also the genres inventor, Michel de Montaigne, seemed to be popping up everywhere and she saw the essay “a talisman of our times.” Why? What about the essay struck her as so current, so important? Wampole thought that “the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America.” The essay is the opposite of the rant, the polemic, the click-bait, the crude headline, and the stupid sound-byte. The essay invites complexity, contradiction, nuance–all of those qualities that mark the real experience of our public and private lives. Essays want to reckon with the rich immensity that is in us and is us. Now, if you’re like me and feel despair about the degree of dogmatic thinking that now dominates our social and political life in 2017, if you hate the fact that, say, a hastily composed tweet by a recently elected official can clog our public debate and prevent us from addressing issues that demand attention to complexity, contradiction, and nuance, then I encourage you to check out a new collection of essays edited by Marcia Aldrich. Its entitled Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women (University of Georgia Press, 2016) and includes many of the best essayists in America. In essays by Cheryl Strayed, Roxanne Gay, Dana Tommasino, and Aldrich herself, the essay achieves its fullest potential as Wampole described it in 2013. The essay’s spirit, she proclaimed, “resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the worlds inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die, these questions are personal ones. Suddenly were faced with an emptiness we cant fill and, at the same time, an often overwhelming abundance of memory and emotion. And yet the questions are not only personal, because, when we become mourners, we fall back on the cultural practices of mourning that our society offers us. Here in America, visiting hours, funerals, eulogies, obituaries, and wakes are a few of the ways we reckon with our dead. Unsurprisingly, other cultures have other practices. In Madagascar, for example, the Malagasy people have a ritual called famadihana, where once every five or seven years families celebrate their ancestral crypts by exhuming the corpses and spraying them with wine or perfume. Its a celebration of their past, full of music and dancing, in which some of the living ask for blessing from the dead and others tell stories about them. As strange as such a ritual might seem to us, it also raises the question of whether our practices do our dead and ourselves justice? Is the way we mourn enough to help us through those we’ve lost? These are just the sort of questions, both personal and cultural, that Ashaki Jackson takes up in her poetry collection, Language Lesson (Miel Books, 2016). Inspired by the death of her grandmother, these poems begin on an intensely personal note, where loss is felt in the body and the bones. Gradually, that note deepens and expands to encompass other losses and other ways of mourning, eventually creating a poetic music that captures our collective losses and collects us in love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature