New Books in Literature

It wasn’t until Shelbi Wescott was deep into her career as a high school teacher that she published her first novel, Virulent: The Release (Arthur Press, 2013). The inspiration for the story came during a class for students who weren’t reading at grade level. “Part of my job in that class is to get students excited about literature,” she says. But one student remained disengaged despite her best efforts: I had to call him after class one day and say ‘You actually have to give some of these books a shot. You might like them.’ And he was like ‘I bet you could even write a better book’ than the one we were currently reading. And I said, ‘I’ll take that challenge. Sure. OK.’ She handed the student a piece of paper and asked him to write down 10 things he wanted to see in the book. And then she sat down and wrote it. “That happened when he was a freshman and Virulent was published his senior year. That was a pretty exciting graduation present for him.” It’s a heart-warming anecdote, one that belies the apocalyptic nature of the novels it inspired. Virulent: The Release, which became the first installment of a trilogy, starts with a bioterrorism attack that kills almost everyone. The story focuses largely on a handful of survivors hiding, and subsequently trapped, in a high school that, as Ms. Wescott explains in the podcast, is remarkably similar to the one in Portland, Ore., where she teaches. The narrative also draws on her experiences as a parent, exploring to what lengths parents might go to save their own children, even if others–perhaps even billions of others–suffer as a result. On her web site, Ms. Wescott describes herself as “author, mother, teacher” but she could add “publisher,” having published her books independently. In her interview, Ms. Wescott discusses her experiences as an “indie” author and the fast-evolving world of self-publishing. You can learn more about Ms. Wescott at Shelbi Wescott and Rob Wolf at http://www.robwolf.net/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It’s clear to most scientists that human activity fuels climate change. What’s less clear is global warming’s long-term impact on geography, ecosystems and human society. If global warming continues at its current pace, what will life be like 50 years from now? A hundred? Five hundred? The further in the future we go, the more we must rely on science fiction writers to help us fill in the details. In her debut novel Memory of Water, Emmi Itaranta takes us to a future where the defining consequence of global warming is water scarcity. But more than a portrait of an environmental apocalypse, Memory of Water is about secrets and their consequences: an authoritarian government’s secrets about the past, a family’s secrets about a hidden source of water. The book is also about language. Ms. Itaranta, who was born and raised in Finland and now lives in England, wrote Memory of Water simultaneously in Finnish and English. As she explains in her interview with Rob Wolf, this forced her to engage in a heightened deliberation about her choice of each word–a slow and exacting process but one that produced diamond-sharp prose. “It forced me to throw away anything that was unnecessary. It forced me to look at each word and each sentence very closely on an almost microscopic level,” she says. Ms. Itaranta also talks about her interest in the Japanese tea ceremony and how it provided the kernel around which the book grew, her advice for writers tackling their first novel, her books reception among Finnish-speaking versus the English-speaking audiences, and her aspiration to create a new kind of heroine. You can learn more about Ms. Itaranta here. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. 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

Southern California can seem magical, thanks to sunny skies, warm weather, orange groves and movie stars. In Greg van Eekhout‘s California Bones (Tor Books, 2014) the magic is real. The Kingdom of Southern California is ruled by osteomancers who draw power and wealth from potions derived from the bones of magical creatures. In his conversation with Rob Wolf, the new host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Eekhout discusses, among other things, his interest in myths and magic, the impact of his Dutch-Indonesian heritage on his writing, protagonist Daniel Blackland’s complex relationship with his father, and Eekhout’s use of outlines to plot his books. This is Rob Wolf’s debut interview as host of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Rob Wolf is the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. He worked for many years as a journalist, writing on a wide range of topics from science to justice reform, and now serves as director of communications for a think tank in New York City. He blogs at Rob Wolf Books and I Saw it Today. 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

Some people describe a lonesome highway or the middle of a desert town–even a state like Ohio–as “the middle of nowhere.”  But for others, like Eric LeMay, no such place exists. There is always a “there there.”  It’s the presence within the absence that draws LeMay.  Either because the absence offers mystery, intangibility, or perhaps it trembles with what came before.  Hamlet pondered, “To be or not to be?” but in LeMay’s writing, the self, our world, even texts don’t exist as either/or puzzles.  It’s the missing pieces–the in-betweens–that are as much a part of everything as anything else.  LeMay’s In Praise of Nothing:  Essays, Memoir, and Experiments (Emergency Press, 2014) not only makes something from nothing, it shows us how we all do.  LeMay contemplates the namelessness of John or Jane Doe, the Rumsfeldian “Unknown unknowns, ” the past’s echoes, and Ground Zero, yet he also elucidates the ways in which words–those in existence and those imagined–can create a new reality or alter the perception of the self. Here is LeMay’s experiment–to sift through layers of texts, images, research, language, and memory in order to reveal how we make meaning out of nothing at all. According to LeMay’s own description, In Praise of Nothing “exists on the printed page and it also exists, slightly altered, in an electronic version . . . shadow versions and doppelgangers, doubles and divergences, lurking in the digital world.”  So you can read, for example, “Losing the Lottery,” a randomly-numbered collage of statistics, anecdotes, quotes, and personal accounts of the obsession with those overwhelming unknowns, the winning numbers, or you can go online and “play” your own.  LeMay is an innovator in the interactive digital essay, and while you can read “Viral-Ize” and “Resistable” in the pages of his book, you can also go to your computer and click to see what’s there, what’s not, and most importantly, how what we see and what we don’t are equally integral in the making and multiplying of meaning. Montaigne asked, “What do I know?”  But what if we what we know is nothing?  In this playful and poignant collection, Eric LeMay shows us that nothing is never nothing.  It’s really something. NB: There’s a fascinating website about In Praise of Nothing that you can find here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Works of fiction sometimes offer unique windows on society, and so it is with Leah Hager Cohen‘s novel No Book but the World (Riverhead, 2014). The story opens with Ava’s search for answers to how her brother Fred has landed in jail, accused of killing a young boy. Having been raised in a Summerhill-inspired alternative education environment along with Fred, Ava’s memories reconstruct for us the making of Fred’s dissonance with the rule-bound world of late twentieth-century America. Cohen provokes our thinking about education and learning philosophies, parenting, and the practice of law. Deeper still, she probes the tangling of childhood experiences with the memories of them and the emotions evoked by past and present. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

What’s made you who you are? It’s a straightforward enough question, one that pops up, more or less and with more or less urgency, in most of our lives. And it’s a question for which most of us have straightforward answers: our families, usually, maybe our teachers, or maybe some important personal event–the death of a loved one, the onset of a disease. Sometimes we may nod toward history: the Depression, the Vietnam War, the attack on the Twin Towers. If we grew up on the South Side of Chicago or came of age on a farm in Idaho, we might see those places as crucial to the adults we’ve become. These are the kinds of things we expect to find in memoirs, that genre that tries to makes sense of our experience, in all its vast buzzing complexity and infinitely baffling richness, and tell us the story of a life. Not so with Nicole Walker‘s new book Quench Your Thirst with Salt (Zone 3 Press, 2013). Walker has written a memoir of sorts, but one in which she’s invited in all that buzzing and all that bafflement, with the aim not of telling the story of her life, so much as capturing the surprising nature of being alive. Walker takes this question–what makes us who we are?–and looks in places we’d never expect. She finds, for example, that she can’t fully understand how her father’s excessive drinking has shaped her unless she can also understand how water itself shapes us, how it literally is the material we are, and how the water she drank as a child in the Salt Lake Valley of Utah came to exist in a landscape that was once a desert. William Blake may see a world in a grain of sand, but Walker see a self a city’s sewage system, an element of carbon, or the struggle of salmon making their way up a concrete spillway. Quench Your Thirst with Salt is a mash up and shake up of memoir, social history, nature writing, confession, chemistry, geology, collage, and brave speculation, all brought together by a lively wit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this sequel to Zita the Spacegirl, Zita faces the perils of being a famous space hero. Ben Hatke once again combines whimsical and lovely drawings with a great sense of humor. Although I purchased Legends of Zita the Spacegirl (First Second, 2012) for my daughter, I think that I’ve re-read it nearly as many times as she has. For more information, check out E.C. Myers’ rave review of the series. In this podcast, Hatke discusses his training as an artist, the origins and development of the Zita series, and provides fascinating information into how he conceptualizes and produces all-ages graphic novels. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Hugh C. Howey, author of the award-winning Molly Fyde Saga, is best known for his self-published and bestselling series Wool. This post apocalyptic tale of human survival within the infamous silos has taken the world by storm. The Wool Omnibus Edition (Simon and Schuster, 2012) won the Kindle Book Review’s 2012 Indie Book of the Year award, in addition to making the bestseller lists in both The New York Times and USA Today. In the two years since releasing a series he originally believed “no one would care about,” it’s been picked up by Simon and Schuster for Canadian and US distribution, and film rights sold to 20th Century Fox.  If you have yet to experience WOOL, it’s a recommended must read! In this interview with Michael Zummo, Hugh shares his approach to writing, his endeavors in self-publishing, the origins of the Wool series, along with what’s coming up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

During my first few weeks at college, I concocted one of those dumb ideas that you get when you suddenly have the freedom of an adult without the wisdom of one.  My new dorm-mates and I would go undercover, as it were, and spend a day as prospective students at the famous Evangelical college down the road, Bob Jones University. Since we’d arrived in Greenville, South Carolina, we’d heard all sorts of rumors about Bob Jones: that you weren’t aloud to go out on a date without a chaperon; that the only place on campus men and women could mingle was a giant gymnasium filled with couches, and that you had to keep a couch cushion between you and the other person sitting next to you, presumably to block the demonic energy radiating from his or her genitals.  And, as if this precaution weren’t enough, this gym was spotted with lifeguard chairs, in which guards kept a wary eye out for the slightest chastity infraction.  We imagined the guards had whistles and Ray-Bands. So we went and, as you can imagine, found nothing much out of the ordinary.  Our tour guides were welcoming, the campus was well-kept, the classrooms and dorms were spacious and inviting, and the student body, far from radiating religious zeal or sexual repression, looked pretty much like the one we’d just left, perhaps a little more friendly.  We didn’t see the mythic gymnasium, and no one ran around with a Bible, beating men and women away from one another.  We were, of course, disappointed. As boneheaded as we were back then, I do think our undercover adventure stems from a curiosity shared by many of us who aren’t a part of the Evangelical church: what’s life really like in that community?  We might have heard about the alternative colleges and preschools, the prayer circles and the mega-churches, but, really, what’s the appeal?  This curiosity is all the more odd given that anywhere from a quarter to over a third of Americans identify themselves as Evangelical, depending on which study you consult.  It seems the Evangelical / non-Evangelical divide is just one of the many that currently mark our much divided country. And now we have Erika Rae‘s new memoir, Devangelical (Emergency Press, 2012).  In it, Rae accomplishes a dual feat.  She gives those of us outside the Evangelical church a first-hand account of growing up within it–of its values and beliefs, of what it’s like to go to youth group or attend the Evangelical alternative to prom.  She even includes a pithy “Guide to Churchese” that gives the Evangelical take on such terms as “Alter Call,” “Christian Alternative,” or “Sexual Immorality” (“If it’s sexual, it’s immoral”).  But more importantly, Rae gives us a coming-of-age story, a story that’s at times hilarious and at times poignant.  Rae captures that struggle we all know and that may be even harder than fending off the demons that lurk in Ouija boards or rock-and-roll music: growing up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Every time I fly into Chicago at night, I’m amazed by the grid I see out of the portal: those hundreds of thousands of almost identical lots, 25 by 125 feet, that are made visible by the city’s 250,000-odd street lights, block after block, all sprawling westward out of the darkness of Lake Michigan like a dream of Euclidian order. I’m amazed because it’s so unnatural, so not the way we make sense of the places where we live our everyday lives. The grid is the living image of an abstract ideal: that a place can be quantified, cut up, understood, and settled. The truth is very different, especially in a city like Chicago. Places are wild. Their pasts rear up and reveal themselves; their foundations give way. In all their layered complexity, contradiction, and intractability, places are about as quantifiable as people, a fact Barrie Jean Borich makes explicit in her new book, Body Geographic (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Borich sets out to map not only the city of Chicago and the other places she and her family have lived, but also to discover the hidden geographies in her own skin–the personal and collective histories, the experiences and desires, that make her who she is. The result is a book that’s insightful, lyrically beautiful, and uncompromising in its search for a self as rich as the cities in which she lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature