New Books in Literature

You Must Take Part In Revolution is a mind-bending graphic novel by award-winning journalist Melissa Chan and acclaimed dissident artist Badiucao. A near-future dystopia in the vein of George Orwell's Animal's Farm, the book explores technology, authoritarian government, and the lengths to which one will go in the fight for freedom. Three idealistic young people, forever changed by the real-life protests in Hong Kong in 2019, develop different beliefs about how best to fight against a techno-authoritarian China. The three characters take different paths toward transformative change, each struggling with how far they will go to fight for freedom and who they will become in the process. A powerful and important book about global totalitarian futures and the costs of resistance. 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 Alegra Goodman about her novel Isola (The Dial Press, 2025)After Marguerite is orphaned as a young girl, her guardian leaves her alone in her family’s enormous home, where servants see to her needs until he hires a mother and daughter to tutor her in the ways of wealthy 16th century lords and ladies. The guardian sells her home and spends her fortune, betting on an expedition to New France (now known as Canada). The guardian insists that she accompany him, only with her old maid. Afraid and lonely, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s secretary and falls in love with him, but the guardian learns of it and abandons her, her maid, and his secretary on a deserted island. Marguerite is forced to learn survival skills in this tale based on a true story.Allegra Goodman’s novels include Isola (2025), Sam (a Read With Jenna Book Club selection), The Chalk Artist (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family 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

Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today.Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser; the 1956 Suez war that marked the end of the British empire; and in its wake the destruction of the Jewish community that had lived in Egypt since Biblical times.Though set in times of revolution and war, Goodbye, Tahrir Square is not a political book. It is the story of a boy whose close-knit extended Sephardic family, full of rich traditions and colorful characters, is suddenly torn asunder by the forces of revolution and war. A man-child coming of age like a wild cactus in the rubble of the past, overcoming a hostile environment, forging friendships that transcend ethnic and religious animus, and finding his own identity as he awakens to literature, history, art, archaeology, and the magic of love and sex. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospital emergency room; back and forth in time — and as a descendent of Africa living in the Americas, negotiates the complexities of culture, geography, race, and language. Through food, music, dance, and family history, Blizzard explores the art of belonging — to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Using traditional narrative and the tools of poetry, Blizzard’s essays hover at the crossroads, in the spaces where art, science, and spirit collide. The intimate becomes universal, the questions are all relevant, and the answers of our times require a sleight of hand — the holding of simultaneous and overlapping worlds.About Gloria Blizzard:Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. She lives in Toronto.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

Translator Julia Sanches speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about translating “The Advice,” a story by Irene Pujadas, which appears in The Common’s fall issue in a portfolio of writing by contemporary Catalan women. Julia talks about her translation process, and the importance of capturing the tone and style of a piece, like the understated absurdist humor in “The Advice.” Julia also discusses how she approaches collaboration with other translators, how she chooses the books and stories she wants to translate, and how starting her career at a literary agency gave her a crash course in the behind-the-scenes of publishing.Julia Sanches has translated close to thirty books from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English, including works by Susana Moreira Marques, Munir Hachemi, and Eva Baltasar. She served as a judge for the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature, and was recently named an NEA Translation Fellow. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.­­Read Julia’s translations from Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese in The Common here. Learn more about Julia and her work at juliasanches.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

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo's Got Money Troubles (William Morrow, 2024) is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Brian Hioe is a Taipei-based writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ who is best known for his journalism regarding Taiwan’s social and political landscape. Much of his work appears in New Bloom Magazine, an online magazine that he helped establish in 2014 to cover activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific at large.In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Brian about his debut fictional novel, Taipei at Daybreak (Repeater Books, 2025).Taipei at Daybreak is a work of autofiction that draws heavy inspiration from Brian’s experiences with activist movements including not just Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, but also Occupy Wall Street in the US and post-Fukushima disaster anti-nuclear protests in Japan.Atop this undercurrent of activism, the novel dives into its protagonist's inner turmoil and coming-of-age, giving readers a highly personal insight into the nature of 2010s-era social movements.Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Andrew’s debut novel Last Resort was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. You can hear our interview about that amazing literary hoax on burned by books at the website or anywhere you find your podcasts. His second novel The Vegan was published in July 2023. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons.Recommended Books: Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine Marilyn Robinson, Reading Genesis 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

Lies I Told My Sister (Latitude 46, 2024) is Ells’ second novel and is a sensitive, poignant work of fiction. Taking place over just 17 hours and alternating between past and present, the novel takes us into the strained relationship of estranged sisters Rose and Lily, who are meeting at the hospital after Rose’s husband has been injured. Very quickly, issues of their childhood, the death of their older sister, and the inevitable truth of past lies and secrets surface. But while centering around a serious injury, the novel focuses on the cost of secrets, the depth of the bond between sisters, and just how far we will go to protect the ones we love—and ourselves.More About Lies I Told My SisterAfter a nine-month estrangement, sisters Lily and Rose, are reunited in a hospital emergency room when the younger sister’s husband has been badly injured in a car crash. While waiting for updates, they reminisce about their childhood memories in an effort to unearth the family tragedy—the death of their older sister Tansy. Lily and Rose begin to unravel the lies of omission that pulled them even farther apart.Lies I Told My Sister is an exploration of how our community of loved ones can both buoy us up or tear us down. How innocently kept secrets can cause profound chasms.About Louise Ells:Louise Ells was born and raised in Northeastern Ontario. After years of travel, she moved to Cambridge and earned her PhD in Creative Writing. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2017, and published her short story collection, Notes Towards Recovery (Latitude 46) in 2019. Louise teaches at universities and colleges in England and Canada and currently lives just north of Toronto, where she can often be found in her library surrounded by books and snuggled up with her cats.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

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the bestselling novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024).The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction. With elements of science fiction and horror dropped in amongst stunning literary prose, the debut novel spans centuries, covering humanity’s colonization of the moon, a war with alien beings, AI minds governing Canada, and a giant spacefaring whale. The book is centred around Toronto and shows a version of a Canadian future that will amaze and stun readers, while raising important questions about the ethics and power of AI, humanity’s claim to space, and the systematic destruction of our current planet.More About The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits:A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a spacefaring whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a recreation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanity’s quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.More About Ben:Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada, whose prose and poetry have been published in Clarkesworld magazine, Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the /tƐmz/ Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary.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