New Books in Literature

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media.These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination.In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together.Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its inception. In 2006, she returned to Manila and the Asia Pacific region, reporting from the frontlines of armed conflict and climate change as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera.She is the editor of I, Migrant, an online platform which showcases writing from the diaspora, advocating a universal humanity beneath people’s differences.Follow Marga on Twitter and Instagram.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of God’s Ashes. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Terena Elizabeth Bell's Tell Me What You See (Whisk(e)y Tit, 2022), is a collection of ten experimental short stories about coronavirus quarantines, climate change, the January 6th invasion on the US Capitol, and other events from 2020-2021. Written in both word and image, pieces from the collection have been called "​​inventive and topical and fresh, emotional, chaotic, and important" by The McNeese Review and "timely, relevant, and interesting" by The Missouri Review. Title story "Tell Me What You See" is a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) City Artist Corps winner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In a flash of modern warfare (Ukraine? Afghanistan? Vietnam? Poland? Hiroshima? Israel? Gaza?), a mother loses her child. She becomes "A Trojan Woman," compelled to embody every iconic character in Euripides’ classic play.Sara Farrington (Playwright) NYC & NJ based playwright, screenwriter, co-founder of Foxy Films, her theater company w/ Reid Farrington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today’s spotlight is on the literary magazine The Threepenny Review. I’m joined by the magazine’s founding and current Editor, Wendy Lesser.Wendy Lesser is the author of twelve nonfiction books and one novel; her latest book, entitled Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, came out from Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2020. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and many other institutions, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her journalistic writing about literature, dance, film, and music has appeared in a number of periodicals in America and abroad. Born in California and educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley, Lesser now divides her time between Berkeley and New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Charles Holdefer's new short story collection, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) weaves together ten stories that connect through America's pastime. Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth’s cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein’s secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven? From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination. Holdefer sends readers into extra innings with this satirical and heartfelt collection.  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 Stephen Schottenfeld about his new novel This Room Is Made of Noise (U Wisconsin Press, 2023).Don Lank is a newly divorced handyman who spots an imitation Tiffany lamp in the front window of a house and offers the elderly owner $800 for it. He’s shocked by the price he gets and returns to give 95-year-old Millie most of the money. While he’s there, he offers to do a couple of repairs in her deteriorating house, and over the course of the next few weeks and months, spends more and more time with her fixing her house, taking her to doctors’ appointments, buying her grocers, and slowly beginning to oversee her care. He’s also trying to repair his relationships with his father, his ex-wife, and his stepchildren. He’s not sure why he’s helping Millie, but struggles to focus on being altruistic and not merely greedy.Stephen Schottenfeld is the author of two Bluff City Pawn (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). His short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other journals, and have received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was awarded a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant, a Halls Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His narratives often trace the work lives of his characters—pawnbrokers, postal carriers, telephone repair people, home inspectors, police detectives, clothing manufacturers, trailer-park owners, to name a few—and explore how these professions bring an individual into a unique set of experiences and conflicts and expressions. He is a professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses in fiction writing, screenwriting, and literature. When he is not writing or reading or teaching, he likes to walk the parks of Rochester, NY. 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 Heather Redmond about her new novel Death and the Visitors (Kensington, 2024).In this second Regency-era mystery featuring Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the sixteen-year-old heroine (still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at this point in her life) and her stepsister and close lifetime companion, Jane Clairmont, are facing even greater penury and discomfort than in the first book, Death and the Sisters (2023), as a result of their parents’ profligacy and the absence of Mary’s older half-sister, banished to Wales because of her excessive attachment to the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and thus unable to help Jane and Mary with their chores.The girls live in a run-down house in a disreputable London neighborhood not far from Newgate Prison and the Smithfield meat market, where they spend their days watching their parents’ bookshop. Their father, an illustrious political thinker and writer, doesn’t earn enough to support five children and a wife. As a result, he has fallen into the grip of moneylenders, and creditors show up on his doorstep with some regularity, embarrassing him and his family.When a group of rich Russians arrives, determined to meet the daughter of the renowned Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s father persuades one of them to support the Godwin publishing enterprise with a gift of diamonds. But the day after their scheduled meeting, a body identified as the Russian donor is pulled out of the Thames River. Mary sets out with her sister and Shelley to solve the mystery of the Russian’s murder, hoping to retrieve the diamonds and buy herself and her family some time.This is the Regency as we have come to know it from the novels of C.S. Harris and Andrea Penrose, among others: opulent on the surface but full of grit and poverty behind the glittering façade. How closely Shelley, Jane, and Mary resemble their historical selves is uncertain, but it’s a rollicking good tale and deserves to be enjoyed on its own terms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Christie Hodgen is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel Boy Meets Girl, which won the 2020 AWP Award for the Novel. Her short fiction and essays have been included in dozens of literary journals and have won two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is the editor of New Letters.A sense of place looms large in the first essay discussed in this episode, “Disintegration” by Karen Fisher. Her job in the hinterlands of east New Orleans involves recycling, hogs that wander around and a boss who is equally beastly as he threatens to fire her. Wrestling for control of her circumstances is tough for the author, in a place that writes “off neglect as charm.” In “On Emptiness” by Joyde Dehli, a poetic sensibility shines. Fear is in the air, as Dehli notes that in response one can flee, fight, freeze or faint, to which might be added a fifth option: fawning, which the author does beautifully over a world that defies definition. In “Right Now, I’m a Chauffeur” by Bud Jennings get ready for sharp-tongued discourse. The narrator’s mom drops line like “Dullards like that should only be allowed cockroaches as pets,” and the essay goes from there in exploring what it’s like to come home to care for your mom versus the lively, coming-out life you led in New York City. Finally, in “A Little Slice of the Moon” by Summer Hammond we encounter a young girl from a Jehovah’s Witnesses family that finds a door into a wider world through, of all things, a job at McDonalds. You’ll find yourself rooting for her to find romance and more.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It's November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn't particularly happy in his job but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the deserted swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won't come out.A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most (Little, Brown, 2024) masterly breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.Jessica Anthony is the author of three previous books of fiction, most recently the novel Enter the Aardvark, a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award in Literature, Anthony wrote The Most while guarding the Mária Valéria Bridge in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She Lives in Portland, Maine.Recommended Books: Patricia Highsmith, Price of Salt Stories of Shirley Jackson (the tooth and the renegade) Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind Andre Breton, Mad Love Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Gretel and the Great War 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 forthcoming 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

Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn why Shanghailanders’ core family is just so dysfunctional.In this interview, Juli and I talk about Shanghai, her decision to write the book in reverse chronological order, and what we gain when those from a non-white perspective write about expatriates.Juli Min is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University, and she holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She was the founding editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and served as its fiction editor from 2016 to 2023.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghailanders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature