New Books in Literature

Poet Robert Lashley's I Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer (Demersal, 2023) is a complex and compelling coming-apart-of-age story set in the Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma, Washington. After being abused by a gang leader and coerced into robbing elderly women, Albert is given a second chance at making something of his life by two counter-posed mentors: fiery radical professor Dr. Everett and beauty-store owner Miss Eulalah. Everertt's brand of bootsraps Black nationalism at first appeals to Albert, but his tutelage under Miss Eulalah introduces him to Black feminsim, through which he is able to recognize the misogyny in such heralded Black male writers as Frantz Fanon, Huey Newton, and Amiri Baraka. Do these writers really point us towards liberation, with their casual sexism and overt antisemitism? Caught between these two worlds, and burdered by immense guilt over the violence he has caused, Albert struggles to forge a useable sense of self against seemingly-impossible odds.Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Robert Stillman, an eighteen-year-old Londoner, has few expectations when he travels to Nottingham to study with the Reverend George Langstaff. Life has not treated Robbie well recently: his mother’s death has left him in the custody of an uncle who has neither the patience to deal with nor the ability to appreciate a young man whose greatest pleasure in life is to draw.The Reverend Langstaff, however, turns out to be exactly the kind of mentor Robbie needs: a wise and tolerant country parson on the brink of retirement, well able to foster his newest pupil’s strengths. When Robbie meets and falls madly in love with their neighbor, Anton Harrington, it would seem that his life is complete.But this is Edwardian England, and men who love men live at risk of arrest and imprisonment under the harshest conditions. Anton, who is older by more than a decade, knows this all too well. Although he loves Robbie in return, Anton has spent years covering up both his dangerous romantic inclinations and his socialist political views. The emotional cost of concealing his self and his past inhibit Anton’s ability to sustain any intimate relationship.Cowell explores the ways in which Robbie and Anton negotiate their way past these emotional and societal pitfalls with warmth, understanding, and respect. And although she surprises us with her conclusion, her ending feels exactly right.Stephanie Cowell is the author of Marrying Mozart, Claude and Camille, and other works of historical fiction. The Boy in the Rain (Regal House Publishing, 2023) is her latest novel.C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and three other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Storyteller, appeared in January 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveling with just a backpack and a miniscule budget in what he calls the “golden age of travel.”In his many adventures around the region, two particular stories stand out enough for Chris to turn into a book, Bugis Nights (Earnshaw, 2023). The first is his encounter with an older German woman in the Himalayan mountains, with a penchant for flirtation and teasing. The second is a maritime journey from a remote Indonesian island to Singapore, on a wooden sloop and a rowdy and raucous French crew.In this interview, Chris and I talk about his journey—both in Southeast Asia and the Himalayas—and the golden age of travel.Chris Stowers is a photographer and reporter, who has traveled to over seventy countries around the world. His work has appeared in publications like Newsweek, Forbes and the New York Times. His journey on the sloop led to his first story and photos being published, and began his career in photography.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Bugis Nights. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate 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

Locus- and Nebula- award-winning author P. Djèlí Clark joins critic andré carrington (UC Riverside) and host Rebecca Ballard for a conversation about the archives, methods, and cosmologies that inform his speculative fiction. Clark’s fiction blends fantasy and horror elements with richly drawn historical worlds that speak to his academic life as a historian. Most recently, Ring Shout (2020) maps Lovecraftian horror into the Ku Klux Klan’s 1920s terrorism in the U.S. South, while A Master Of Djinn (2021) brings angels and the titular djinns into a steampunk version of Egypt focalized around a pair of female detectives with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. The conversation probes the way Clark’s work limns “the supernatural and the mundane,” delving into his formative experiences with the everyday presence of ancestors in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, the way he writes deities into mortal stories without flattening free will, and why he is committed to writing stories that talk about nations, politics, and racism, even in worlds where the supernatural is just as present. As the episode wraps up, Clark talks about the process that led to his celebrated 2018 story “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” which consists of nine vignettes imagining the lives of the enslaved people whose teeth Washington used for his dentures. Stay tuned for Clark’s iconic answer to this season’s signature question—a must-listen for anybody who has always suspected there’s something weird lurking beneath the surface of children’s television!Mentioned in this Episode andré carrington’s Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction Them! The Day the Earth Stood Still Boris Karloff Vincent Price Star Trek The Twilight Zone The Bayou Classic Toni Morrison Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time Edward Said’s Orientalism The Battle of Algiers The Maxim gun The George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia Michel-Rolph Trouillot National Museum of African American History and Culture 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 Suzanne Berne about her novel The Blue Window (Marysue Rucci Books, 2023). Lorna is a clinical social worker, trained to talk to people, but she can’t get through to the two people most important to her; her miserable teenage son and her distant, unhappy mother. She grew up with a deaf father who never explained to her or her brother why their mother suddenly disappeared. Her brother died of AIDS in the 1980s and her father is also gone, but her mother had coming for Thanksgiving Day since Lorna’s son Adam was born. Now, a neighbor calls to say that her mother, Marika, has hurt her ankle and needs help. Lorna prepares to drive up, and hopes Adam will join her for the drive. Adam hopes to torture and negate himself, so he agrees to the journey. Lorna doesn’t expect that her distant son and mother will bond, or that she will be left out of their relationship.Suzanne Berne is the author of four previous novels: The Dogs of Littlefield, The Ghost at the Table, A Perfect Arrangement, and A Crime in the Neighborhood, which won Great Britain’s Orange Prize, now The Women’s Prize. She has also published a book of nonfiction, Missing Lucile, about her paternal grandmother. Berne has written frequently for The New York Times and The Washington Post, and published essays and articles in numerous magazines. For many years she taught creative writing, first at Harvard University, and then at Boston College and at the Ranier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, WA. She lives outside of Boston with her husband. They have two daughters. When she is not writing--or thinking about the writing she is not doing--she is often walking her dog or thinking about walking him. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sae, former journalist turned a young mother of two in 1992 Seoul, is waiting for her husband, an engineer for a small construction company. He’s late. A neighbor rushes down with the news: a high-rise downtown has collapsed, trapping hundreds inside–the same high-rise that Sae’s husband is working.That disaster, which parallels the real-life Sampoong Department Store collapse in 1995, starts the story of Hannah Michell’s novel Excavations (One World: 2023). Sae and the book’s other characters try to uncover the mystery of why this high-rise, the jewel of Seoul’s skyline, unexpectedly collapsed–and who might be to blame.In this interview, Hannah and I talk about the Sampoong Department Store and how it parallels her novel, and what current-day events inspired the development of her bookHannah Michell grew up in Seoul. She studied anthropology and philosophy at Cambridge University and now lives in California with her husband and children. She teaches in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program at the University of California, Berkeley. You can follow her on Instagram at @_hannahmichell.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Excavations. 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

Today I talked to Sherif Meleka about his novel Suleiman’s Ring (Hoopoe, 2023)An enchanted ring brings good fortune to an Egyptian oud player in this compelling novel combining elements of magical realism with political historyCan one man or a mere ring alter the events of one’s life and the history of a country? Combining elements of magical realism with momentous history, Suleiman’s Ring poses these questions and more in a gripping tale of friendship, identity, and the fate of a nation.Alexandria, Egypt, on the eve of the 1952 Free Officers revolution. Daoud, a struggling musician, is summoned with his best friend Sheikh Hassanein to a meeting with Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who seeks their help as he mobilizes for the revolution. Daoud lends Nasser an enchanted silver ring for its powers to bring good luck. The revolution succeeds but Daoud soon grows estranged from Hassanein, who has joined the Muslim Brotherhood, after he suggests that Daoud leave Egypt since as a Jew he is no longer welcome. When Hassanein is arrested, however, destiny draws Daoud into a complex web of sexual intrigue and betrayal that threatens to upend his already precarious existence.Set against the backdrop of the simmering political tensions of mid-twentieth-century Egypt and the Arab–Israeli wars, Sherif Meleka’s story of fate and fortune transports us to another time and place while peeling back the curtain on events that still haunt the country to this day.Sherif Meleka was born in 1958 into a Coptic Christian family in Alexandria, Egypt. A trained medical doctor, he emigrated to the United States in 1984. He is the author of numerous novels, poetry and short story collections in Arabic. Suleiman’s Ring is his English-language debut. He currently lives in Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Caitlin Cowan is the author of Happy Everything, forthcoming in February 2024 from Cornerstone Press. Caitlin holds a PhD in English from the University of North Texas, an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and BAs in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Caitlin has taught writing at UNT, Texas Woman’s University, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and elsewhere. She works in arts nonprofit administration at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, where she serves as Director of International Programs and as Chair of Creative Writing. Caitlin also writes PopPoetry, a weekly pop culture and poetry newsletter, from Michigan's west coast where she lives with her fiancé, their young daughter, and their two mischievous cats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Jamila Ahmed's novel, Every Rising Sun (Henry Holt, 2023) is a clever take on One Thousand and One Nights. Traveling through lush courtyards, perilous deserts, and opulent palaces brimming with secrets and treachery, Shaherazade must entertain her dangerous new husband, the Malik, and navigate court intrigue as her homeland teeters on brink of destruction in this sprawling new take on the classic One Thousand and One Nights. In twelfth century, Persia, clever and dreamy Shaherazade stumbles on the Malik’s beloved wife entwined with a lover in a sun-dappled courtyard. When Shaherazade slips her first tale, the story of this infidelity, to the Malik, she sets the Seljuk Empire on fire. Enraged at his wife’s betrayal, the once-gentle Malik beheads her. But when that killing does not quench his anger, the Malik begins to marry and behead a new girl night after night. Furious at the murders, his province seethes on rebellion’s edge. To suppress her guilt and quell threats of a revolt—and, perhaps, to marry the man she has loved since childhood—Shaherazade makes a plan. She persuades her father, the Malik’s vizier, to use his sway as a top official and offer her as the Malik’s next wife. On their wedding night, Shaherazade starts a tale, but as the sun ascends, she cuts the story off, ensuring that she will live to tell another tale, by repeating this practice night after night. But the Malik’s rage runs too deep for Shaherazade to exorcise alone. And so, she and her father persuade the Malik to leave Persia—and the memories of his unfaithful wife—to join Saladin’s fight against the Crusaders in Palestine. This wider world is even more perilous. With plots spun against Shaherazade and the Seljuks from all corners, Shaherazade must maneuver through intrigue in the age’s greatest courts to safeguard her people. All the while, Shaherazade must keep the Malik enticed with her otherworldly tales—because the slightest misstep could cost Shaherazade her head.Jamila Ahmed is a graduate of Harvard Law School and Barnard College, where she studied medieval Islamic history.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Prismatic and polysemous, On the Road to Lviv (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) invites us on an odyssey across Ukraine in the hour of war. "This chronicle/ Took shape the day the war began, which was/ My 65th birthday," writes legendary traveler, war correspondent, memoirist and poet Christopher Merrill. At once deeply personal yet rooted in history so recent you can almost see the smoke billowing from the ruins of Mariupol, the poem is equal parts chronicle, a document of war crimes, and a sober self-reflection in which the poem's speaker examines his own engagement with Ukraine as a "democratic-minded" Westerner "determined to develop/ Civil societies around the world." Not since Byron's Mazeppa has there been an English-language poem comparably engaged with Ukrainian history, appearing here en face with Nina Murray's masterly translation into Ukrainian.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed is a Preceptor in Ukrainian at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature