New Books in Literature

Every year one of my absolute favorite episodes is the Booksellers Best-Of episode for which I get to interview independent bookstore managers, owners, and booksellers about the books that meant the most to them over the course of a year. This year I welcome an exciting new bookseller to the program: Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of Programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, DC and Silver Spring, MD. She is a 2022 Publishers Weekly Star Watch Honoree, graduate of Barnard College, and currently serves on the American Bookseller Association’s DEI Committee. Christine is passionate about championing marginalized authors both at Loyalty and on her Bookstagram @readingismagical. My returning guest will be known to all who love books and live in Ithaca, New York. Lisa Swayze is general manager and buyer at Buffalo St., Books Ithaca’s independent, co-op bookstore. She serves on the board of the American booksellers Association, and works every day toward making Indie book selling more sustainable. We are going to spend this episode talking about Christine’s and Lisa’s favorite books of the year and also their most anticipated books for 2024. I know my listeners look forward to this episode annually and use it as a list from which to buy books for their favorite literature, loving family and friends. Enjoy the Show!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 as World Literature, is under contract 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

Alina Gorban is an illustrator of 22 children's books, a cartoonist, and a teaching artist. In our interview we celebrate her new graphic novel entitled, Silence, Full Stop (Street Noise Books, 2023), a very personal and explicit graphic memoir of the struggles of an adolescent girl processing the trauma of childhood sexual assault. It is her debut as an author, and it is published under the pseudonymn Karina Shor. Alina grew up in Israel, after immigrating from the former Soviet Union. She received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and now lives back in Tel Aviv, Israel.Mel Rosenberg is a professor emeritus of microbiology (Tel Aviv University) who fell in love with children's books as a small child and now writes his own. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Jarret Keene's, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press, 2023),  is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley's survivors and protect her younger classmates at a paramilitary school holed up in Luxor on the Las Vegas Strip. After graduation, she'll be alone in fending off the deadly intentions and desires of the school's most powerful opponents. When she's captured by the enemy warlord, she's surprised by two revelations: He's not the monster her headmaster wants her to believe and the one thing she can't safeguard is her own heart. Hammer of the Dogs celebrates the courageousness of a younger generation in the face of authority while exploring the difficult choices a conscionable young woman must make with her back against a blood-spattered wall. It's a story of transformation and maturity, as Lash grapples with her own identity and redefines the glittering Las Vegas that Nevada is known for.Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss.Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ's family bakery. TJ's not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said - and left unsaid - to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?When secrets and wounds become so insurmountable that they devour us from within, hope and sustenance and friendship can come from the most unlikely source. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal (Riverhead Books, 2023) is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.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 as World Literature, is under contract 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

Linking literature, philosophy, art, and personal experience, a moving exploration of the wooded landscape’s power.In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State, which had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish, and Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who currently live and had lived there, including Native Americans, settlers, bears, deer, turtles, and migrating birds. In this personal and eloquent account, Sax explores the meanings and cultural history of forests from prehistory to the present, taking in Gilgamesh, Virgil, Dante, the Gawain poet, medieval alchemists, the Brothers Grimm, Hudson River painters, Latin American folklore, contemporary African novelists, and much more. Combining lyricism with contemporary scholarship, Sax opens new emotional, intellectual, and environmental perspectives on the storied history of the forest.Avery Weinman earned her Master’s in History from UCLA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be" )--as well as the protagonist's temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why "auto-fiction" strikes her as a "bad category" and "a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally" since "the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience."Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer's weirdness!Mentioned in this Episode:By Sheila Heti: Pure Colour How Should a Person Be? Alphabetical Diaries Ticknor We Need a Horse (children's book) The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman) Also mentioned: Oulipo Group Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael George Eliot, Middlemarch Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star) Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy Willa Cather , The Professor's House William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble. Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the local newspaper presents the newly born Ernsts and Thälmas in a photo on the front page, forever tying four families together.In Cecil the Lion Had to Die (HURI, 2023), Olena Stiazhkina follows these families through radical transformations when the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neoimperial Russia occupies Ukraine's Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Just as Stiazhkina's decision to write in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance--performed in this book that begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian--the stark choices of family members take them in different directions, presenting a multifaceted and nuanced Donbas.A tour de force of stylistic registers, intertwining stories, and ironic voices, this novel is a must-read for those who seek deeper understanding of how Ukrainian history and local identity shapes war with Russia.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

Where the Pavement Turns to Sand (Malarkey Books, 2023) is a collection of working class, everyday heartbreaks and bad decisions. In a refreshing rural Canadian setting, the characters in these slice of life tales stumble through divorce, debt, bad sex, and boring jobs, but also curling robots, aliens, jackalopes, wendigo, lots of legs wet with urine, and (maybe) sasquatches with an unexpected whimsy. What makes it work is Birnie’s signature dark humor and conversational style that makes every story feel like it was your neighbor telling it to you over a beer around a campfire, or at the rink. Surprising, entertaining, grimy and weird.”Sheldon Birnie is a writer, family man, and beer league hockey player living in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand (Malarkey Books) and Missing Like Teeth: An oral history of Winnipeg underground rock 1990-2001 (Eternal Cavalier Press). 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 Katherine Vaz about her new novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books, 2023).In 1843-1846, on the Portuguese island of Madeira, five-year-old John Alves lived in jail and starved alongside his heretic mother, who was condemned to death for converting to Protestantism from Catholicism. Finally freed, John befriends young Mary Freitas, the adopted daughter of a wonderful botanist. Both families are forced to flee, and they end up in southern Illinois. John teaches signing to deaf children and Mary works as a gardener for a wealthy man who falls in love with her. She’s torn after she and John find each other again, but he’s off to fight in the Civil War. A mean-spirited trick keeps them away from each other and Mary accepts her boss’s marriage proposal. This is a rich and detailed love story based on the Portuguese community of Jacksonville, Illinois, historical characters, events, and flower cultivation, a courtship that took place in the home of rising politician Abraham Lincoln, and a sweeping view of 19th and early 20th century America.Katherine Vaz is an award-winning author, a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003-09), and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (2006-7). Her novels include SAUDADE, (St. Martin’s Press), was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and Marlee Matlin (Solo One Productions) optioned it. Her novel MARIANA has been printed in six languages and is currently optioned by Anne Harrison, with screenwriter Sandy Welch. Rizzoli Publishers picked it as one of their top three books of 1998, and the U.S. Library of Congress chose it as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. Her collection FADO & OTHER STORIES won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, and two of the stories won her a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. OUR LADY OF THE ARTICHOKES won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and the title story was the springboard for a one-page film idea that was one of eight national winners in the 2014 “Write Start” contest co-sponsored by the New York Film Academy. Her short fiction has appeared in dozens of magazines, including the Harvard Review, BOMB, Tin House, Glimmer Train, etc., and her children’s stories have been included in anthologies by Simon & Schuster, Viking, and Penguin. She was a fiction editor for the Harvard Review and has lectured extensively on magical realism.Katherine Vaz is the first Portuguese American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress, Hispanic Division, and she was on the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation to open the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon. She teaches the “Writing the Luso Experience” workshop in the Disquiet International Literary program in Lisbon. A California native, she lives in New York City with her husband, Christopher Cerf, who hails from a publishing family (his father co-founded Random House) and has played creative and executive roles in children’s television, most notably Sesame Street and Between the Lions.G.P. Gottlieb is the author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery Series and a prolific baker of healthful breads and pastries. Please contact her through her website (GPGottlieb.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Annie Fisk—an only child in Los Alamos, New Mexico—spends a lot of time investigating the treasure trove of objects at the back of her garden. Her father, with whom she is close, works long hours on the nuclear bomb project, her mother seems distant and preoccupied, and Annie has trouble making friends. But she is a gifted student, and she leaves home to major in physics and astronomy at a Texas college. At around the same time, she becomes romantically involved with Evelyn, an artist.Yet Annie’s sights are set on the stars—more specifically, NASA, where the Apollo Project is underway. She graduates in 1962 and, against Evelyn’s objections, heads for Houston, where she lands a job as a secretary—it’s the 1960s, after all, and that’s what women are expected to do. There she meets Norman Gale, a relationship that opens up her future both professionally and personally.But it’s Annie’s past, more than her present, that holds her back. And in this beautifully written debut novel, Isa Arsén ties all the disparate threads together in a unique and surprising way.Isa Arsén lives in South Texas with her husband and a comically small dog. When not writing, she is an audio engineer for interactive media. Shoot the Moon ((G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2023), 2023) is her debut 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