New Books in Literature

Garth Nix’s new collection Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Pupper Sorcerer (Harper Voyager, 2023) gathers together stories written over more than fifteen years for a variety of publications and follows the artillerist knight and his sorcerous, paper mâché companion as they pursue their duties as god-slayers.In this interview, Nix describes the myriad influences shaping his work, the balance of the melancholy and humor in the collection, and what makes the medium of short fiction compelling. As with so much of Nix’s work, Sir Herewood draws on many of the archetypes of fantasy and reimagines them, imbuing them with new life. It was a joy to speak with him.A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

It's 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm's reach--writerly ambitions, tight knit friendships, a place to call home--Leyla attempts to find solace in the techno beats of Berlin's nightlife, with little success. Right as the clock winds down on the hold on her visa, Leyla meets a conservative Swedish tourist and--against her political convictions and better judgment--begins to fall in love, or something like it. Will she accept an IKEA life with the Volvo salesman and relinquish her creative dreams, or return to Turkey to her mother and sister, codependent and enmeshed, her father's ghost still haunting their lives?While she waits for the German court's verdict on her future, in the pages of her diary, Leyla begins to parse her unresolved past and untenable present. An indelible character at once precocious and imperiled, Leyla gives voice to the working-class and immigrant struggle to find safety, self-expression, and happiness. The Applicant is an extraordinary dissection of a liminal life between borders and identities, an original and darkly funny debut.Nazli’s debut novel, The Applicant, was published on February 14, 2023. While writing The Applicant, Nazli worked as a cleaner, dishwasher, and bookseller in Berlin, South Bend, Chicago, and New York. She has taught and studied Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Denver. Her previous work has appeared in Narrative, The Threepenny Review, Bookforum, Second Factory, QSQOQST, books without covers, and The Chicago Review of Books.Recommended Books: Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth Ebru Ojen, Lojman 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

Today I talked to Marty Wingate about her novel The Orphans of Mersea House (Alcove Press 2022).Olive Kersey is both penniless and alone at 37 – her brother and her boyfriend both died during WWII, her father not long after, and Olive spent all the years taking care of her ailing mother. Now her mother is dead and Olive has to vacate their rental. She lives in Southwold, a small town on the Suffolk coast of England and her choices are limited until her childhood friend Margery suddenly returns home. Margery has inherited a big old house, and hires Olive to run it, but the first two lodgers have secrets. Margery learns that she is the ward of an 11-year-old orphan, daughter of her first love. Olive adds little Juniper, whose legs were compromised by polio and requires braces, to her list of responsibilities in the old Mersea House. The officer in charge of placing children like Juniper begins keeping a close eye on the house, and in a small town, there are always those who want to expose secrets……Marty Wingate began college life as a journalism major but ended up with an undergraduate degree in theater and a master’s degree in speech pathology from New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She worked as a speech therapist in Phoenix, at a school for the deaf in El Paso, and at the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin, Ireland before settling in the Pacific Northwest where she met her husband and worked in public schools for many years. Her husband’s job as a newspaper and freelance copyeditor drew her back into the world of words by way of horticulture. She returned to school and obtained a second master’s degree, this one in urban horticulture from the University of Washington. She then wrote garden how-to books and magazine and newspaper articles and for several years could be heard taking gardening weekly on KUOW, the local NPR station. She segued from nonfiction to fiction writing with the appearance of her first mystery, The Garden Plot, in 2014. In the past nearly-ten years, Marty has written seventeen books. This includes eight books in the Potting Shed series featuring Pru Parke, a middle-aged American gardener transplanted from Texas to England; four Birds of a Feather mysteries that follow Julia Lanchester, bird lover, who runs a tourist office in a Suffolk village; three books in the First Edition Library series; and two historical fiction standalones including Glamour Girls, about a female, Second World War Spitfire pilot. More books are on the way. A Body on the Doorstep, the first book in The London Ladies Murder Club, set in 1921, will be out January 2024. Marty prefers on-the-ground research whenever possible, so she and her husband regularly travel to England and Scotland, where she can be found tracing the steps of her characters, stopping for tea and a slice of Victoria sponge in a café, or enjoying a swift half in a pub. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In the unconscious, coincidence does not exist.A bizarre tragedy drives ten-year-old Paul from his dysfunctional home, leaving his younger sister, Bethany, behind. Paul flees to his estranged father’s apple orchard where he discovers comfort and parenting for the first time. Two decades later, the long-lost siblings settle separately in NYC where a gifted psychoanalyst, Lillian, develops independent relationships with them as all three characters search for seemingly unattainable connection while carrying inescapable demons.In Triskele (Atmosphere Press, 2023) by B. D’Amato, we experience a psychological story that takes us through generations to the research and art departments, galleries and art lecture halls of distinguished Franklin University; an idyllic upstate farm; heart-wrenching therapy sessions; a seminary and the raunchy crime and drug infested NYC streets during the early 1980’s. A kaleidoscope of settings provide symbolic backdrops for the complex, human desires of individuals struggling for emotional wholeness. The story explores the irrational behaviors people embrace and the apparently antithetical, yet underlying motives, for their actions. Rich dream material furnishes complexity and deepens perspective into the conflicts of each character’s internal world, all the while asking: where do we find grace?B. D’Amato is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC. She has written numerous professional papers analyzing the psychic conflicts of literary characters and their authors, i.e., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, R L Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Her most recent publication considers the lyrics in Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” from a hypnogogic (hip·nuh·gaa·juhk) perspective. She has written extensively about dreams, adoption, and the curative potential of human interconnection through emotional communication. Triskele is her first work of fiction. bdamato.comLexa Roséan is a psychoanalyst practicing in NYC. Lexa is on faculty at the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis (CMPS). She also dances and teaches Argentine tango. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Any novel set in Russia during the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1533–1584) is an instant draw for me; that is, after all, the setting for most of my own fiction. Throw in Baba Yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folklore, and give her a makeover, and I am hooked.Throw out the warts and the cackle, the flying mortar and pestle, the human skulls lighted from within, and even the appellation “Baba” (“granny,” but also “hag” or “crone”). These attributes, according to Gilmore, are part of a vicious plot to discredit her heroine, Yaga—the half-mortal, extremely long-lived daughter of the Earth goddess Mokosh. Born in the tenth century, before the introduction of Christianity cast the old Slavic deities into the shade, Yaga has become a noted healer who doesn’t appear a day over thirty in 1560, when the story begins. Over the centuries, she has acquired a frenemy, Koshey (Koshchei) the Deathless, who for reasons that become clear during the novel has chosen to break his prior deal with Yaga and interfere once more in human affairs, pushing Tsar Ivan the Terrible along his path of suspicion and terror. The first victim is Tsaritsa Anastasia, a friend of Yaga’s before Anastasia’s selection as Ivan’s first royal bride. It’s that connection that draws Yaga into the fight. But the forces opposing her are immortal as well as mortal, complicating her efforts.It’s all very well done, although the impact of Ivan’s atrocities and of Koshey’s insistence on violence as necessary to the survival of Russia is only heightened by Putin’s ongoing aggression against Ukraine, which the author could not have anticipated when her book was accepted for publication. The history is mostly sound (allowing for the supernatural element) and the Russian correct, as one would expect of a native speaker. And there is the fun, for those in the know, of watching the author play with familiar (Little Hen, the hut on chicken feet) and new (Yaga’s immortal helpers, the wolf Dyen and the owl Noch, named for Day and Night, respectively) tropes from this set of ancient myths. If you like fantastical takes on history or reexaminations of literary villainesses, this novel is for you.Olesya Salnikova Gilmore was born in Moscow, Russia, and raised in the United States. She writes historical fiction and fantasy inspired by Eastern European folklore. The Witch and the Tsar (Ace Books, 2022) 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

John Plotz talked with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy back in 2019. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution.Recall This Book loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America?He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation.On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public BooksDiscussed in this episode: The Neveryon Series, “Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton (also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “Aye, and Gomorrah,” “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. Delany In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick “The Science Fiction of Roe vs. Wade,” Palmer Rampell Library of America Volumes, Ursula K. Le Guin (Delany disses them!) A Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Heinlein The Fifth Season Novels, N.K. Jemisin More than Human and The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

For the last forty-five years, the distinguished poets Molly Peacock and Phillis Levin have read and discussed nearly every poem they’ve written-an unparalleled friendship in poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem (Palimpsest Press, 2022), Peacock collects her most important essays on poetic form and traces the development of her formalist aesthetic across their lifelong back-and-forth. Peacock offers a charming, psychologically wise, and metaphorically piquant look at navigating craft and creativity. This is a book both for serious poets as well as for anyone who wants a deep dive into the impact of friendship on art itself. Levin's most recent work, Mr. Memory and Other Poems, tackles themes of memory and longing and is as expansive and is it detailed.Another unique aspect of this already rare friendship is that they shared a therapist - one who was so beloved that, when she had a stroke and had to close her practice, both Peacock and Levin felt bereft like they'd lost a mother. In a fascinating role reversal, Peacock cared for her therapist after her stroke, and wrote magnificently about the experience and their years-long relationship prior to Joan's stroke in The Analyst (W. W. Nortton and Company, 2017). Peacock is a poet, biographer, and memoirist whose literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others, from poetry to prose and back again to poetry. In A Friend Sails in on a Poem she describes her decades-long friendship with distinguished poet Phillis Levin, quoting their poetry and outlining her personal rules for poetic form. In addition to The Analyst, Peacock's poetry collections include Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems from Biblioasis and W.W. Norton and Company. She is the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals such as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Malahat Review, The Women’s Review of Books, and Plume and are anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She has written two books about creativity in the lives of women artists: The Paper Garden and Flower Diary. Peacock teaches online for the Unterberg Poetry Center at 92NY.You can learn more about Megan Wildhood at meganwildhood.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

M. A. Carrick’s newest novel Labyrinth’s Heart (Orbit, 2023) is the culmination of their Rook and Rose trilogy, which chronicles the life of the thief Arenza Lenskaya after she returns home to the city of Nadežra to con her way into one of the city’s noble families.The co-writers describe the trilogy’s origins–as the spinoff of a tabletop game–and the influence that their backgrounds in anthropology have had on their work. They discuss the importance of different kinds of family relationships and the power of queernorm stories, how they balanced trauma and joy in the narrative, and what makes vigilante characters so compelling to both write and read.The Rook and Rose trilogy is a fast paced adventure that is simultaneously intricate and empathetic. It is a testament to the things that make fantasy compelling as a genre and it was wonderful to speak with the authors about its conclusion.A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at aelanier.com. 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 Michelle Brafman about her novel Swimming with Ghosts (Keylight Books, 2023).Until her unemployed husband Charlie volunteers to step in as team coach, professional organizer Gillian Cloud has also controlled the neighborhood swim club and its team. She’s a beautiful, much-admired part of the community, but Gillian is living behind a façade, refusing to accept the truth about her father’s alcoholism and philandering, suppressing any unpleasantness in order to present her well-known positivity. Her best friend Kristy learns the truth about her own hidden addictions, which surface in a dangerous way and require the support of a former mentor. It’s the summer of 2012, and after the ghosts of family addictions appear, and a real derecho destroys the clubhouse and destroys the power grid for several days, both Gillian and Kristy need to come to terms with their past trauma.Michelle Brafman is the author of Bertrand Court: Stories and the novel Washing the Dead. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Oprah Daily, Slate, LitHub, The Forward, Tablet, and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. She’s worked as a coffee barista, radio advertising salesperson, and television producer, among other jobs. She got hooked on writing fiction while she was producing television because she craved another outlet to tell the stories she was gathering. Brafman grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, earned an MA in Fiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and in addition to writing, her grand passion is helping others find and tune their narrative voices. A former swim mom and NCAA All-American freestyler, Michelle has never lived more than a mile away from a lake, ocean, or river. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

According to Merriam-Webster, noir is “crime fiction featuring hard-boiled, cynical characters and bleak, sleazy settings.” The Cambridge Dictionary says noir shows “the world as being unpleasant, strange, or cruel.” Nick Harkaway new novel Titanium Noir (Knopf, 2023) has all that but with a twist—rather than the fedora-wearing detective hired by a woman who just as soon stab you in the back and love you, the first-person narrator is P.I. Cal Sounder, hired by the police to help investigate the murder of a 7’8”, 91-year-old man who by all rights could have lived several more centuries.Sounder’s specialty is investigating crimes against Titans, the one percenters among one percenters, whose access to an exclusive medical treatment known as Titanium 7 enlarges both their bodies and their lifespans.The story is set hundreds of years in the future, when such miracle treatments become possible, but the book also sends roots into the past. The murder weapon, for instance, is a .22 Derringer, a small handgun not too different from the weapon used to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.“Killing someone with a gun is noir. Every poster of a noir movie is someone with a gun, whether it's a shadow with a revolver or a kind of Rico Bandello in Little Caesar. The gun is bound up with noir and vice versa,” Harkaway says.Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nicholas Cornwell. As Harkaway, he is the author of the novels The Gone-Away World, Angelmaker (which was nominated for the 2013 Arthur C. Clarke award), Tigerman, Gnomon; and the non-fiction The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World. He has also written two novels under the pseudonym Aidan Truhen. His father wrote under the pen name John le Carré.Find out more about Rob Wolf and Brenda Noiseux. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature