New Books in Literature

Today I talked to Andy Mozina about his new novel Tandem (Tortoise Books, 2023).An economics professor at a Michigan college is struggling through a bad divorce, having a tough time with his only son, and then, through hardly any fault of his own, he must avoid getting caught by the police. He only had one extra beer and it was late and foggy outside, plus the two college kids were biking out of the entrance to the deserted beach, instead of the exit, without a headlight, so was it really his fault when he hit and killed them? Also, couldn’t he do more for the world and right his wrongs, if he was still teaching and making contributions, than if he was stuck in jail forever? Mike will do anything to avoid being caught in this moving novel about the lengths a person will go to avoid facing uncomfortable truths.Born and raised in Milwaukee, Andy Mozina majored in economics at Northwestern, then dropped out of Harvard Law School to study literature and write. He’s published fiction in Tin House, Ecotone, McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His first story collection, The Women Were Leaving the Men, won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. Quality Snacks, his second collection, was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Prize. His first novel, Contrary Motion, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Penguin Random House. His fiction has received special citations in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the Midwest. He’s a professor of English at Kalamazoo College. His passion is grading papers, and his hobbies include listening to legal podcasts and rooting for Wisconsin professional sports teams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Wole Talabi’s debut novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (Daw Books, 2023) follows Shigidi–a former nightmare god–and his partner, the succubus Nneoma as they attempt to carve a life independent from the control of Spirit Corporations. The story spans continents and decades but centers on a heist to steal an artifact back from the British Museum.In this interview, Talabi describes using the Yoruba pantheon of gods while also drawing on other global mythologies. We discuss the process of writing a novel with a fragmented timeline with scenes spanning millennia and the power of speculative fiction to tackle complex issues in a thoughtful and engaging way. We talk heist stories, subverting misogynistic succubus tropes, and cinematic action in novels.Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is an energetic, fast paced read with great depth and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.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

Under the direction of founding editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age series is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. After he published The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023) demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed endless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with joy and delight, from the fleeting sweetness of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging.In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Gay to talk about why he believes delight is a radical and necessary practice, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention. Gay also reads an essay from his new collection.Life As It Is is a monthly podcast featuring prominent voices from within and beyond the Buddhist fold. Listen to more episodes here.Tricycle: The Buddhist Review provides a unique and independent public forum for exploring Buddhism, establishing a dialogue between Buddhism and the broader culture, and introducing Buddhist thinking to Western disciplines. This approach has enabled Tricycle to successfully attract readers from all walks of life, many of whom desire to enrich their lives through a deeper knowledge of Buddhist traditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo's subtly sinister edge, and watches her carefully. When a patron's death in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo's mysterious past, Patricia can't resist digging deeper--even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession as these "transfixing dual female narrators" (Kimberly McCreight) hurtle toward a stunning climax.How Can I Help You (Putnam, 2023) is a LibraryReads Top Ten Pick of July, an Amazon Editors’ Pick of the Month, a Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week, and one of CrimeReads’ 10 Best Books of July. Laura Sims’s first novel, LOOKER, was chosen as a “Best Book” by Vogue, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire UK, and more, and is now in development for television by eOne and Emily Mortimer’s King Bee Productions. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Conjunctions, and Electric Lit. She and her family live in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a reference librarian and hosts the library’s lecture series.Recommendations: Nathan Oates, A Flaw in the Design Marianna Enriquez, Our Share of Night Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story 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

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find his killer and give his life’s work meaning. This is a historical novel that bends and twists genre and narrative into wondrous and disorienting knots and makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Shehan notes that if anything survives the death of your body, it’s probably the voice in your head, and the voice in his head speaks in the second person. Moving from philosophy to the politics of fiction, Professor Sangeeta Ray, author of En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke), prompts Shehan to think about Sri Lankan literature’s rise on the global stage, and Shehan makes the case for fiction standing in for the missing records and histories of the dead, lost, and disappeared in a prolonged time of war. The conversation takes us to the surprise Sri Lankan win in the Cricket World Cup of 1996, the role of queer desire in a novel about war tragedies, and whether any story about the Sri Lankan civil war can be optimistic. We end with a signature question that links Shehan and a previous guest, the Argentinian novelist Mariana Enríquez, in their shared (and spooky) writing inspiration. Mentions: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children  Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes  Shehan Karunatilaka, The Legend of Pradeep Matthew  Kevin Liu  Ted Chiang  1996 Cricket World Cup  Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient   Romesh Gunesekera  Yasmine Gooneratne  Shyam Selvadurai  A. Sivanandan  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown by Annie Dawid, (Inkspot Publishing 2023), opens long after 917 people died by drinking cyanide or by lethal injection on November 18, 1978. It’s 2008, and one of the survivors, who made it out earlier that day, is speaking to a reporter on the 30th anniversary of the “Jonestown Massacre.” When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline found Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised of all colors. They wanted to live honest lives earning their bread from the earth. They dreamt of their followers coming together as equals, loving each other as sisters and brothers, and building a commune in the British Guyana jungle. As the years passed, Jim Jones became more autocratic, he bedded his followers and sired children, and although Marceline hated what their marriage had become, she still loved him. Even unto death.Annie Dawid writes and teaches online in very rural Colorado, where she also makes rugs and assemblages as well as plays tennis and Scrabble. For the last 7 years, she’s taught in the master’s creative writing program for University College, University of Denver. She received her Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Denver’s English Dept. in Creative Writing. For 15 years, she was professor of English and Creative Writing director at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. Her last book, Put Off My Sackcloth: Essays, came out from The Humble Essayist Press in 2021. Her first book, York Ferry: A Novel, Cane Hill Press, 1993, second printing, was positively reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times. It won the 2016 International Rubery Award in Fiction. Her second book was Lily in the Desert: Stories, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001, followed by And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family, Litchfield Review Press, 2009, winner of their inaugural short story collection prize. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Anatomie of the World: Poems. Along the way, her 10-minute drama, Gun Play, won the New Rocky Mountain Voices Contest and was performed in Westcliffe, Colorado. But most of the last 19 years have been devoted to researching, writing, revising, and searching for a publisher for her Jonestown novel, rewarded, at last, by Inkspot Publishing of the UK and published on the 45th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mina Seçkin's novel The Four Humors (Catapult, 2022) follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine.Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father's grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine.Also on Sibel's mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret.Delving into her family's history, the narrative weaves through periods of political unrest in Turkey, from military coups to the Gezi Park protests. Told with pathos and humor, Sibel's search for strange and unusual cures is disrupted as she begins to see how she might heal herself through the care of others, including her own family and its long-fractured relationships.Mina Seçkin completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she received the Felipe De Alba Fellowship and where she also received her bachelor degree. Her work has been published in Refinery 29, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She serves as managing editor of Apogee Journal.Recommended Books: Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors Lina Wolff, Carnality Aria Aber, Hard Damage 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 we talked to Reese Hogan about his book My Heart Is Human (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023).The body belongs to Joel Lodowick, a single parent and trans man whose only wish, at the story’s outset, is to raise his five year old daughter in peace. The robot is Acubens, who has been warehoused for nearly 10 years until Joel tries to activate him.At first, Joel is excited for the advantages Acubens’ conjoined consciousness confers, like the ability to get a much higher paying job with Acubens’ ability to make any numeric calculations with dizzying speed. But when Acubens—professing to have only Joel’s best interests at heart—threatens to erase Joel’s memory as part of an “upgrade,” Joel gets more than he bargained for.Complicating their relationship is the fact that in this near future world, all technology has been outlawed. If the authorities discover Acubens has been reactivated—and worse, that Acubens is taking up more and more space in Joel’s mind—they both risk being destroyed.Reese Hogan is a transmasc science fiction author of four novels. His short fiction has been published in The Decameron Project, A Coup of Owls, and on the Tales to Terrify podcast, as well as in two anthologies. In addition to writing, Reese enjoys singing in the local gay men’s chorus and running. He lives with his two children in New Mexico.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

Today I talked to Kim Taylor Blakemore about her new book The Good Time Girls Get Famous (Sycamore Creek Press, 2023).Get ready for the latest rip-roaring "Good Time Girls" adventure with Ruby Calhoun and Pip Quinn, two accidental outlaws now on the run for too many crimes to count.As the silent film industry booms and Westerns steal the spotlight, a movie producer sees potential gold in Ruby and Pip's outlaw story. With their misdeeds now legendary, the duo is offered a chance to play themselves on the big screen. It's an opportunity for fame, fortune, and a safe getaway to Mexico once the film wraps.However, the world of filmmaking proves to be a turbulent ride, even for these seasoned outlaws. The law is hot on their heels, pursuing them from Kansas across the plains to the Rockies, determined to bring them to justice. The newspapers tell half-truths and tall tales of their exploits. To make matters worse, a feared foe from their past has resurfaced, putting the film troupe and Ruby's sister in grave danger.Can the women outsmart the law, rescue Ruby's sister, and secure their freedom? With a little help from their friends, they just might pull it off. "The Good Time Girls Get Famous" is a heartwarming and uproarious novel that celebrates fierce female friendships and the audacious spirit of two unforgettable women in a world that's anything but ordinary.Kim Taylor Blakemore is an author, developmental editor and founder of the Novelitics Writers Collective. She writes historical novels that feature fierce, audacious, and often dangerous women. She writes about the thieves and servants, murderesses and mediums, grifters and frauds - the women with darker stories, tangled lies and hidden motives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature