New Books in Literature

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing.Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls (Hogarth Press, 2023) is a mystery, a family drama, and a novel of profound philosophical inquiry. Happiness Falls was an instant New York Times bestseller. Angie’s debut novel, Miracle Creek, won the Edgar Award, the ITW Thriller Award, the Strand Critics’ Award, and the Pinckley Prize and was named one of the hundred best mysteries and thrillers of all time by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and the Today show. One of Variety Magazine’s inaugural “10 Storytellers to Watch,” Angie has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, Glamour, and numerous literary journals. She lives in northern Virginia with her family.Recommended Books: Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump Daniel Mason, North Woods Hang Kan, Greek Lessons 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

12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about how he wrote a book out of found language. The conversation reveals why The Nature Book is so compelling: it scrambles the usual distinctions between narrative and database. It is fast-paced, propulsive, full of cliffhangers and yet also a “mood collage” composed of macro, micro, and nanopatterns that Tom identified in his corpus. Writing through a complex set of Oulipo-like constraints, he checked his own authorial freedom to create a book in which the human hand becomes distant and ghostly – its traces felt in the change of seasons and at the bottoms of oceans yet nowhere seen.Deidre connects Tom’s “literary supercut” (his own term for his practice) to the centuries-old tradition of commonplacing in which ordinary readers would cut and paste favored passages into books that then became archives of personal experience and collective memory. The Nature Book thus finds its place in a countercultural tradition of authorship where recycling takes precedence over invention. Copying, curation, and rearrangement become a novelistic style of “degrowth” in which writers discover that, in lieu of developing new language, they can plumb the depths of our already existing language. The episode ends with a series of surprising answers to the signature question: narratives and databases cross paths with hookups and keepsakes!Mentions:  Kota Ezawa Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Fiction for Dummies Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement Herman Melville, Moby Dick It Narratives – narratives in which protagonists are often manufactured objects (e.g. Adventures of a Corkscrew (1775)) Elvia Wilk, Death by Landscape Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith et al. (edited) 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

A Coup, the third novel in Phyllis Skoy’s Turkish Trilogy (Black Rose Writing 2023) follows a young woman in Turkey. In the first book of the trilogy, Adalet, who has found new friends after a devastating earthquake killed her parents, destroyed their home, took her unborn baby, and left her scarred for life. Her husband leaves her for another woman, and as part of the divorce agreement, she’s forced to live far from the city. Now in the third book, Adalet is back in the city, visiting Nuray, a college friend who runs a small women’s magazine. It’s not long after an attempted coup against Erdogan, a strongman who is set to crush all opposition, and police suddenly show up and throw Nuray, her fellow journalists, and Adalet into a notorious prison. They’re in separate, filthy and horrifying cells, and Adalet has to confront the possibility of never getting out alive. This is a novel about regular people trying to live their lives in the aftermath of Turkey’s takeover by a populist authoritarian leader.Phyllis M Skoy’s first short story, “Life Before,” appeared as the Discovery of the Year in Bosque, 2013. What Survives, the first novel in the Turkish Trilogy (IP Books) was short listed for the Santa Fe Writers Project, a finalist in the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and First Runner Up in the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Short List. In 2022, Black Rose Writing reissued What Survives and published the prequel, As They Are. A Coup, the third novel in the trilogy, follows the lives of two women in the aftermath of the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, a country which fascinates her. Myopia, A Memoir (IP Books 2017) describes what it was like to grow up with a refugee father still unknowingly consumed with the fears and struggles of his past. The author of various published short stories and essays, Skoy is a retired psychoanalyst who practiced in both New York City and Albuquerque before her retirement in 2018. She specialized in working with the deaf, with children, and with adults suffering from depression, anxiety, and trauma. She currently resides in Placitas, New Mexico with her husband and her Australian Cattle dog. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Thieves (Fence Books, 2023) is an autofictional account of a gallery girl named Valerie – an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, the consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic bildungsroman.Valerie Werder is an art writer, a fiction author, and a doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her critical, creative, and scholarly work has been published in Public Culture, BOMB, Flash Art, and various exhibition catalogues, and has been performed at Participant Inc in New York City, and Artspace in New Haven. Werder is a 2023-23 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor, and was previously a 2021 Art & Law Fellow. Her debut novel, Thieves (2023), was winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose.Iva Glisic is a historian and art historian specialising in modern Russia and the Balkans.Liz Bradtke is a writer, editor, and communications specialist who works for the Australian Library and Information Association. Liz has studied and taught in the English departments of the University of Melbourne and New York University. Her poetry has been featured in The Age, Voiceworks magazine and Gutcult. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sheldon Birnie's novel Down in the Flood (BookBaby, 2012) is the story of a man who is rapidly becoming lost in a sea of women, whisky, and bad weather. Set in the Canadian West, the story follows the narrator through a season of torrential rain and personal tribulation. With a colourful cast of characters along for the ride, Down in the Flood is a frank examination of alcoholism, friendship, love, and bad weather.After adventuring around the Canadian West, our narrator and his best friend, Jack, return to their small hometown on the prairies to regroup and try to shake their addictions. But quickly, the pair fall into familiar patterns. Their personal quests for redemption are complicated by the arrival of two beautiful women - Iris and Rose - and an assorted cast of characters who make giving up the bottle even harder. Compounded by a season of unprecedented bad weather, their struggles soon come to overwhelm them. Will our narrator and Jack make it out with their lives intact, or will they go down in the flood? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father's footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times.But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test.From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the values that have shaped their lives. But in the midst of their disillusionment, they'll discover their own capacity for resilience, connection, and, ultimately, hope.Andrew’s debut novel, The Altruists, was published by Viking in the United States and in seventeen other countries. The Altruists was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Paris Review staff pick, an Amazon Editors’ Pick, and the People Book of the Week.Andrew is the editor of Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Le Monde, Bookforum, The Paris Review Daily, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Andrew lives in Brooklyn, New York.Recommendations: Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach Joyce Carol Oates, Wonderland Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club 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

Marjorie Hudson's Indigo Field (Regal House Publishing, 2023) paints a sweeping picture of multigenerational family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel is stunned when his wife dies, leaving him stranded in the fancy, rural North Carolina retirement community he’d hated from the start. The community is located next to an abandoned field that hides centuries of crimes. The only person who remembers is Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her entire family. Reba takes in the white child whose evil father killed her beloved niece, whom she doesn’t want to disappoint. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while the colonel’s son guards bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut in which North Carolina race relations, land use and ancient trees, farming and development, history and memory are all uprooted during a massive storm.Marjorie Hudson was born in a small town in Illinois, raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in rural North Carolina. 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

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

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

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