New Books in 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

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

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, Caroline O'Donoghue's The Rachel Incident (Knopf, 2023) is a triumph.Caroline O’Donoghue is an Irish author, journalist and host of the award-winning podcast  "Sentimental Garbage." Her previous work includes a trilogy for young adults, the first of which, All Our Hidden Gifts, is under option to a major international indie with Caroline adapting for long form TV drama. On publication of her first novel, Promising Young Women, she was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards’ Newcomer of the Year and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her next adult novel, Scenes of a Graphic Nature, was published in 2020 and it is in development as a feature. She has a regular column for The Irish Examiner. Caroline was born in Cork but currently lives in London.Check out Caroline’s fantastic, award winning culture podcast, "Sentimental Garbage."Recommendations:--Ann Patchett, Tom Lake--Zadie Smith, Fraud--Esi Edugyan, Washington BlackChris 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

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”.Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. 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 Ben Pladek about his novel Dry Land (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). Rand Brandt, a forester in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, discovers that his touch can grow any plant or tree. In this tale of Magical Realism, he dreams of using his gift to restore landscapes ruined by the lumber industry, but first needs to test his powers. Gabriel, his fellow forester, and secret lover, finds and saves Rand after he’s pushed himself by spending his nights sneaking into the forest instead of sleeping. It’s 1917 and the foresters are drafted to join in the fight in France. An old friend of Rand’s joins the press covering his unit and helps him cover his tracks. A commanding officer learns about Rand’s gift and demands that he grow forests for the wood needed to win the war, but Rand learns that everything he grows will die within days. Now, he’s keeping two major secrets, either of which, if discovered, could destroy him.Ben Pladek is associate professor of literature at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His first novel, Dry Land, appeared in September 2023 with the University of Wisconsin Press. He’s previously published short fiction in Strange Horizons, The Offing, Slate Future Tense Fiction, and elsewhere. As a colleague pointed out to him, his short fiction is often set in the near-future and his longer fiction in the near-past; other recurring interests include ecology, messy relationships, messier bureaucracy, and people feeling guilty. He’s also written an academic book called The Poetics of Palliation: Romantic Literary Therapy, 1790-1850, that came out from Liverpool University Press in 2019, as well as a number of articles on British Romanticism. Before getting hired at Marquette, he did his PhD at the University of Toronto and taught for a year in the fantastic Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When he moved to Wisconsin, he fell in love with the landscape and the state’s fascinating history of conservation, including the writings of Aldo Leopold. Ben and his husband have hiked all over Wisconsin. They especially enjoy the Northwoods, Horicon Marsh, and the southwest “driftless” area. In Ben’s spare time you can find him reading, birdwatching, taking long walks around Milwaukee, admiring wetlands, eating peanut butter, and taking pictures of informational signs at historical monuments that he’ll never go back and read. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature