New Books in Literature

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu's palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.Tania James is the author of Atlas of Unknowns, Aerogrammes, and Other Stories, and The Tusk That Did the Damage. Her stories have appeared in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, Granta, the New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and One Story, and have been featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. The Tusk that Did the Damage was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tania lives in Washing D.C. where she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.Recommended Books: Hua Hsu, Stay True Marcy Dermansky, Very Nice Rita Chang-Eppig, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea *A video of a period expert playing Tipu’s Tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London is available hereChris 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’s book is: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (Milkweed Editions, 2023), by Debra Magpie Earling, which is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Debra Magpie Earling brings this mythologized figure vividly to life, casting unsparing light on the men who brutalized her and recentering Sacajewea as the arbiter of her own history. Raised among the Lemhi Shoshone, in this telling the young Sacajewea is bright and bold, growing strong from the hard work of “learning all ways to survive”: gathering berries, water, roots, and wood; butchering buffalo, antelope, and deer; catching salmon and snaring rabbits; weaving baskets and listening to the stories of her elders. When her village is raided and her beloved Appe and Bia are killed, Sacajewea is kidnapped and then gambled away to Charbonneau, a French Canadian trapper. Heavy with grief, Sacajewea learns how to survive at the edge of a strange new world teeming with fur trappers and traders. When Lewis and Clark’s expedition party arrives, Sacajewea knows she must cross a vast and brutal terrain with her newborn son, the white man who owns her, and a company of men who wish to conquer and commodify the world she loves. Written in lyrical, dreamlike prose, The Lost Journals of Sacajewea is an astonishing work of art and a powerful tale of perseverance—the Indigenous woman’s story that hasn’t been told.Keywords from today’s episode include: Sacajewea, Agai River, Appe, Bia, Charbonneau, Lewis and Clark, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, Otter Woman, Pop Pank, MMIW, Lemhi Shoshone, Shoshone, Mandan, Hidasta.Today’s guest is: Debra Magpie Earling, who is the author of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. An earlier version of The Lost Journals of Sacajewea was written in verse and produced as an artist book during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Perma Red, by Debra Magpie Earling Sacred Wilderness, by Susan Power Grass Dancer, by Susan Power Night of the Living Rez, by Morgan Talty Indian Horse, by Richard Wagamese Embers, by Richard Wagamese Listeners may also be interested in: This podcast with Morgan Talty discussing Night of the Living Rez This podcast with Michelle Cyca about Misrepresentation on Campus This podcast with the editor of Tribal Colleges Journal of American Indian Higher Education This podcast on The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, though she accepts the moniker of “African writer,” she rejects the double-standard of authenticity it implies. She also chafes against the Conradian image of Africa, which infused so many of her own literary encounters with her home continent. In response to these distortions, Aminatta describes developing a “forensic level of honesty” that allowed her to re-encounter Sierra Leone on her own terms. She also learned to look back at those who would look at her.Reversing the gaze extends not only from Africa to Europe but also to the human-animal divide. Aminatta and Nicole reconsider Western stereotypes around African animal cruelty, what it means to portray animal consciousness, and what the treatment of dogs in Sierra Leone and foxes in London tells us about what those societies value. Finally, Aminatta reads from Ancestor Stones and offers a chilling vision of the civil war in Sierra Leone through the dissociated perspective of a character inspired by the women who lived through it. Listeners will feel the “underground rising” in Aminatta’s memorable phrase.Books Mentioned:-Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad-Kazuo Ishiguro-Dr. Gudush Jalloh – veterinarian in Sierra Leone and subject of Forna’s essay “The Last Vet”-Pablo Picasso, Bull’s Head-Forna, Happiness-Forna, The Hired Man-Temne – largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone; also the name of one of the official languages of Sierra Leone.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

Tania James' novel Loot (Knopf 2023) is about a young woodcarver who is ordered by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in late 18th century India to carve a large wooden tiger. The tiger seems to devour a life-sized European man. As the apprentice of an alcoholic French clockmaker, Abbas has a short time to create this gift for the sultan’s youngest sons after they return from being held captive by the British. Later, British forces attack Mysore, kill as many as they can reach, and ship everything of value back to England. Abbas survives the attack and then the sea and other adventures in order to reach Rouen, where his teacher’s teacher lives. Spanning 50 years and two continents, Loot is a hero’s quest, a love story, and an exuberant heist novel that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across the world.Tania James is the author of the novels The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short-story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Freeman’s, Granta, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, One Story, and A Public Space. Tania has been a fellow of Ragdale, MacDowell, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University and lives in Washington, D.C. When she's not writing, James likes to dance--whether it's the classical Indian dance form of kuchipudi or simply busting a move in her living room. Her favorite mode of transport is bicycle and her favorite place to chill is the terrace of the Martin Luther King Jr library.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

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers reflection and instruction informed by their own methods and processes. It’s a beautiful and vibrant book that invites writers, artists, and would-be creators into a feast of play and possibility.Kelcey Ervick is the author of the graphic memoir, The Keeper and other books. Her comics have been published widely, including in The Washington Post, The Believer, and Lit Hub, and two featured comics series of hers have appeared in The Rumpus. She is a professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, where she teaches creative writing, comics, and literary collage.Tom Hart is the author/artist of The New York Times #1 bestselling graphic memoir Rosalie Lightning and of The Art of the Graphic Memoir. He is the executive director of The Sequential Artists Workshop, an organization and school for comics and graphic novels in Gainesville, Florida. Before founding SAW, Tom was a core instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for 10 years. 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 Liisa Kovala about her new novel Sisu's Winter War (Latitude 46, 2022).Meri Saari made a promise to her dying mother she would keep the family together, but she was too young to know how a war can pull people apart. As a teenager responsible for her siblings she finds herself following her father to the front lines during the Winter War when he goes missing in action. Forty years later, living in northern Ontario, Meri's past and present collide when she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Responsible for her granddaughter, and navigating a strained relationship with her daughter Linnea, Meri is haunted by the people of her past and by the promises she failed to keep. As she struggles against her inevitable decline, she knows her losses are amassing: her home, her health, and her memories. Meri embarks on one last journey in search of the man she had to give up, and before it's too late. Before everything disappears. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz.Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself.Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and the Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, winner of the American Choix Goncourt, and it has been a long-selling bestseller in France.Tina Kover is the translator of more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, including Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Anna Gavalda’s Life, Only Better. Her translations have twice been nominated for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award and she was the recipient in 2009 of a Literary Translation Fellowship from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts. She is the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a youtube channel that spotlights translators reading from their own work. She lives in the northeast of England.Books Recommended: Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six million Patrick Modiano, Scene of the Crime Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise Petra Rautiainen, Land of Ashes and Snow Julya Rabinowich, Me, In between 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

Emily Hockaday is a poet from Queens who writes about ecology, astronomy, and the city landscape, alongside more personal subjects. Her first collection Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022) tackles the onset of chronic illness and parenting through grief. Her next full-length, In a Body, will be out in October with Harbor Editions. This collection looks at chronic illness through the lens of ecopoetry. Emily is the author of five chapbooks and has had poems in a variety of print and online journals. You can learn more about her at www.emilyhockaday.com.Naming the Ghost, Hockaday's first full-length collection, is a strikingly unique collection of poems that take on the grief of losing a parent just as the author becomes one herself during the time between onset of her chronic symptoms and a diagnosis that she was convinced, all evidence be damned, was fatal. Written during what the author herself calls her nervous breakdown, Naming the Ghost gives the reader a voicey visceral, encapsulating experience of the anxiety, disorientation and kind of fear of the tempts one to do reckless things that comprise the no-man's land between knowing something's wrong but not yet knowing its name. You can find Naming The Ghost on Cornerstone Press's store and on Amazon.You can learn more about the interviewer 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

In Dreaming in Spanish: An Unexpected Love Story In Puerto Vallarta (Little Creek Press, 2023), Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. She’s honest about her struggle to overcome her weaknesses, her relationships, and her addictions at the age of twenty-four. In 1999, with $10,000 from her grandmother’s will, her goal is to live near a Mexican beach and get her act together. She commits to six months of celibacy and vows to avoid her previously reckless, party lifestyle in favor of reading, meditating, and getting healthy.Sara Alvarado is a writer, speaker, and fierce advocate for racial equity in real estate. She is the co-founder of OWN IT: Building Black Wealth, co-owner of Alvarado Real Estate Group, author of the Racial Justice Toolkit for Real Estate Professionals (2020), A Guide for Change Agents (2016), and creator of the Conversation Challenge: helping white people talk about race. Sara has also had numerous essays and articles published in Madison365, HuffPost, and Scary Mommy. She graduated from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis with a BA in Spanish and feels most at home in Madison, WI. and Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Sara is a lover of love, spirit, dance, and adventure (with the music turned up), and enjoys traveling, challenging the status quo, and writing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1897, a Mount Holyoke College junior named Bertha Mellish disappears from campus overnight, leaving no word for her family. It’s a time when female college students are still considered “queer” (in the old sense of peculiar as well as the modern understanding of the word), although the college administrators insist that their primary purpose is to produce excellent wives and mothers. But even this community of oddities considers Bertha strange, by which the other girls mean that she pays too little attention to parties and boys, too much to her schoolwork and social causes.Bertha’s only true friend is Agnes Sullivan, a young woman from a poor Boston family who has been forced to conceal her Catholic upbringing to gain admission to the college. Agnes, a would-be doctor (an even greater anomaly in late 19th-century culture than a woman with a college education, although not inconceivable), grieves Bertha’s absence but insists she has no idea where Bertha might be. Dragging the rivers and lakes turns up nothing, supposed sightings of the missing girl lead nowhere, and the police would be willing to write the case off as closed if only her relatives and the family doctor would let it go.Almost from the beginning, it’s clear that Agnes knows far more than she lets on, but finding out what really happened to Bertha and why is a long, winding trail of suspense. Through the overlapping stories of Agnes, Bertha’s sister Florence, Dr. Henry Hammond, and the inspector whom Hammond hires to find the missing girl, Katharine Beutner keeps us on the edge of our seats as she unravels their tangle of secrets and lies. Perhaps the most intriguing element is knowing that however fictional the plot and many of the characters, the story derives from the real-life disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897, the mystery of which has never been solved.Katharine Beutner, the author of fiction and nonfiction, teaches English at the College of Wooster in Ohio. Killingly (Soho Press, 2023) is her second 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