New Books in Literature

In his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture. Based on Jonan’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a vivid picture of Mongol landscapes, Western interactions, and the rise in cultural tensions.Maggie Freeman is a PhD student in the School of Architecture at MIT. She researches uses of architecture by nomadic peoples and historical interactions of nomads and empires, with a focus on the modern Middle East. 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 Sarah Fawn Montgomery about her new collection of essays, Halfway from Home (Split Lip Press, 2022). These essays explore, in nuanced and beautiful prose, Montgomery’s journey to find a place—or perhaps a place of mind—she might call home. We follow Montgomery from childhood to adulthood, from California, to the Midwest, to the East Coast. This is a journey that asks what it means to grow into wisdom and to love this burning earth which, in one way or another, is where we all must find ourselves a home. Halfway from Home is a book for any of us who have ever struggled to belong and who very much want to.Eric LeMay is on the creative writing faculty at Ohio University. He is the author of five books, most recently Remember Me. He can be reached at eric@ericlemay.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind.In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by gay rights activists, becomes a member of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Along the way Trey attempts to navigate past traumas and searches for ways to maintain familial relationships--all while seeking the meaning of life amid so much death.Vibrant, humorous, and fraught with entanglements, Rasheed Newson's My Government Means to Kill Me (Flatiron Books, 2023) is an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story that lends itself to a larger discussion about what it means for a young gay Black man in the mid-1980s to come to terms with his role in the midst of a political and social reckoning.Rasheed Newson is a writer and producer of Bel-Air, The Chi, and Narcos. He currently resides in Pasadena, California with his husband and two children. My Government Means to Kill Me is his debut novel.Recommended Books: Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming Richard Mirabella, Brother and Sister Enter the Forest Jeffrey Escoffery, If I Survive You Prince Shakur, When They Tell You to Be Good Rasheed’s Socials! Twitter: @rasheednewson TikTok: @rasheednewson Instagram: rasheed.newson.author 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies.Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenager during the Red Summer race riots of 1919 shot and killed a police detective after he broke down her bedroom door. Prohibited from arguing self-defense, she was convicted of manslaughter, but a judge later tossed out the verdict.Penelope found the real Johnson’s exoneration so remarkable that she felt “it had to be magic.” As she puts it, “How did this young Black girl get out of that situation? If magic was involved, that would make so much more sense.”The book’s magical elements are layered over D.C.’s dynamic Black community, where Black entrepreneurs, artists and academics thrive even as they face racism that is both overt (the Ku Klux Klan holds a demonstration) and systemic (Woodrow Wilson had segregated the federal workforce a few years earlier). The magic echoes the hope and horror of the real world, providing Penelope’s characters with the power to save themselves and their community—but at a painful price.Leslye Penelope is an award-winning author of fantasy and paranormal romance. Her debut novel, Song of Blood & Stone, was chosen as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time. The novel also won the inaugural award for Best Self-Published Fiction from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When the two immigrant parents in Zeno Sworder’s latest illustrated book go to the baker asking for a cake for their son, the baker asks for something different instead of money.“Five centimeters should do it,” says the baker. “Your height, of course”That starts the story of My Strange Shrinking Parents (Thames & Hudson: 2023): a tale that connects to immigration, parental sacrifice, and the changing perspective that comes with growing up.In this interview, Zeno and I talk about immigrant parents, the use of height as a symbol, and what’s different about creating an illustrated book.Zeno Sworder is a writer and artist who lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is also the author of This Small Blue Dot (Thames & Hudson: 2021).You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of My Strange Shrinking Parents. 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

Today I talked to Sarit Yishai-Levi about The Woman Beyond the Sea (Amazon Crossing, 2023). The book was translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann.Eliyah is 25 when she travels from Tel Aviv to Paris to meet up with her husband, who turns out to be having an affair with a French woman. As her life crumbles, Eliyah plunges into a deep depression, returns home to her childhood bed, and slowly descends into madness. The therapist assigned to her after a suicide attempt manages to help her rebuild her life, but she still grapples with Lily, her not-very loving mother. Then Eliyah and her mother journey across the sea to discover the truth about who they both are. Moving but sometimes horrifying backstories set around the world fill out the lives of the characters - Eliyah’s mother, father, her new boyfriend, and her grandparents. This is a sweeping saga about trauma, betrayal, antisemitism, expulsion from home and country, and secrets.Sarit Yishai-Levi Yishai-Levi was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic family that has lived in the city for eight generations. She’s been living with her family in Tel Aviv since 1970 and is a renowned Israeli journalist and author. In 2016 she published her first book, The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem. It immediately became a bestseller and garnered critical acclaim. The book sold more than three hundred thousand copies in Israel, was translated into ten languages, and was adapted into a TV series that won the Israeli TV award for best drama series. It also won the Publishers Association’s Gold, Platinum, and Diamond prizes; the Steimatzky Prize for bestselling book of the year in Israel; and the WIZO France Prize for best book translated into French. Yishai-Levi’s second book, The Woman Beyond the Sea, was published in 2019. It won the Publishers Association’s Gold and Platinum prizes and was adapted for television by Netflix. 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 Kelly Barnhill about her book The Crane Husband (Tordotcom, 2023).Our unnamed narrator, a fifteen-year-old girl, manages to care for her six-year-old brother and creative but irresponsible mother by skipping school and selling her mother’s artwork. Her father taught her everything useful before he died, and much like Katniss in The Hunger Games, she devotes herself to keeping her small family afloat (and dodging the social worker’s efforts to intervene). The Crane Husband opens with the arrival of her mother’s newest lover, an insolent giant crane that demands every bit of her mother’s attention while returning her affection with raucous sex and deep cuts from his razor-sharp beak.From this surrealist beginning, things get progressively stranger. In some ways, this surreal, poetic novella reminded me of Australian author Kathleen Jenning’s eerie novella, Flyway. There are fatherless children fighting for survival, allusion to ancestral violence, and odd metamorphoses taking place in remote locations. Underneath the inexplicable events lie opposing motivations—the wish to escape both love and duty fighting with the desire to nurture and care for others. The two novels’ daughters are left to sort through the wreckage and attempt to make wise decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sherry Thomas' latest book in her Lady Sherlock Series, A Tempest at Sea (Berkley, 2023), finds Charlotte Holmes in a dangerous investigation at set in the seventh book in this bestselling series. After feigning her own death in Cornwall to escape from Moriarty’s perilous attention, Charlotte Holmes goes into hiding. But then she receives a tempting offer: Find a dossier the crown is desperately seeking, and she might be able to go back to a normal life. Her search leads her aboard the RMS Provence. But on the night Charlotte makes her move to retrieve the dossier, in the midst of a terrifying storm in the Bay of Biscay, a brutal murder takes place on the ship. Instead of solving the crime, as she is accustomed to doing, Charlotte must take care not to be embroiled in this investigation, lest it become known to those who harbor ill intentions that Sherlock Holmes is abroad and still very much alive. Thomas talks about writing the series, her approach to a female Sherlock, romance, writing about social class, and how difficult it is to find a layout of a passenger ship from the 1880s. Rebekah Buchanan is a Professor of English and Director of English Education at Western Illinois University. Her research focuses on feminism, activism, and literacy practices in youth culture, specifically through zines and music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family.So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and speculative fiction as the lives of Bo, Brandon, and Blue begin to intersect, uncovering a vast network of secrets and an experimental technology that threatens to upend life itself. Intertwined with them is the saga of an iconic '80s detective show, Raider, whose star actor has imploded spectacularly after revelations of long-term, concealed abuse.Flux is a haunting and sometimes shocking exploration of the cyclical nature of grief, of moving past trauma, and of the pervasive nature of whiteness within the development of Asian identity in America.Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, published March 21, 2023 in the US and UK from Melville House.,His work has appeared in The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. He received the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Fiction from The Southern Review and a special mention in the 2022 Pushcart Prize anthology. He received an MFA from Columbia University and is an editorial assistant at One Story.Recommended Books: Julia Bartz, Writing Retreat Gina Chung, Sea Change 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

Svetlana Lavochkina's book Dam Duchess (Whiskey Tit, 2018) invites readers to take a surreal journey into the past: the construction of Dnipro Dam, the Stalinist regime, the fate of the aristocrats of the Russian Empire, the horrors of the Holodomor, the memory of the Cossack Hetmanate that travels from generation to generation, the Soviet harrowing of life and psyche. To survive in the Soviet Union, one has to learn how to adjust to the system that embraces fear and intimidation to impose a distorted sense of loyalty and comradeship. Agreements can certify the collapse of empires, but the individual’s memory of violence sanctioned by brutal regimes will travel through years, decades, and generations. Lavochkina’s Dam Duchess calls for compassion that can easily be lost once terror is normalized.Nataliya Shpylova-Saeed has a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures (Indiana University, 2022). Her dissertation explores contested memory focusing on Ukraine and Russia. She also holds a Ph.D. in American literature (Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, 2007). In her dissertation on Richard Brautigan, she focuses on postmodernism in American literature. Currently, she is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Eurasian program at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature