New Books in Literature

Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel,Where it Rains in Color (Angry Robot, 2022), is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi. Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the Milky Way. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, least of all the Rare Indigo. But Lileala’s perfect, pampered lifestyle is about to be shattered.Published on the cusp of Crittendon’s 70th birthday, the novel’s creation was decades in the making. Ideas were jotted down and relegated to a drawer while her work as a journalist and ghostwriter took front seat. Inspiration was gathered from her time in Zimbabwe and a recurring dream she had over many years.“The dream influenced the novel a great deal,” says Crittendon. “The novel was kind of built around the dream. When I finally started writing it again, then the dreams came back. And then I stopped and the dreams went away. When I finally got a chance to do that final push, I never had a dream again.”That experience layers an almost metaphysical presence to a story that already includes a different kind of worldbuilding from what we normally see in science fiction. From Swazembi’s galaxy-renowned wind-force public transit system and nuanced cultural greeting of “waves of joy” to the noted lack of violence throughout, the novel offers a fresh perspective on what sci fi can be.Before making the big leap into the world of sci-fi & fantasy, Denise Crittendon held a string of journalism jobs. In addition to being a staff writer for The Detroit News and The Kansas City Star, she was editor-in-chief of the NAACP’s national magazine, The Crisis. Later, she became founding editor of a Michigan-based lifestyle publication for black families. After self-publishing two manuals that empower youth, “Girl in the Mirror, A Teen’s Guide to Self-Awareness” and “Life is a Party That Comes with Exams,” she entered the new-age healing movement as a motivational speaker for teens. These days, she fulfills ghostwriting assignments for clients and writes speculative fiction on the side. She divides her time between Spring Valley, Nevada and her hometown, Detroit, Mich.Brenda Noiseux and Rob Wolf are co-hosts of New Books in Science Fiction. 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 C. P. Lesley about Song of the Storyteller (Five Directions Press, 2023). It’s 1546, and Ivan the Terrible is about to be coronated and married off. Government nobles are given 6 weeks to choose the most beautiful, highborn, fertile, and politically expedient brides from around the country. Before Tsar Ivan makes his choice, 16-year-old Lyuba is forced to go through a series of examinations as a potential bride, but she’s in love with someone else and planning to do everything she can to make herself as unappealing as possible. But anything too obvious could backfire, and her family would pay the price if she was anything but delighted to be a candidate.CP Lesley was born in England and lived in the states from the age of eleven. She earned a PhD in Russian History from Stanford and has always loved telling stories. Author of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum (Five Directions Press), she is currently working on the sixth book in her Songs of Steppe & Forest series, Song of the Steadfast. The series includes Song of the Siren (2019), Song of the Shaman (2020) Song of the Sisters (2021), Song of the Sinner (2022), and now Song of the Storyteller (2023). CP Lesley also hosts New Books in Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. When not thinking up new ways to torture her characters, she edits other people’s manuscripts, reads voraciously, maintains her website, and practices classical ballet.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

Sanaë Lemoine is the author of The Margot Affair and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. She was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia, and now live in New York. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.Book Recommendations: Meera Sodha, Made in India Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow Sarah Freeman, Tides 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

Charles Street Trio: A Novel in Three Voices (2022) is a series of books that collectively form a tapestry of life in the form of a sprawling epic of a novel. Here in Book 1: The Early Years attend a birthday party, spend a day at the hairdresser’s, have your heart broken, experience teen awareness of class difference, loss of a beloved parent, a harrowing accident with your mom, take a bike ride around the corner. All intermingled with a visual feast of original collages and photographs.“We met in that small sanctuary of a place on Charles Street decades ago. One of us said she saw a ghost dance across the kitchen. Even our ghosts are lively. About their own business. Another of us said recently that convening again after forty years of life, love and work, we must be angels. Have a seat. Plenty of chairs all around.”--The Authors (2022)Meet the Artists:Pamela Manché Pearce, prose writer, poet and visual artist. About Pearce’s Widowland, critics have said: “Widowland provides, as a collection, an assortment of beautiful and raw moments that tackle an active life without the poet’s other. Without his living presence. The themes of loss and grief, of course are hardly new…there is a canon, and Pearce arrives in it with her own exquisite verse.”Anthony Valerio, prose writer. Anthony Valerio’s fiction bears likeness to our best dreams, when the fantastical elements of the subconscious play themselves out in a vivid replica of reality.--—The Baltimore Sun.“He’s just crazy enough. He knows his characters, he knows his craft. He gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be.—Shel SilversteinKate Farrell, prose and screen writer. Farrell oversees several hit television series. She is a four-time Emmy Award winning sports producer and has produced an award-winning documentary for HBO.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. (https://newbooksnetwork.substa...) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Kudzu salesman James T. Cullowee arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in the spring of 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu. It can apparently feed cattle, improve soil, grow with no effort, be turned into jam, and cure headaches. Mattie Lee Watson is struck from the moment she sees Mr. Cullowee, and dreams of both becoming Cooper County Kudzu Queen and strolling on the Kudzu King’s arm. But Mattie’s best friend is faced with calamity, Mr. Cullowee seems to be as sneaky and destructive as kudzu, and Mattie realizes that she’s the only one who can fix the mess. Mimi Herman's The Kudzu Queen (Regal House, 2023) is a gripping coming-of-age story about family, trust, race relations, and friendship in the face of divisiveness, alcoholism, mean girls, prejudice, and evil.Mimi Herman is a Kennedy Center teaching artist and director of the United Arts Council Arts Integration Institute. She has taught in the Master of Education programs at Lesley University, served as the 2017 North Carolina Piedmont Laureate, and been an associate editor for Teaching Artist Journal. Since 1990, she has engaged over 25,000 students and teachers with her warm and intuitive teaching style. Mimi holds a BA from the University of North Carolina and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson. She is the author of A Field Guide to Human Emotions, Logophilia and The Art of Learning. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, The Hollins Critic, Main Street Rag, Prime Number Magazine and other journals. Mimi has performed her fiction and poetry at many venues including Why There Are Words in Sausalito, Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh and Symphony Space in New York City. When she's not writing, Mimi codirects Writeaways writing workshops at a chateau in France, a villa in Italy, an adobe in New Mexico and a manor house in Ireland--and does her own plumbing and carpentry work on her almost hundred-year-old house.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

MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, which comes out in January 2023 from Little, Brown. Most recent are the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others) and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Also forthcoming is a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.Book Recommendations: Kristin Chen, Counterfeit Alice Munroe, Selected Stories Ryan Lee Wong, Which Side Are You On? 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

It is the very end of the eighteenth century, and Pandora Blake—known as Dora—lives at the edge of London society. Despite the opposition of her obnoxious uncle Hezekiah and his live-in housekeeper/mistress Lottie, neither of whom has much interest in their orphaned charge, Dora has a dream. She wants to sketch jewelry designs that will appeal to the beauties of the haut ton, in the process earning Dora a livelihood sufficient to free her from her family’s antique shop, now in decline due to Hezekiah’s mismanagement. To that end, Dora spends hours in her attic bedchamber drawing with only her beloved magpie, Hermes, for company.Even before we meet Dora in this enchanting yet troubling tale, we have encountered an unnamed diver bent on retrieving the cargo from a scuttered ship somewhere in the Mediterranean. It soon becomes clear that the mysterious cargo includes a massive Greek vase (more properly, a pithos, used for storing wine or grain), which Hezekiah acquires, together with a shipment of Greek pottery. Dora at first believes this is an attempt to save the store, but her uncle’s behavior raises questions—not least whether he obtained the pithos legally. To find out what Hezekiah has in mind, Dora enlists the help of a bookbinder, Edward Lawrence, setting them off on a journey that will lead deep into Dora’s past.Pandora (Harper Perennial, 2023) is a novel of many layers, as intricately plotted as Dora’s jewelry designs, which seem to have inspired the book’s gorgeous cover. The characters and setting are Dickensian, yet the themes are modern and the reconsideration of the mythical story of Pandora’s Box rings true. Definitely a book worth reading.Susan Stokes-Chapman lives in Northwest Wales, endlessly pestered by a pair of very beautiful (and very naughty) British Shorthair cats named Byron and Brontë while she works on her fiction. Pandora is her debut 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

I Meant to Tell You, by Fran Hawthorne (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022) opens during a conversation between Miranda Isaacs and her fiancé, Russ, who is going through an FBI security check as a prelude to getting his dream job in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Miranda worries that her parents’ antiwar activities in the late 60s might be a stumbling block, but neglects to mention a felony kidnapping arrest that happened when she tried to help a good friend escape a bad marriage. Miranda thought that charge from nearly a decade ago had been erased, so she never mentioned it to Russ. But now, Russ is justified in bringing up the question of honesty in a serious relationship.Fran Hawthorne has been writing novels since she was four years old, although she was sidetracked for several decades by journalism. During that award-winning career, she wrote eight nonfiction books, mainly about consumer activism, the drug industry, and the financial world. (Ethical Chic was named one of the best business books of 2012 by Library Journal, and Pension Dumping was a Foreword magazine 2008 Book of the Year.) Hawthorne has been an editor or regular contributor for The New York Times, Business Week, Fortune, and many other publications. She also writes book reviews for the New York Journal of Books. Her debut novel, The Heirs, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2018. In her non-writing life, Fran runs 8 miles a day, studies Hebrew and French, volunteers at the New-York Historical Society, and works on community projects at her local park and other places. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Dan Kois is the author of three nonfiction books: How to Be A Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Foward, an oral history of Tony Kushner's Angels in America (with Isaac Butler); and Facing Future, part of the 33 1/3 series of music criticism. He's a longtime writer, editor, and Podcaster at Slate. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his family.Book Recommendations: Luke Healy, Con Artists Peter and Maria Hoey, The Bend of Luck Linnea Sterte, A Frog in Fall 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

The Daughters of Izdihar (Harper Voyager, 2023), like last year’s A Master of Djinn, is set in a world similar to Egypt, during the time of the suffragette movement. American-Egyptian author Hadeer Elsbai has chosen to focus even more on social justice issues, through her two main characters, rich spoiled girl Nehal, and struggling bookworm Giorgina. Both have magical powers, as well as an interest in women’s rights, but while Giorgina’s poverty and traditional father make her susceptible to intimidation, Nehal has grown up feeling entitled and being allowed to express her opinions. However, when Nehal is forced into marriage, and bristles at needing her husband’s permission to enroll in a school to train magicians, she starts to realize that even wealth and status can’t make up for the subservient status of women.Nehal and Giorgina become unlikely allies, brought together both through their politics and their proximity to Nico, Giorgina’s husband.Hadeer studied history at Hunter College and later earned her Master’s degree in library science from Queens College. Aside from writing, Hadeer enjoys cats, iced drinks, live theater, and studying the 19th century. She is also a gigantic A Song of Ice and Fire nerd, having read George R.R. Martin’s books before the show. The series remains a constant inspiration.You can follow Gabrielle on Twitter to get updates about new podcasts and more @GabrielleAuthor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature