New Books in Literature

Today I talked to the wonderful Sandy Moffett. Sandy joined the Grinnell faculty in 1971 and teaches Acting, Directing and American Theatre. Although now Emeritus, he continues to teach and direct when called upon. He is also devoted to conservation and prairie restoration and has been responsible for the restoration and preservation of nearly 900 acres of native grassland and woodland in Poweshiek and Mahaska Counties. Sandy writes short stories and songs and performs with the Too Many String Band.We talked about how Sandy got to Grinnell, his many years experience directing Grinnell students in many, many productions, and his extensive work preserving Iowa's tall grass prairie. We also discuss his new book The Ghost of Craven Snuggs: A Midwestern Murder Mystery (Ice Cube Press, 2022). Here's a short description of the book: "Early one November, portraits of the Chief Executives of three major midwestern meat-producing corporations and the governor of Iowa go missing. These incidents seem minor until the dead bodies of the three CEOs are discovered in the hog lots and chicken factories that they own. The governor remains alive but terrified. He immediately orders the state department of criminal investigation to drop all other duties to protect him. The job of investigating the thefts and murders falls to the small, understaffed, sheriff’s department. Initial suspects—a disgruntled young biology professor who has resigned to protest the state university’s support of large-scale meat production, the widows of the deceased who seem a bit too delighted to be rid of their husbands, and an 80-year-old armyveteran who is valiantly fighting the proliferation of CAFOs in her township. The sheriff and his deputies are left with a single clue: an ancient pickup truck that belonged to Craven Snuggs, a fierce opponent of large-scale industrial agriculture, who died in a mysterious fire years earlier. The investigation takes a makeshift posse through the woods, prairies, and crop fields of Nachawinga County." Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In 1934, tens of thousands of Communist guerillas fled Jiangxi, in an extended retreat through hazardous terrain to Shaanxi in the north, while under fire from their Nationalist enemies. The Long March, as it became to be known, helped build the legend of the Chinese Communist Party, and of its leader Mao.While on the Long March, Mao had a daughter, who was left behind to live with a local family due to the trek’s dangersThat event inspired Michael X. Wang’s debut novel Lost in the Long March (Overlook Press, 2022), about one couple who faced a similar decision–whether to leave their child behind–and that decision’s repercussions decades later.In this interview, Michael and I talk about the Long March, what makes it a great setting for a novel, and how its story aligns with many other family stories from modern China.Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a small coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi province. His short story collection, Further News of Defeat (Autumn House Press: 2020), won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection and was a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction. Michael’s work has appeared in the New England Review, Greensboro Review, Day One, and Juked, among others. He is currently an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Arkansas Tech University and lives in Russellville, Arkansas. He can be followed on Twitter at @MichaelXWang3.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Lost in the Long March. 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

Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change.In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon into the pandemic moment of late March, 2020. Then they discuss Stan’s sense that SF is the realism of the day and his take on “cognitive estrangement.” Finally, they happen upon a shared admiration for the great epic SF poet, Frederick Turner. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick.Mentioned in the Episode George Stewart, “Earth Abides“ Mary Shelley, “The Last Man“ M. P. Shiel, “The Purple Cloud“ John Clute, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (on “fantastika”) Frederick Turner, “Genesis” and “Apocalypse“ Ursula Le Guin, “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (1974; KSR praises such works as this for “power of poetry alone”) Darko Suvin, “Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre ” (1979; on cognitive estrangement) “The door dilated” a quote from Robert A. Heinlein in “Beyond This Horizon” Read the transcript here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Becoming the Writer You Already Are (Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the parts of your writing process that need developing. The book is ideal for dissertation writing seminars, graduate students struggling with the transition from coursework to dissertation work, scholars who are supporting or participating in writing groups, and marginalized scholars whose writing struggles have prompted them to internalize the bias that others have about their ability to do exemplary research.Michelle R. Boyd is the founder of the InkWell Academic Writing Retreats.Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

We can't all be heroes. Some try and succeed. Others posture and pretend. And a few--just a few--set off on their hero's quest only to discover that failure was within them all along.Murray Lee's Compass (Publerati, 2022) recounts the adventures of a man who, after traveling the world shilling stories for a major geographic magazine about historic expeditions and explorers, sets out on an adventure of his own--an ill-advised and poorly planned trip to the Arctic floe edge under the disorienting twenty-four-hour summer sun. When the ice breaks and his guide disappears, the narrator ends up alone and adrift in the hostile northern sea. He draws on his knowledge of historic expeditions to craft his own, inept, attempt at survival. As time passes and he becomes increasingly disoriented, his obsession with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea, becomes terrifyingly real.Part Life of Pi, part Into the Wild, Compass draws heavily on true historical adventures, Inuit mythology, and its Arctic setting. The narrator, a self-aware buffoon who remains nameless throughout, is both remarkably well-informed and entirely useless. He knows just enough to steer himself into the path of disaster--repeatedly, often comically, and ultimately tragically.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

What is still wild in us – and is it recoverable? The poems in Wilder (Liverpool UP, 2022), Jemma Borg’s second collection, are acts of excavation into the deeper and more elusive aspects of our mental and physical lives. Whether revisiting Dante’s forest of the suicides, experiencing the saturation of new motherhood or engaging in a boundary-dissolving encounter with a psychedelic cactus, these meticulous and sensuous poems demonstrate a restless intelligence, seeking out what we are losing and inviting us to ‘break ourselves each against the beauty of the other’.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

Crimes are meant to be solved. But what happens when they’re not? For the individuals involved—from the victims and their families to police investigators—this is the most frustrating part of all. For them there’s no resolution, no justice, no tidy boxes in which to pack away all the bits and pieces of a puzzle that finally links together. Instead, they are only left with questions that may never get answered.In The Best New True Crime Stories: Unsolved Crimes & Mysteries (Mango Publishing, 2022), the sixth volume in her true crime franchise, Mitzi Szereto brings together all-new and original accounts of unsolved crimes and mysterious stories from around the world penned by writers from across the literary spectrum, from true crime and crime fiction to journalism. Readers will uncover a fascinating collection of crimes that are dark, scary, mysterious, and still waiting to be solved.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

Chrysta Bilton is an American writer who lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. Her first book, the memoir Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, was published in July 2022 by Little, Brown in the US and Octopus in the UK.Chrysta's work has appeared in The Guardian, Literary Hub, and Newsweek. Normal Family was listed among Kirkus's Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 and named a 'best' or 'must-read' book of Summer 2022 by Amazon, The Los Angeles Times,Vanity Fair, People, USA Today, The Hollywood Reporter, Cup of Jo, Parade, Today, Apple, and elsewhere.Book Recommendations: David Sheff, Beautiful Boy Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road 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 first story in Jamil Jan Kochai’s newest collection has an interesting title and premise.“Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” leads The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking: 2022). But what starts as a story of a young Afghan-American man buying the latest installment of the stealth video game becomes an exploration of Afghanistan, how its borne the brunt of generations of imperial and geopolitical conflict–and how that history is etched on its people.Jamil’s book is about Afghanistan–as well as Afghans and Afghan-Americans, grappling with history and strife, conflict and tension, family and community, often amidst the backdrop of an unfeeling U.S. invasion.Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking: 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Currently, he is a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.Today, Jamil and I will talk about his short stories, his Afghan and Afghan-American characters, how they relate to today’s Afghanistan–and some of the surprising inspirations for some of his stories.You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak. 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

From Lucrezia Borgia to Marlene Dietrich, Empress Marie Fyodorovna of Russia, and most recently the actress Sarah Bernhardt, C. W. Gortner has made a career out of finding strong, fascinating, real-life heroines for his novels. In The American Adventuress (William Morrow, 2022), he focuses his attention on Jennie Jerome, the mother of Winston Churchill.From the moment we first meet her as a sassy and defiant twelve-year-old schoolgirl, Jennie charts her own course—to the consternation of her more conventional but in some ways wiser mother. Her father—an entrepreneur hovering on the edge of elite New York society—adores and supports this second daughter whose character so resembles his own, but some shady business dealings and a long-term affair with Jennie’s piano teacher eventually undermine his marriage. Jennie’s mother flees with her three daughters to Paris, where the girls complete their education. Then the Franco-Prussian War begins, and the family moves to London and safety.There Jennie makes the acquaintance of an odd-looking but charming and intelligent young man, Lord Randolph Churchill, who proposes marriage almost right away. Jennie falls madly in love, and soon they are courting in earnest despite opposition from both their families.A gifted pianist, a beauty, a free spirit, and a loving if often-distant mother, Jennie lives life to the hilt: spending extravagantly, flirting outrageously, neglecting her children, and breaking convention in ways that defy our views of the constraints placed on Victorian women. But whatever her faults, Jennie herself is unforgettable, and it is Gortner’s achievement that he brings her so vividly to life.C. W. Gortner holds an MFA in Writing with an emphasis in Renaissance Studies from the New College of California. From an original focus on the Tudors, the range of his bestselling fiction has expanded to include the lives of Coco Chanel, Catherine de Medici, and Isabella of Castile. The American Adventuress is his twelfth 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 next novel, Song of the Storyteller, will appear 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