New Books in Literature

Today I interview Sarah Minor, a brilliant and exciting author and artist. Minor has written a new book that looks into—in fact, I might even say sinks us or maybe slathers us in—slime. And if that sounds more disgusting than appealing, that's one of the many wonders of slime that Minor reveals: yes, slime grosses us out and yet its grossness somehow comes curiously close to desire. Slime features in immensely popular genres our culture loves and loathes, like horror movies and pornography. Slime has its own online communities. Slime even comes from outer space and lands on the earth as "gelatinous meteors." Slime, once you start looking for it, shows up in spaces where we experience birth and death, where bodies connect and boundaries dissolve. Minor's book is called Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit (Noemi Press, 2021), which is a title that slimes together unexpected things, and I start our conversation by asking her about it. Here’s my chat with the warm and wonderfully un-slimy Sarah Minor.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

Ricardo Wilson speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his poem, “nigrescence,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Ricardo talks about his new collection Apparent Horizon and Other Stories, winner of the PANK Book Contest in fiction. The collection includes several short poetic fragments scattered amongst stories and novellas, with both historic and contemporary storylines. He discusses his process for writing from historical research, and what it’s like writing creative and critical work at the same time. Ricardo also talks about Outpost, a fully-funded residency in Vermont for creative writers of color from the US and Latin America.Ricardo Wilson is an assistant professor of English at Williams College and the author of An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories and The Nigrescent Beyond: Mexico, the United States, and the Psychic Vanishing of Blackness. His fiction and critical writing can be found in 3:AM Magazine, Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, CR: The New Centennial Review, Crazyhorse, and Stirring. He is director of Outpost, a residency for creative writers of color from the United States and Latin America. Read his poem in The Common at thecommononline.org/nigrescence.Read more about Ricardo and his work at ricardoawilson.com. Follow him on Twitter @ricardoawilson.Purchase An Apparent Horizon and Other Stories from PANK Books.Find out more about Outpost, and apply by November 1, at outposttheresidency.org.The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. 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 Beth Alvarado about her new novel Jillian in the Borderlands (Black Lawrence Press, 2020)We first meet Jillian Guzmán when she is nine. She’s mute, has a big imagination, and communicates through her drawings. She and her mother, Angie O’Malley live in the borderlands of Arizona and Mexico. Jillian can see ghosts – in the first story a dead child-bride saves her from the clutches of a predatory neighbor. These dark stories introduce faith healers, talking animals, and spirits of the dead. As she grows up, Jillian’s drawings begin to both reflect and create the realities she sees around her, culminating at the Casa de los Olviados, a refuge for the sick and elderly run by a traditional faith healer, Juana of God.Beth Alvarado is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. Her essay collection Anxious Attachments won the 2020 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spievogel Award for the Art of the Essay. She is also the author of Anthropologies: A Family Memoir and Not a Matter of Love and other stories, which won the Many Voices Project Award. Her stories and essays have been published in many fine journals including The Sun, Guernica: An International Magazine of Politics and Art, The Southern Review, and Ploughshares. Three of her essays have been chosen as Notable by Best American Essays. She is a recipient of a 2020 Oregon Career Artist’s Fellowship, and lives in Bend, Oregon, where she is core faculty at OSU-Cascades Low Residency MFA Program.I interview authors of beautifully written literary fiction and mysteries, and try to focus on independently published novels, especially by women and others whose voices deserve more attention. If your upcoming or recently published novel might be a candidate for a podcast, please contact me via my website, gpgottlieb dot com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. The 2014 “Revolution of Dignity” heralded a tremendous transformation of Ukrainian politics and society that has continued to ripple and reverberate throughout the world. These unprecedented events also wrought a remarkable cultural revolution in Ukraine itself. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the presidency of the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review, focusing on newly emergent trends in film, literature, painting, design, and fashion. The journal became an East European cultural institution, publishing outstanding writers in the region and beyond. From his vantage point as a journalist and editor, Davidzon came to observe events and know many of the leading figures in Ukrainian politics and culture, and to write about them for a Western audience. Davidzon later found himself in the center of world events as he became a United States government witness in the Ukraine scandal that shook the presidency of Donald Trump. From Odessa with Love: Political and Literary Essays in Post-Soviet Ukraine (Academica Press, 2020) tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its centerSteven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In a world that demands faith in progress and growth, Limbo (Fitzcarraldo, 2019) is a companion for the stuck, the isolated, delayed, stranded and those in the dark. Fusing memoir with a meditation on creative block and a cultural history of limbo, Dan Fox considers the role that fallow periods and states of inbetween play in art and life. Limbo is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, ghosts and sailors - including the author's older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world - to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and its opposites. From the Headington Shark to radical behavioural experiments, from life aboard a container ship to Sun Ra's cosmology, Limbo argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal. Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (Harvard Graduate School of Design) interviews authors on how the portrayal and use of emptiness and allied concepts (such as voids, nothingness, or limbo) in philosophical, political, religious, and social studies are influenced by the imagination and construction of physical space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mark Baker is an American journalist and travel writer. In the 1980s, he lived in Vienna and reported on the former Eastern bloc for Business International and The Economist Group. In 1991, he moved to Prague, where he worked as an editor for The Prague Post and co-founded The Globe Bookstore & Coffeehouse. He’s written 30 travel guidebooks for publishers like Lonely Planet and Fodor's on countries in Central and Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic. Čas Proměn (Time of Changes) is his first book of historical nonfiction. Find more about Mark at his website. Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Celeste Mohammed speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Home,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Celeste talks about her novel-in-stories, Pleasantview, and why it was important to her to write a book that shows all the complexities and difficulties of island life, with characters who break out of the stereotypical West Indian personality Americans often expect. She also discusses Trinidad’s multicultural society, her choice to write dialogue in patois, and her essay “Split Me in Two,” about being mixed-race during the election of Vice President Kamala Harris.Celeste Mohammed’s debut novel-in-stories, Pleasantview, published this year. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, LitMag, Epiphany, and The Rumpus, among other places. She is the recipient of a 2018 PEN / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, the 2019 Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction, and the 2017 John Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction. A native of Trinidad and Tobago, Celeste graduated from Lesley University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with an MFA in creative writing. Read her story in The Common at thecommononline.org/home-celeste-mohammed.Read more about Celeste and her work at thecursivem.com.Purchase Pleasantview here.Below is a list of books and writers from the Caribbean and the West Indies that Celeste recommended in the podcast: Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma The Undiscovered Country by Andre Bagoo Golden Child by Claire Adam Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey Home Home by Lisa Allen-Agostini The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag.Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She holds an MA in literature from Queen Mary University of London, and a BA from Smith College. Say hello on Twitter @Public_Emily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

On Wandering Beaches (Pardes, 2020) is a novel of journeys, a novel of migration that conceals contradictions that summarize a whole world. Along the shores of Tel Aviv- Haifa-Acre-Nahariyya, all the contradictions are summarized: the Jewish nationalism versus the Arab nationalism, the individual principles versus the traditions of society, the heart versus the mind, femininity versus manliness, the ‘I’ versus the ‘Other’, geography of homeland versus geography of happiness, the end versus the beginning, and emigration versus settlement in homeland. All these contradictions seek on the shores of the novel to achieve reconciliation, affinity, identification and harmony in a deeper entity of humanity, love and happiness.Dr. Rawya Jarjoura Burbara. Born in Nazareth (1969), Dr. Burbara serves as Chief Inspector Director of Arabic (for native speakers of Arabic) at the Ministry of Education, and a lecturer at the Language Department, Oranim College. She is also a writer, and her 10th book was published in 2021 (collection of short stories titled "I do not want to get use to you"). Her Arabic novel, titled "On the shores of wandering" was translated to Hebrew and published by Pardes (2020). Dr. Burbara is editorial member at Maktoob series and The Translators Forum at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. She is also a member of the Mahmoud Darwish Association.Dr. Yakir Englander is the National Director of Leadership programs at the Israeli-American Council. He also teaches at the AJR. He can be reached at: Yakir1212englander@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Cadwell Turnbull appeared on New Books in Science Fiction two years ago to discuss his debut novel, The Lesson, about an alien invasion and colonization of Earth, centered around Turnbull's native U.S. Virgin Islands.He returns to talk about his second book, No Gods, No Monsters (Blackstone, 2021), which, rather than aliens from another planet, features monsters who live among us as our friends, neighbors and even relatives. While ostensibly about the fantastical, the novel is grounded in reality with complex characters whose experiences touch on difficult but important issues like police violence, othering, and even fake news.While the two books have different characters and storylines, Turnbull calls them “sister books.”Aliens and monsters “are both versions of human fears manifested through these speculative elements,” Turnbull says. “One is dealing with a threat from without, and one is dealing with a threat from within. And they both have similar thematic concerns.”Among the topics Turnbull discusses in the interview are the human propensity to deny uncomfortable truths; the challenge of those with different beliefs accepting the same version of reality (even when reality is captured on video); how monsters can provide a window on intersectional marginalization; and how writing can be like solving a puzzle.Rob Wolf is the host of New Books in Science Fiction and the author of The Alternate Universe and The Escape. 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 Stephen Jenkinson. Jenkinson has a new book. It's entitled A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (Orphan Wisdom, 2021) and it's a rarity among books and, to my mind, authors. Jenkinson not only attempts to reckon with our current crisis in the midst of it, which would be challenge enough, but he also attempts to reckon with his previous work, asking the ballsy question: do the books that I've written in my life—does, in some part, my life's work—stand up to the pressures of this moment? Did I write anything that withstands the test of this time? This is, to my mind, a colossal demand that Jenkinson asks of himself. He's written books about money and soul, death and wisdom, matrimony and patrimony, and the role of elders in a culture bereft of them. In A Generation's Worth, Jenkinson isn't so much summing up these previous books as leaning in more deeply to the questions that animate them. And through these questions, these wonderings, as Jenkinson calls them, he asks us to lean more deeply into life—not life as we wish it or want it to be—but life as it is, life full of grief and mystery, full of rough gods and dark roads, life that, as he writes, "will prevail over lives, yours included."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