New Books In Literature

Today I talked to Joanna Higgins about her new book In the Fall They Leave: a Novel of the First World War (Regal House Publishing, 2023). Nineteen-year-old pianist Marie-Thérèse has dropped out of her prestigious conservatory in favor of becoming a nurse, much to her mother’s disappointment. As she begins her final year of study, Germany invades Belgium on its way to France. It’s 1914, and Marie-Thérèse’s world is upended by harsh rules and demands that students and staff spy on each other. The matron of the school, who is based on the historical Edith Cavell, is a nurse whose courage saves numbers of Belgians. Her decision to secretly treat all who need help has consequences for everyone on the staff. Marie-Thérèse, while perfecting her ability to bandage wounds and treat patients, becomes friends with German soldiers, falls in love with the two little orphaned girls who’ve been living at the clinic, and risks her life to follow the matron’s courageous defiance of the German army. Joanna Higgins is the auth

Today I talked to Deepti Kapoor about her new novel Age of Vice (Riverhead, 2023). Deepti Kapoor grew up in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband. Recommended Books: Rafael Chirbes, Crematoria Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories  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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The essential contribution of The Woman with the Cure (Berkley Books, 2023) can be summarized in one sentence: like most of its future readers (I assume), I had never before heard of Dorothy Horstmann and her fundamental role in the research that led to the near-eradication of polio, despite having benefited hugely from her work. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, she devoted her considerable talents and endless hours to tracking how polio spread throughout the body, but like the other remarkable women portrayed in this novel, she was forced because of her gender to play second fiddle to Doctors Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, her academic colleagues. Their contributions, of course, were also real and worthy of acclaim, but it was Dr. Horstmann—too often dismissed as “Dottie” or “Dot,” as if she were someone’s secretary—who made the crucial discovery that early in its path from the digestive to the nervous system, the polio virus created antibodies in the blood. That finding made the polio vaccine

Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what's in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems. 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). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literatur

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as "The Cutting," and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Duke UP, 2019).  Written in 1937, published in Spanish in 1973, and appearing here in English for the first time, Prestol Castillo's novel is one of the few works that details the massacre's scale and scope. Conveying the horror of witnessing such inhumane violence firsthand, it is both an attempt to come to terms with personal and collective guilt and a search to understand how people can be driven to indiscriminately kill their neighbors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Side Effects of Wanting (Main Street Rag, 2022), author Mary Salisbury spent nearly twenty years gathering together the pieces of humanity she saw reflected in the lives around her and distilled them into a poetically written, beautifully curated short story collection. In this debut, small-town stories speak of love and belonging, longing and regret. The people who populate these tales yearn for companionship and comfort but face the trauma of fractured relationships and the ache of not quite becoming the person they hoped to be. Mary Salisbury’s short fiction and essays have been published in Fiction Southeast, The Whitefish Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Cutthroat’s Truth to Power. Her chapbooks Come What May and Scarlet Rain Boots were published by Finishing Line Press, and her poetry has appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. Salisbury is an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient and a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in writing progr

In his memoir, Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint, 2023), Nic Brown shares his experiences as a rock and roll drummer who abandons his successful music career to pursue his true passion and discovers a deeper understanding of artistic fulfillment in this episodic memoir of swapping one dream for another In the mid-1990s, fresh out of high school, Nic Brown was living his childhood dream as a rock and roll drummer. Signing a major label record deal, playing big shows, hitting the charts, giving interviews in Rolling Stone, appearing on The Tonight Show—what could be better for a young artist? But contrary to expectations, getting a shot at his artistic dream early in life was a destabilizing shock. The more he achieved, the more accolades that came his way, the less sure Brown became about his path. Only a few years into a promising musical career, he discovered the crux of his discontent: he was never meant to remain behind the drums. In fact, his true artistic path lay in a radically different direction entirely:

“Kopi Dulu,” means “coffee first” in Indonesian–a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with anyone. At least, that was Mark Eveleigh’s experience, as a travel writer and reporter, traveling across the country’s many islands. The phrase gives us the title of his latest book: Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Travels Through Indonesia (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2022). Mark travels through Indonesia’s cities and villages, jungles and seas, sharing his experience with the country’s nature, history, and possibility for adventure. In this interview, Mark joins the show to share his stories on islands like Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, and why it’s important to pay attention to this large Southeast Asian country. Mark Eveleigh is a travel writer and photographer whose work has, over 25 years, graced the pages of some of the world's most prestigious travel titles. The British-born writer (who lived most of his first decade in West Africa) has traveled widely in Africa, Latin America

Christopher M. Hood is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the Dalton School in New York City and lives nearby with his wife and daughter. He received an MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine. The Revivalists (Harper, 2022) is his debut novel. Book Recommendations: Chang-rae Lee, My Year Abroad Jenny Liou, Muscle Memory 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Today I talked to Kerri Schlottman about her new novel Tell Me One Thing (Regal House Publishing, 2023). Quinn and a friend are driving from New York City to Pennsylvania when she sees 9-year-old Lulu sitting on a trucker’s lap, smoking a cigarette. At the truck stop for her friend to score drugs, Quinn takes an astounding picture and then leaves, disappointing Lulu, who thinks maybe people will see the picture and help her. Quinn goes on to live the heady life of a successful photographer while Lulu is confronted with various kinds of abuse and dysfunction. Despite the differences in their lives, both women experience moments of great joy, and significant amounts of despair This is a novel about haves and have-nots, those who find love and those who don’t, how the AIDS epidemic fractured New York’s gay community, and the confusing world of art. Kerri Schlottman’s writing has placed second in the Dillydoun International Fiction Prize, been longlisted for the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction, and was a 2021 Unive

Food journalist Angela Hui grew up in rural Wales, as daughter to the owners of the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway. Angela grew up behind the counter, helping take orders and serve customers, while also trying to find her place in this small Welsh town. In her new memoir, Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood behind the Counter (Trapeze, 2022), she writes about the surprisingly central role the takeaway plays in rural Britain: Name me one other room where you can blow out birthday candles, watch a live drunken boxing match between two rowdy customers, enjoy a steam facial from the multiple Boxing Day hot pots bubbling away on portable gas stoves, witness a hen party aftermath where the bride-to-be is sick in the corner, host a high-stakes mahjong tournament with three tables going at once, and hold an unofficial Six Nations rugby viewing, where chips and fried rice is strewn everywhere whenever Wales score a try. Angela Hui is an award-winning journalist and editor from South Wales. Her work has been published in g

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 ne

Cheryl said many times that "I'm done with that life, I'll never go back to it." But she did. When her Aunt Judy finds her in jail after two years of thinking she may be dead, she hopes and prays this is a second chance for her niece. Her sensitive, funny, bookworm niece. Her big sister's eldest daughter, the sister who has since died. And through writing White Flag: A Memoir (Legacy Book Press, 2022), bestselling author Judy L. Mandel finds that it didn't start with Cheryl, but that the tentacles of trauma explored in her first book Replacement Child have grabbed hold of her niece too. She struggles with being powerless to help Cheryl, and she discovers that transgenerational trauma and epigenetics may have started this avalanche of pain. She wonders why some people can recover from addiction, and others cannot. Why some are able to raise their white flag of surrender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.support

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 cu

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/adchoices Support 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 asso

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

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

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

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