New Books In Literature

18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages (Cherry Orchard, 2023) is the first anthology of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in 25 years: a collection of 18 splendid stories, each translated into English from a different language: Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by eminent authors that include Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Isaac Babel, and Lili Berger, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture, and will make you laugh, cry, and think. This beautiful book is easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers, but for story-lovers of all backgrounds. Authors (in the order they appear in the book) include: Elie Wiesel, Varda Fiszbein, S. Y. Agnon, Gábor T. Szántó, Jasminka Domaš, Augusto Segre, Lili Berger, Peter Sichrovsky, Maciej Płaza, Entela Kasi, Norman Manea, Luize Valente, Eliya K

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed author Farzana Doctor about her stunning novel, The Beauty of Us (ECW Press, 2024). They also talk about genre hopping, book promotion, avoiding burnout (and sometimes not), and literary community. More About The Beauty of Us : September 1984, Thornton College private school. After 15-year-old Zahabiya’s father remarries, she can’t wait to leave home and convinces him to send her away to boarding school. But will she fit in? She joins a clique of smart students but isn’t sure if she measures up or how to read the mixed messages from a guy she’s crushing on. Seventeen-year-old Leesa has been at Thornton since middle school after her parents’ messy divorce. She’s been climbing the school’s social ladder with equal measures of meanness and manipulation. She’s also guarding a big secret that she has to work overtime to keep from her friends. Fresh out of university, this is Nahla’s first real teaching job, and she’s drowning. She has her distractions

Kayla E.’s Precious Rubbish (Fantagraphics, 2025), is an experimental graphic memoir drawn in a style that references the aesthetics of mid-century children’s comics and tells the story of a childhood shaped by maternal emotional dysregulation, rural poverty, and incest. The author’s childhood is portrayed as a collection of short-form comics and gag panels punctuated by interactive elements like paper dolls, satirical advertisements, games, and puzzles. While the work is concerned with violence and a particularly Texan brand of Pentecostal fanaticism, it is presented in a playful visual language with a deadpan humor that elevates the material beyond mere graphic memoir. Precious Rubbish is a landmark work of comics storytelling and graphic medicine. The debut graphic novel from artist Kayla E., Precious Rubbish asks the reader to do the extratextual work of filling out narrative gaps, which mirrors the challenge of trauma recollection. The reader is invited to co-labor in the meaning-making process, an exerc

Discipline (Four Way Books, 2024), Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The novel twists and turns through the lives of an artist and his wife, a teenager forced to attend a horrifying boarding school, the artist and his wife’s lonely daughter after their deaths, and a divorced art appraiser studying the works of the dead artist. Discipline addresses teenagers whose lives are molded by thoughtless adults and women who struggle with loneliness or are taken advantage of by the unscrupulous. It’s a coming-of-age story, a mystery about an art theft, but this gorgeous novel is also about family, ambition, and suffering. DEBRA SPARK is the author of five novels, two collections of short stories, and two books of essays on fiction writing. Her most recent books are the novel Unknown Caller and the essay collection And Then Something Happened. With Deborah Joy Co

Michael Housen is living a typical, white-collar American life at a security company when he falls for a phishing campaign with dire implications. One click, and suddenly the US is under marshal law and bombing Tehran. Michael unknowingly triggered a cyberattack by Iranian hackers, which a belligerent President Davis uses as pretext for war against Iran. Michael blinks and he and his wife, Pam, are thrown into private prisons owned by the president, a multibillionaire tycoon. This ordinary couple suddenly must answer a harrowing question: What do you do when the enemy of the state is you? And they find themselves cooperating with extraordinary partners, from right-wing militias to Iranian documentarians, as they work to clear their names and stop the global conflict that Michael set off with an unwitting click. Written by a renowned cybersecurity attorney and a bestselling author, A Quiet Life is a cyberthriller for the times that we all live in, and how we can lose everything on the strength of a lie. And

Michael Housen is living a typical, white-collar American life at a security company when he falls for a phishing campaign with dire implications. One click, and suddenly the US is under marshal law and bombing Tehran. Michael unknowingly triggered a cyberattack by Iranian hackers, which a belligerent President Davis uses as pretext for war against Iran. Michael blinks and he and his wife, Pam, are thrown into private prisons owned by the president, a multibillionaire tycoon. This ordinary couple suddenly must answer a harrowing question: What do you do when the enemy of the state is you? And they find themselves cooperating with extraordinary partners, from right-wing militias to Iranian documentarians, as they work to clear their names and stop the global conflict that Michael set off with an unwitting click. Written by a renowned cybersecurity attorney and a bestselling author, A Quiet Life is a cyberthriller for the times that we all live in, and how we can lose everything on the strength of a lie. And

NBN host Hollay Ghadery is delighted to speak with Toronto area poet Stedmond Pardy about his newest book, Beached Whales (Mosaic Press, 2024). Stedmond Pardy’s first book of poems The Pleasures of this Planet Aren't Enough was published by Mosaic Press in 2020 and launched his career as a boundary-pushing literary and poetic voice. His devoted readers can’t get enough of his compelling YouTube and Soundcloud spoken-word performances. Stedmond lives by his own dicta: “ An artist is an instrument through which the Universe reveals itself and word poetry is for every man, but soul poetry, alas, is not heavily distributed.” About Stedmond Pardy: STEDMOND PARDY is a self-educated, left-handed poet of mixed ancestry (Newfoundland and St. Kitts/Nevis). Originally from the Mimico area of Toronto, he now resides in Dionysus knows where… He has performed his work around the Greater Toronto Area and has appeared on stages in Montreal and Washington State. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian mult

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with cultural icons, Anne Waldman (The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment) and Andrew Whiteman (Broken Social Scene) who have collaborated to create Your Devotee in Rags—a metamorphic sonic poetry LP released by Siren Recordings in 2025 and is available from Spotify. The conversation starts with a discussion of Anne’s epic, The Iovis Trilogy (Coffee House Press, 2011). Published for the first time in its entirety, this major epic poem assures Anne Waldman’s place in the pantheon of contemporary poetry. The Iovis Trilogy, Waldman’s monumental feminist epic, traverses epochs, cultures, and genres to create a visionary call to poetic arms. Iovis details the misdeeds of the Patriarch, and with a fierce imagination queries and subverts his warmongering. All of Waldman’s themes come into focus—friendship, motherhood, politics, and Buddhist wisdom. This is epic poetry that goes beyond the old injunction “to include history”—its effort is to change history. Your Devot

It is said that when one person in a family is unstable, the whole family is destabilized. Meet the Shreds. Olivia is the sister in the spotlight until her stunning confidence becomes erratic and unpredictable, a hurricane leaving people wrecked in her wake. Younger sister Amy, cautious and studious to the core, believes in facts, proof, and the empirical world. None of that explains what’s happening to Ollie, whose physical beauty and charisma mask the mental illness that will shatter Amy’s carefully constructed life. As Amy comes of age and seeks to find her place—first in academics, then New York publishing, and through a series of troubled relationships—every step brings collisions with Ollie, who slips in and out of the Shred family without warning. Yet for all that threatens their sibling bond, Amy and Ollie cannot escape or deny the inextricable sister knot that binds them. Spanning two decades, Shred Sisters (Grove Press, 2024) is an intimate and bittersweet story exploring the fierce complexities of

On this episode of NBN, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Griffin and Governor General Award winning poet, Tolu Oloruntoba, whose highly-anticipated poetry collection, Unravel, was released by McClelland & Stewart in spring 2025. A poetic exploration of the cyclical philosophy of dismantling and remaking, Unravel is a moving and inventive rove through what could happen in the deconstructed aftermath of person and world. More about Tolu Oloruntoba: TOLU OLORUNTOBA was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he studied and practiced medicine. He is the author of two collections of poetry, The Junta of Happenstance, winner of the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General’s Literary Award and Each One a Furnace, a Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize finalist. He gave the 2022 League of Canadian Poets Anne Szumigalski Lecture, and is a Civitella Ranieri fellow. About Hollay Ghadery: Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the Un

Monsters, in all their terrifying glory, have preoccupied humans since we began telling stories. But where did these stories come from? In Monsterland: A Journey Around the World’s Dark Imagination (Scribe, 2025), award-winning author Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth — giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons — all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify. His far-ranging adventure takes him across the world. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, travels to an eighteenth-century Balkan vampire’s forest dwelling, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. On his travels, he discovers that the stories of the people and places that birthed them are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves. Artfully written, Monsterland is a spellbinding interrogation into why we need these monsters and what they can tell us abo

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth. Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London. When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elem

In the early 80s, New York City’s Gansevoort Meatpacking District, a small irregular patch of the West Village, was a wild confluence of meat market workers, gay men hitting The Mineshaft or The Anvil, transgendered prostitutes, homeless huddled around burn barrels, New Jersey mafiosos, veterans of three wars, heroes of the French Resistance, and Holocaust survivors. I was newly arrived to New York City when I began working at Adolf Kusy Meats in 1982, a young man barely out of college who had never imagined himself in any city, much less New York. I had decided I was going to be a fiction writer and while ignorant of what that might entail, I understood writers lived in New York. From the start, Kusy’s seemed the perfect place for a budding writer looking for life experience, a singular, endlessly entertaining circus. When I interviewed Red, my old boss at Kusy’s in October of 2013, the first thing he said was, “I wish now I had a tape recorder and had just recorded every day down there. Just the fucking sto

The itinerary of Faithfully Seeking Franz comprises an irregular quest for dead mentor, modernist author Franz Kafka--in places he lived, worked, vacationed and convalesced, and in the body of work he left: fiction, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence. The search for the man inside the writer is both a personal journey and a joint venture of two in the field: E. and M. in pursuit of K. The story might even be said to unfold as a love note to triangulation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor—a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood. Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times—times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is about the way our homes

Poems by and biographies of inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual in the face of extreme suffering. The concentration camp at Dachau was the first established by the Nazis, opened shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933. It first held political prisoners, but later also forced laborers, Soviet POWs, Jews, and other "undesirables." More than 30,000 deaths were documented there, with many more unrecorded. In the midst of the horror, some inmates turned to poetry to provide comfort, to preserve their sense of humanity, or to document their experiences. Some were or would later become established poets; others were prominent politicians or theologians; still others were ordinary men and women. My Shadow in Dachau: Poems (Camden House, 2014) contains 68 poems by 32 inmates of Dachau, in 10 different original languages and facing-page English translation, along with short biographies. A foreword by Walter Jens and an introduction

Memory Feather, who was born with a misshapen hand and was able to communicate with animals, looks back to when she was a child living with her newly divorced mother in a dilapidated hotel far from home. Her mother, Virginia cleans rooms and turns occasional tricks to support Memory until 1953, when she’s forced to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast town where her difficult, bigoted parents live. Much to their disdain, Virginia’s childhood friend Mac welcomes Mem and her mother to live with him and offers Virginia a job in his antique store. As a gay man in the 1950s, Mac suffers harassment and violence, and even Memory’s cat Minerva knows that the good-looking hustler who’s moved in with Mac is evil. Mem recalls her anxiety, her fears, and her role in the series of events that changed her life forever. Minrose Gwin is the author of The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in

Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir was published in January 2025 by Icon Books. The book considers the political and psychological dimensions of diasporic identity as Ravinthiran leaps imaginatively between memoir and criticism—understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. Ranging from Andrew Marvell to Divya Victor, Ravinthiran writes both about and through poems, discussing Sri Lanka, experiences of racism and resilience, and pandemic parenting to name a few. Vidyan Ravinthiran is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and teaches in the Department of English there. Born in Leeds to Sri Lankan Tamils, Ravinthiran completed his education at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, before moving to the US five years ago. His publications include Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (2015), Worlds Woven Together: Essays on Poetry and Poetics (2022) and Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose (2022). Aside from his literary criticism, which has been publishe

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) about their phenomenal debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books, 2021), which won the 2022 ReLit Award for Poetry. With kitchen-table candour and empathy, Charlie Petch offers witness to a decades-long trans/personal coming of age, finding heroes in unexpected places More about Charlie Petch: Charlie Petch (they/them, he/him) is a disabled/queer/transmasculine multidisciplinary artist who resides in Tkaronto/Toronto. A poet, playwright, librettist, musician, lighting designer, and host, Petch was the 2017 Poet of Honour for the speakNORTH national festival, winner of the Sheri-D Golden Beret Award from The League of Canadian Poets (2020), and founder of Hot Damn it's a Queer Slam. Petch is a touring performer, as well as a mentor and workshop facilitator. Their debut poetry collection, Why I Was Late (Brick Books), won the 2022 ReLit Award, and was named "Best of 2021" by The Walrus. Their film with Opera QTO, Medusa's Children,

Michael David Lukas speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “More to the Story,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Michael talks about his writing process for the essay, which began when a dark family mystery moved him to research a side of his family he’d never learned much about. He also discusses the revision stages of the piece, which included adding in details of the other side of the family—his mother’s parents—who were Holocaust survivors. We also talk about his time as a nightshift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and the new novel project he’s working on now. Michael David Lukas is the author of the international bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, a finalist for the California Book Award, the NCIBA Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. His second novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo, won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction in 2018, the Sami Rohr Prize, and France’s best foreign novel prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street J