New Books In Literature

Josie Flint, known as Jaybird, narrates her story of life in Atlanta during the turbulent South as Jim Crow laws come to an end. Her school desegregates. The country meanders through new ideas brought about by the Civil Rights movement. And the perfect childhood Jaybird treasured is shattered. The narrative alternates between Josie’s childhood and thirty-five years later when her grandmother, Annie Jo, dies. A family secret brings a new heartache for Josie as she struggles to rise against tragedy with grace while maintaining family loyalty. Not only does Jaybird’s Song (Kathy Wilson Florence, 2017) have strong female characters, but also the turbulent 1960s South is its own character. Additionally, for the modern woman, Jaybird’s Song grapples with sexuality and aggression from the opposite sex in a time before trigger warnings and rape culture awareness. Florence notes she too dealt with an embarrassing sexual incident as a child which she has not told her parents, even as an adult. “

Peppa Mueller has a lot going for her. The daughter of a deceased Harvard professor who gave her an eclectic upbringing, she is heir to his fortune, and Radcliffe has accepted her application for undergraduate study in chemistry–her gift and her passion. Too bad that her conventional Swiss relatives cannot imagine why any young lady would want a college education in 1957. Sick of their constraints, she runs away from their home in Basel, even though she cannot collect her inheritance for another two weeks. A house-sitting job draws her to a remote Alpine town, where she becomes the subject of a terrible experiment. Wanted for murder, accused of insanity, and beset by visions of herself as a fierce peregrine falcon, Peppa decides to go after Ludwig Unruh, the man who has victimized her and now holds her precious German Shepherd hostage to force Peppa to participate in his ongoing research into psychedelic plants. But Unruh has far more experience with both chemistry and life than Peppa does, not to menti

The Prey of the Gods, published by Harper Voyager on June 13th, is Nicky Drayden‘s debut novel, though she’s published many short stories. It’s a compassionate work, despite a neglected blood-thirsty goddess and an ancient spirit who assaults women in their dreams, in order to father his brood. Though set in 2064, boys are still boys, impulsive, playful, and needing to be brave. Families are still families, with traditional grandfathers hoping to share their ways with their descendants, although elders and parents often pose the greatest danger. Boisterously mixing mythology and science fiction, the novel moves along from multiple perspectives, keeping the ball rolling. Be sure to pay attention to the old man’s story about the mythological offspring he had; it serves as a framework to understand various characters and their newly acquired powers. Between cross-dressing politicians, a fashion-obsessed demon, and a bot revolution, there’s never a dull moment in Cape Elizabeth. An e

Whether you’re on the right or the left of the political spectrum, I’ll bet that lately the Office of the President isn’t far from your mind. Every day, it seems, I encounter one, two, three, four stories about President Trump, which includes those on Twitter that he posts himself. For me, as the stories keep coming, so do the questions. Who is this guy? How is this guy President? And, by extension, just who can be President–what kind of character or lack of character makes a person right for the Office? My questions aren’t new, even if our current President raises them in new and, for me at least, disturbing ways. Theres an entire subgenre of literature devoted to them. The presidential biography aims to give readers a sense of who a given President is, of the man behind–and before–the Office. These biographies are usually cradle-to-grave tomes or at least cradle-to-end-of-term, written with the idea that a President’s early life somehow shapes his political de

The Gibbs Smith motto is “to enrich and inspire mankind.” Since 1969, the publishing house has become known for creating smart, stylish, sophisticated books. This has included books on architecture and design as well as cooking, holiday and children’s books. Among their most popular series are the BabyLit books, designed to foster a love of great literature at a an early age. Imagine sharing classics like Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and The Odyssey with the very youngest kids hard to envision, but the BabyLit books do it amazingly well, fulfilling the company’s objective “to create things for brilliant babies.” Publisher Suzanne Gibbs Taylor talks about inspiration for that line and their other books for children. Susan Raab is president of Raab Associates, an internationally recognized agency that specializes in marketing literature, products and initiatives that help improve the lives of young people. Clients have included National Geographic, Scholastic, the International Boa

It’s January 1935. Prohibition has just ended, but the Great Depression has not, and much of Chicago remains under the grip of the crime lords who profited from the trade in illegal liquor. Eighteen-year-old Henrietta von Harmon, despite her aristocratic name, struggles to keep food on the table for her overwhelmed mother and seven younger siblings. After too many evenings spent cleaning, peddling drinks, and keeping score for dicers at a local bar, Henrietta jumps at the chance to double her income by taking a new job at a nightclub, where she dances with customers for hours. Too bad she cannot share the story with her family, who would be scandalized at the potential damage to her reputation if they knew. Then her boss turns up dead, and the customer to whom she is most attracted reveals that he works as a detective for the Chicago Police. The search for the murderer leads Henrietta into even more unsavory circumstances, and soon she’s wondering whether even the police can keep her safe. In A Gi

Assaph Mehr‘s Murder in Absentia: A Story of Togas, Daggers, and Magic (Purple Toga Publications, 2015) is Egretia, a town in a fantasy world modeled on the Roman Empire, and the occasion is the crime of murder. Felix the Fox, our narrator, is a detective with some extra talents. Not only is he good at winkling out information, watching people and drawing conclusions, but he’s also familiar with magic–both the kind thats allowed in his homeland, and the more dangerous, forbidden kind. Magic can be dangerous. Felix’s former best friend, now an uncanny beggar with frightening eyes, was a talented sorcerer, before things went wrong. When Felix investigates a secret ring of sorcerers that he suspects are responsible for the horrific death of a rich mans son, he is forced to rely on his old friend, as well as a network of associates, his loyal servant, and an alluring damsel or two.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Roy Bing Chan‘s new book explores twentieth-century Chinese literature that emphasizes sleeping and dreaming as a way to reckon with the trauma of modernity, from the early May Fourth period through the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. Informed by theoretical engagements with Russian Formalism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxism, affect studies, and more, The Edge of Knowing: Dreams, History, and Realism in Modern Chinese Literature (University of Washington Press, 2017) considers how time was transformed with the rise of capitalist modernity, and illustrates the significance of a language of dreams and dreaming as writers sought to cope with this transformation and its consequences. Chan offers careful readings of the work of several writers as a way to tell this story, from Lu Xun’s prose poetry to fiction by Mao Dun, Yang Mo, and Zong Pu. Chan concludes by reflecting on how this context might inform how we understand the notion of the Chinese Dream, and arguing that paying atte

As our name makes clear, the New Books Network focuses on books. And as a host who looks at contemporary literature, I have the pleasure of interviewing authors with new books, ones often published by smaller presses without the huge PR machines of larger presses and ones that consequently are often overlooked by larger media outlets. For me, thats one of the rewards of hosting at the New Books Network: I have the chance to showcase important work that you might otherwise miss, work that adds to the richness and diversity of our national literary culture. Now you might be thinking that I’m about to ask you for a donation. I’m not. Though if you want to contribute to the New Books Network and its public mission to widen the intellectual life of America, by all means please do so. We’d appreciate it. No, what I want to do is make the point that, while books from small literary presses are one place that our literary culture thrives, it’s not the only one. Crucial to our national literatu

As an African-American child growing up in the segregated pre-Civil Rights South, Sarah Bracey White pushed against the social conventions that warned her not to rock the boat, even before she was old enough to fully understand her urge to defy the status quo. In her candid and poignant memoir, Primary Lessons (CavanKerry Press, 2013), White recalls a childhood marked by equal measures of poverty and pride–formative years spent sorting through the “lessons” learned from a complicated relationship with her beloved, careworn mother and from a father’s absence engendered by racial injustice and compromised manhood. Although born in Sumter, South Carolina, Sarah spends much of her first five years in Philadelphia in the care of her bighearted Aunt Susie and her husband, Uncle Whitey. As her parents fourth daughter, she has been sent north to ease her family’s financial burden, freeing her mother to work as a schoolteacher. Young Sarah loves her life in Philadelphia, and is devastated

So many people hope to find the perfect soul mate, but suppose you do, only to lose the person you love just as your life together is getting off to a beautiful start? Faye Morgan reacts by tumbling into a new marriage with her first husband’s best friend. After all, the bills pile ever higher, and her husband’s unborn child can’t come into the world without health insurance. The best friend is eager to help, but as time goes by, they both realize it takes more than need and a shared but unexpressed grief to make a partnership. Faye leaps at the chance to resume her career as a photographer, and as she travels around South Carolina’s coastal island, her mourning finds an outlet and hope creeps back into her life. In the old town of Beaufort, she encounters the legend of a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who drowned as a young woman. Compelled to learn more, Faye finds a photograph in the town archives and discovers that the lighthouse keeper looked just like her first, lost husband.

The House of Binding Thorns (Ace, 2017), Aliette de Bodard‘s novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, is the follow up to The House of Shattered Wings, which won the 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award. The books are set in an alternate Paris, where dragons and other sea-creatures drawn from Vietnamese mythology control the river Seine, and the Fallen, ruthless angels expelled from heaven, control everything else. The reader is enveloped in gossamer threads of dread, as she reads about the struggles of various characters to escape domination and cruelty. Both the dragon kingdom and the Houses of the Fallen offer nuanced gradients of aggression; there is no refuge for the powerless. A pregnant Vietnamese woman, an immortal from Asia who lost most of his power, and a French woman who is addicted to the magic found in angel bones, all try to find their way among the shifting alliances, subterfuges, and occasional rewards of a decaying and rotting city. This is low fa

The tragic Tulsa Race Riots plus a smidgeon of romance equals to a compelling historical saga. Marlene Banks weaves fact and fiction together illustrating how law and culture may change but human nature remains the same in her historical novel series Son of a Preacher Man and Greenwood and Archer. Son of a Preacher Man takes place in 1920 Tulsa, Oklahoma, a strictly segregated oil boomtown. The preacher’s son, Billy Ray Matthias and Benny Freeman, daughter of an oil-rich rancher, befriend each other when both want to escape the shadows of their past. Billy Ray’s heart is open for love but Benny’s is fearfully shut. After the devastating race riot, Banks continues the narrative of restoration in the sequel Greenwood and Archer. Lives have been drastically changed since the riot and its citizens defiantly rebuild their piece of prosperity. Tulsa, Oklahoma is as segregated as ever but doesn’t want the whole nation watching. Additional tension festers as prohibition brings Chicago gangster

There’s a phrase that sometimes comes up among those of us who love poetry. Its called the “heresy of paraphrase.” It’s from a book published in 1947 by Cleanth Brooks titled The Well Wrought Urn, but it captures an idea that goes back to Aristotle. And this is the idea: a poem–at least a good poem–is a finally crafted work of art, and the way its crafted, the way its words are structured, is intrinsic to its meaning. You can’t paraphrase a poem. You can’t say it really means or basically means this or that, like you can with other sorts of communication, without distorting it, because how a poem uses language is as important as what its language conveys. In a poem, form and content are inseparable. This view of poetry is the reason those of us who love poetry end up running to our bookshelves in the middle of a dinner party and pulling down our favorite poems and reading them aloud to our unsuspecting guests, because once you mention a poem you love, it doesn&#

Julia Alekseyeva’s graphic novel Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution was published by Microcosm Publishing in 2017. This is the intertwining story of two women: Lola, who was born in a Jewish family in Kiev in 1910, and her great-granddaughter Julia, whose family moved to the United States from Ukraine in the wake of the events at Chernobyl. Lola has gone through the Bolshevik revolution, the Civil War, the Stalinist purges, deportation to Kazakhstan, and the Chernobyl disaster and these are her real-life memoirs that lay the foundation for the novel. The chapters telling Lola’s story are alternated with shorter interludes from the contemporary life of the second protagonist, Julia, a representative of the generation of millennials, who are struggling to come to terms with their idealistic views on life and politics amidst the changing world order. Alekseyeva, who is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, works on avant-garde cinema in the USSR, Japan, and France, and her

Rivi Handler-Spitz, Pauline C. Lee, and Haun Saussy have created a wonderful resource for readers, researchers, students, and teachers alike. A Book To Burn And A Book To Keep (Hidden): Selected Writings (Columbia University Press, 2016) collects and translates a range of works by Li Zhi, a fascinating and significant figure in the history of China and its literatures. His most famous books, A Book to Burn (likely first pub in 1590) and Another Book to Burn (first published posthumously in 1618), make up the focus of the work translated for this volume, which also includes other materials. In the course of our conversation we talked both about the volume and its wonderful collected contents, and also about practices of and approaches to translation more generally.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quincy Carroll’s new novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside: A Novel (Inkshares, 2015) follows the experiences of a handful of expats teaching English in China, simultaneously offering a compelling story and a peek into various ways of making a life from encounters with dislocation. Readers explore Ningyuan (in Hunan) along with two very different though perhaps not so different(?) figures in the teachers (Thomas) Guillard and Daniel. As their stories and lives intersect the distinctions between these men begin to blur, as do the distinctions between notions of home and away, self and other, and much more. In the course of our conversation, Carroll and I spoke about the book, the experiences that helped inspire the novel, and his experience publishing fiction with Inkshares. Enjoy!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Surveillance and literature, as kindred practices, have light to shed on each other.” When David Rosen and Aaron Santesso considered the discipline of surveillance studies in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001, they saw contributions from political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, and engineers, but found that “the distinctive and necessary contribution of the humanities as such to this conversation” had “largely gone unarticulated” (5). The Watchman in Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood (Yale University Press, 2013) is a wide ranging, deeply researched, and compellingly argued corrective to that lacuna that places humanistic thought, and in particular literary history, in complex and satisfying conversation with the disciplines working to theorize surveillance for our moment. Arguing that “the ultimate target of all surveillance activity: the individual self” is best approached as a knot of questions rather than a stab

Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 2016). In this collection, Polly channels her experiences into rich stories that capture the essence of mental illness and the humans who deal with it. She speaks with me about the healing that can come from writing–and reading–these stories and about her unique views on life, writing, and consciousness. If you’re a writer, psychologist, or someone who’s interested in how other people experience the world differently, this interview is a do-not-miss. Polly Buckingham teaches at Eastern Washington University and is director of its Willow Springs Books. She is also founding editor at SpringTown Press, and her previous book is entitled A Year of Silence. Eugenio Duarte is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He treats individuals and couples, with specialties in

Have you ever wondered about your family history, and how family traditions or secrets through the years may affect you, your behavior, and major aspects of your life? Velvet (AuthorHouse, 2013) begins with Ludie, a young, unwed mother escaping reality down a dusty Southern road. Author Holly Charles also found a way to escape reality; or, rather, found a means to cope with reality years ago when she first began to write about her complicated relationship with her mother. It was through her own extensive research and many meaningful conversations with her grandmother that she identified several common themes in mother/daughter relationships particularly in (but not exclusive to) the African American community. All mothers, regardless of race and culture, seek to protect their children from the demons and disappointments they themselves have been hindered by. Trying to spare their own daughters the pangs of womanhood and colorist ideals causes African American mothers to reproduce their own personal feelings o