New Books in Literature

Rachel Eliza Griffiths, "The Flower Bearers" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (New Books Network) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

On September 24, 2021, Rachel Eliza Griffiths married her husband, the novelist Salman Rushdie. On the same day, hundreds of miles away, Griffiths’ closest friend and chosen sister, the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon, who was expected to speak at the wedding, died suddenly. Eleven months later, as Griffiths attempted to piece together her life as a newlywed with heartbreak in one hand and immense love in the other, a brutal attack nearly killed her husband. As trauma compounded trauma, Griffiths realized that in order to survive her grief, she would need to mourn not only her friend, but the woman she had been on her wedding day, a woman who had also died that day.

In the process of rebuilding a self, Griffiths chronicles her friendship with Moon, the seventeen years since their meeting at Sarah Lawrence College. Together, they embraced their literary foremothers—Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, to name a few—and fought to embrace themselves as poets, artists, and Black women. Alongside this unbreakable bond, Griffiths weaves the story of her relationship with Rushdie, of the challenges they have faced and the unshakeable devotion that endures.

In The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), Griffiths inscribes the trajectories of two transformational relationships with grace and honesty, chronicling the beauty and pain that comes with opening oneself fully to love. This is a conversation not to be missed.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a multi-media artist, poet, and novelist. She received the MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and is the recipient of numerous fellowships including Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Kimbilio, Cave Canem Foundation, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Yaddo. Her literary and visual work has been widely published in journals, magazines, anthologies, and periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Progressive, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, The Writer’s Chronicle, Transition, American Poet, Mosaic, Indiana Review, Ecotone, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, Best American Poetry (2020, 2021), The New York Review of Books, BOMB! Magazine, and many others. You can find Rachel on Instagram.

Learn more about the Torch 20th Anniversary celebration here.

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Mubanga Kalimamukwento, "The Shipikisha Club" (Cassava Republic Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Kabwe, Zambia: Sali, a working mother of three, stands trial for the murder of her husband, Kasunga. The prosecutor claims Sali shot him after a heated fight in their bedroom. There are no witnesses. Sali pleads not guilty.

But her story does not begin with a gun. It begins fourteen years earlier--with her rebellion against the pressure to find a husband, her affair with a wealthy married man called Doc, and her discovery that she's pregnant on the same day of Doc's unexpected death.To avoid the shame of being an unwed mother, Sali accepts Kasunga's proposal, and finds herself suddenly thrust into the shipikisha club: her society's expectations that it is a wife's duty to endure. Over the years, Sali navigates her husband's infidelities and alcohol-filled nights, their money troubles, and her postpartum depression in silence. Until the day she speaks her mind, and Kasunga puts a gun in her face.

The trial is a national scandal. Many are called to testify--the maid, Kasunga's mother, and Ntashé, Sali's fifteen-year-old daughter. Even after Sali's diary is dissected and laid bare for all to see, Sali calls no witnesses to her defense. With Kasunga gone, only Sali will ever know the truth. But is the truth enough?

Told through the rotating perspectives of Sali, Ntashé, and Sali's mother Peggy, The Shipikisha Club (Cassava Republic Press, 2026) is a riveting story of gender politics in Zambia and the world at large--a must-read for fans of Peace Adzo Medie, Abi Daré, and Tayari P. Jones.

Mubanga Kalimamukwento is a Zambian attorney and award-winning editor and writer, known for her novel The Mourning Bird and her collection of short stories titled Obligations to the Wounded. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree in law, as well as a master's in fine arts. She is currently pursuing a PhD in gender, women and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota.

Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University in African History. She is the Editor-In-Chief of the New Books Network.

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Tom Lin, "Babylon, South Dakota" (Little Brown and Co, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.

But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.
In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of “strangers in a strange land” to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.

Tom Lin was born in China and immigrated to the United States when he was four. A graduate of Pomona College, he also holds a PhD from the University of California, Davis. His first novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. He teaches English and creative writing at the University of Iowa.

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Ellen Prentiss Campbell, "Vanishing Point" (Apprentice House Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Beginning in the 1880s and spanning three generations through the 1980s, Vanishing Point (Apprentice House Press, 2026) explores the life and family of Pennsylvania artist George Hetzel and his large, complex family. We watch him and his wife, Mary Louise, mourn losses, celebrate triumphs, and struggle with the tension between their family life and Hetzel’s art. We learn about the lives of Hetzel’s children, especially focusing on his daughter Lila, also a painter, and his granddaughter, Dorothy, a writer. Weaving together stories of personal lives, insight into the ongoing struggle of women to rise in the creative arts, and pivotal artistic events in Pittsburgh, Scalp Level, and Somerset, Pennsylvania, Vanishing Point is a gorgeous historical novel.

Ellen Prentiss Campbell grew up in Pennsylvania and Rockville, Maryland. A graduate of Smith College, Simmons School of Social Work, and The Bennington Writing Seminars, she practiced psychotherapy for many years. Her historical novels The Bowl with Gold Seams and Frieda’s Song and her collections of short stories have garnered awards and recognition, and best of all – readers. Ellen blogs for The Washington Independent as Girl Writing and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She lives with her husband in Washington, DC and Manns Choice, Pennsylvania. Ellen loves travel, reading, writing, and swimming everywhere she goes. Connect online here

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Lucas L. Johnson II, "Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World" (Broadleaf Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

As we approach the 50th anniversaries of Alex Haley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots (1976) and its landmark television adaptation (1977), journalist and storyteller Lucas L. Johnson II reflects on the enduring legacy of Haley’s work through the voices of those it continues to move, including scholars, artists, genealogists, students, and original cast members like LeVar Burton and Ben Vereen.

With vivid personal anecdotes, emotional tributes, and probing reflections, Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World (Broadleaf Books, 2026)shows how Haley’s vision gave birth to a genealogy movement, inspired generations to reclaim their identities, and challenged America to confront its past. From a sixth-grader who became the first lawyer in her family, to a blind musician empowered by his father’s retelling of Roots’ most iconic scene, Johnson traces the ripple effects of Haley’s griot storytelling across time and culture.

As debates rage over which histories get told, Remembering Roots boldly asserts the necessity to remember and retell our stories. A call to action, this book reaffirms that storytelling is not just an art — it’s a path to healing. A companion reading and viewing guide to the book and film is available here.

Lucas L. Johnson II is a former reporter for the Associated Press, where he worked for more than twenty years mainly covering politics, education, and religion. He is the author of Finding the Good and coauthor of Youth Change Agent. Lucas works in higher education and has taught high school and college students. A freelance writer and communications strategist, Lucas lives in Nashville, Tennessee. You can find him at his website.

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Stef Ferrari, "Pining for You" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Pining for You (Simon & Schuster, 2026) the classic Hallmark holiday movie gets turned upside down when a teen leaves her small-town Christmas tree farm in pursuit of the city girl who swept her off her feet in this cheeky and cozy rom-com by Food Network competitor Stef Ferrari. Bennie Bosley has Christmas spirit on lock. Her borderline magical ability to give the perfect gift, encyclopedic knowledge of holiday movies, and skill as a baker working at a literal Christmas tree farm mean she’s the authority on all things merry. So, when Bennie sees sparkles after bumping into the most stunning girl she’s ever seen in her small Connecticut town, her friends are all shocked that Bennie doesn’t seem to realize what this is: real holiday magic at work…and the perfect opportunity for her much-needed first kiss. There’s just one problem: her mystery girl, Eve, lives in Brooklyn and Bennie never got her number or her last name. But showing up unexpectedly to make a big romantic gesture is a classic holiday trope for a reason, right? And her friends aren’t about to miss the fireworks. But what was supposed to be a quick Christmas adventure turns into a scramble across Brooklyn when the biggest snowstorm of the decade hits. Will Bennie and crew be able to track Eve down for a merrily ever after and still make it back for their last Cooper Farm Christmas Eve party, or is their holiday movie moment destined for the cutting room floor?

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Jonathan Swift and David Womersley ed., "Gulliver's Travels: Cambridge Anniversary Edition" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 7 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Gulliver's Travels is one of the landmarks of world literature. Gulliver's adventures with the tiny but spirited Lilliputians, the giant inhabitants of Brobdingnag, the flying island of Laputa, and the rational horses of Houyhnmhnmland have become globally famous for their satirical wit and visionary creativity. Early editions credited Gulliver himself as the author, and many readers believed him to be a real person. Later commentators have variously described the work as proto-science fiction, as inspired children's literature and as a forerunner of the modern novel. The editor's introduction to this celebratory anniversary edition contextualises Gulliver's Travels in Swift's life and work as a whole while exploring its rich and remarkable afterlife. All the original illustrations and maps are included, as are the frontispiece portraits. Generous annotation explains textual details which might now seem obscure, and appendices contain additional documents and images to enhance contemporary understanding and enjoyment.

David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Téa Obreht, "Sunrise" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 2 Sep 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In 2024, Nina’s small-engine plane crashes into a lake in the Wyoming mountains. Her boyfriend Ben, who was flying it, is nowhere to be found. Lost and freezing on the shore, Nina is armed with only a few old protein bars, a phone with no service, and a vague hope of rescue. It is up to her to survive in the vast wilderness. But then she stumbles upon Sunrise—a town of the Old West that is strangely well maintained, but seemingly abandoned. A place that holds the missing link to a ghost story one hundred years in the making.
In 2003, Sand Daw’s golden boy Coll is putting the finishing touches on the town’s annual historical reenactment. But when an upstart would-be author comes to him with questions about one of Sunrise’s most beloved figures, it threatens to upend everything he thought he knew about the city—and himself.
In 1902, town founder, gunslinger, and legendary pulp hero Anton Vargas returns to Sunrise and quickly takes charge of a group searching for a missing boy. But who really is Vargas? What does he know about the boy’s disappearance? And why has he returned after such a long absence?
These three strangers are separated by time and circumstance. But Sunrise’s many secrets are like gunpowder: quiet, contained, until they encounter a spark. Magisterial and suspenseful, Téa Obreht’s novel Sunrise (Random House, 2026) challenges the myths we think we know: of heroes and villains, of the people and places to which we lay claim, and, most of all, of our own lives.

Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, Inland, and The Morningside. Her novels have won the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Southwest Book Award, and have been finalists for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, among others. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, she divides her time between Dublin, Ireland, and Wyoming.

Recommended Books:

Kevin Barry, City of Bohane
Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Katy Simpson Smith, The Maltese Version
Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

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Darlene Madott, "Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times" (Guernica Editions, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with retired lawyer and award-winning author of 10 books, Darlene Madott about her new book, Closing Ceremonies and Dying Times, published by Guernica Editions, September 1, 2026

Closing Ceremonies is a collection of linked love stories that explores the aftermath of love. Who among us has not suffered the after-shocks? The sorrowing souls that inhabit these tales struggle at various stages of the grief cycle: from denial and paralysis to anger and desire for revenge; to bargaining and, ultimately, for some characters and for others incompletely, acceptance and reconciliation. Some of the stories handle the love quandary comedically—for example, the triptych of stories about Francesca and Concetta, who embrace a sisterly friendship born of betrayal. Others are more elegiac, such as the story of Thor and Lovise: unsanctioned lovers who get to orbit about each other, however briefly. “Appropriation” is a coming-of-age story where the longed-for first kiss is obtained, but not in the way the kiss was desired. What links these stories? Human yearning to move out of love away from an obsessive attachment, to a selfless state where genuine love becomes possible again.

About the author:

Darlene Madott is an award-winning author of 10 books, including Winners and Losers, Stations of the Heart, and Making Olives and Other Family Secrets. Winners and Losers (her 9th book) grew out of her legal practice of over 3 decades, and was named The Miramichi Readers Best of 2023. She has twice won the Bressani Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Vanderbilt-sponsored Carter V. Cooper EXILE editions award three times, and for the inaugural Nona Heaslip Best Canadian Short Stories Award. Widely anthologized, she has participated in international literary conferences, most recently as an invited plenary-panel speaker on Alice Munro for the International Conference of the Short Story in English, 2025, Killarney, Ireland. She has been translated into Italian and published by the prestigious Les Flâneurs Edizioni, Italy. Her 10th book, Closing Ceremonies, now includes Dying Times.

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Rebecca Ruth Gould, "Strangers" (Serving House Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:29:00 +0000

In this episode, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Distinguished Professor, Comparative Poetics & Global Politics at SOAS University of London, and University of Puerto Rico professors Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Cora Monroe González, discuss writing, travel, bilingualism, translation, defamiliarization and the power of language as facets of Gould’s book Strangers: Stories (Serving House Books, 2025).

Nuevos Horizontes is the podcast of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

In Stranger: Stories, Rebecca Ruth Gould uses ink and paper to describe the power of art, loss, love, distance, and words themselves.
Find Rebecca Ruth Gould on substack.

Quotes, books, places, and scholars mentioned in this conversation:

Alcatraz Restaurant in Mayagüez.

Gabriel García Márquez, Doce cuentos peregrinos.

Aurora Levins Morales, “Hija de las Américas.”

Heriberto Yépez, Transnational Battlefield.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

Roberto Bolaño, Cuentos completos.

“Mi patria son mis hijos.” -Roberto Bolaño

"My home, or a way to create continuity between spaces." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

Writing as a defamiliarization process

"Writing as a way to see things differently." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

How languages influence experience

"I became a different person, being immersed in another language....It allowed me to develop different identities, different values, to question things I had taken for granted." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

"Reflections on Exile," Edward Said.

"[Edward Said] is a paradigm in the modern world." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

"Capturing certain cities in time, particularly Damascus...the places I describe are not there anymore." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

"The hierarchy in the word charity that isn't there in Persian and Arabic." -Rebecca Ruth Gould

Walter Benjamin

A translation mindset

Distance as a creative resource

Tony Hillerman

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Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, "The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois" (HarperCollins, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In 2021, the NAACP Image Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers made her fiction debut with The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, a magisterial epic of African American historical fiction—an intimate yet sweeping novel with all the luminescence and force of Homegoing; Sing, Unburied, Sing; and The Water Dancer—chronicling the journey of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War, to our own tumultuous era.

Five years, and numerous awards and best-of lists later, Honorée joins the podcast on the anniversary of the novel’s publication to talk about what it meant then, what it means now, and that call from Oprah that shifted everything.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is an essayist, novelist, poet, and a student of United States history. She is the author of seven books spanning three genres, including the NAACP Image Award-winning poetry collection, The Age of Phillis. She was on the podcast on June 20, 2025 to discuss her book, Misbehaving at the Crossroad: Essays and Writing. You can find Honorée on Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

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David Lagercrantz, "Post Mortem: A Mystery" (Knopf, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Post Mortem: A Mystery (Knopf, 2026) is the third book in David Lagercrantz's mystery series following detective duo Rekke and Vargas: this time, their hunt for a killer has a literary twist. Professor Hans Rekke and police officer Micaela Vargas have earned a reputation for solving the unsolvable. But they’ve never been confronted by a serial killer. Until now. Rekke receives a visit from Spanish chief inspector Rafael Corales, who is unable to forget the brutal, unsolved murder of a young woman in Santander in 1988. Now other bodies have come to light, marked with signs that seem to be some kind of numerical order. Still recovering from his latest manic episode, his relationship with Vargas strained by a secret she’s keeping, Rekke agrees to help decipher these signs before the killer strikes again. The victim was an aspiring writer, and clues from her posthumously published short story about a stray dog draw Rekke and Vargas deep into the murk of Sweden’s literary scene. To unmask the killer, Rekke must relearn the difference between fact and fiction, and discover what really happened that night back in the 1980s. In yet another intricate and exciting puzzle mystery, David Lagercrantz draws on the literary world that he—and we—know all too well to tell a story about guilt, shame, repressed memories, human depravity, and publishing.

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Ed Park, "Three Tenses" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Three Tenses (Random House, 2026) by Ed Park is not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, not quite poetry and not quite prose—and yet it transcends the sum of all its not-quite parts as a resonant portrait of its young artist. Written when he was 28, Park’s “transmission from the nineties” displays his more earnest, more vulnerable version: a writer toiling away in upstart obscurity, working thankless New York jobs, who has yet to reach the triumph of publishing his first book. Three Tenses would not be that book. Instead, Park stashed it away in a manilla folder. Fast forward to the dog days of the pandemic, 2020, when Park rediscovered his old manuscript, tinkering with it while he worked on other projects, including his novel Same Bed, Different Dreams, which went on to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist after its 2023 publication. Fascinated and charmed by its lack of convention, I knew that I wanted to speak to Park about Three Tenses, and he was kind enough to join me for a chat about the process of confronting—and publishing—his younger self.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed, Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and his writing appears in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, and other publications. In 2025, he received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space

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A Hosts' Special: Ferry and Plotz Choose Books in Dark Times (EF, JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

For our pandemic-era Books in Dark Times (our first ever Special Series!) Elizabeth and John discussed books that were keeping us afloat, barely afloat, way back in April 2020. Memory lane, here we come!

A book you might not think would be so comforting starts it off, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) about the plague in London “during the last Great Visitation in 1665.” Classroom resource for Great Plague of 1665-1666 here

Probably based on the journals of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe, the Journal comforts Elizabeth by its similarities to our current situation, providing a sense of continuity to our forebears. Even if that continuity is through our epidemiological vulnerabilities and our incapacity for coordinated action.

Second, because some aspects of what happened in 1665 seem so familiar, from detailed discussions of the “weekly bills” of dead in each parish and how to interpret them, to arguments over social isolation, contact tracing, the ethics of leaving London for second homes in the country, and the devastating secondary effects of lost commercial activity:

Thirdly: at least it’s not the bubonic plague.

Elizabeth’s love for the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope (or 35 of them, anyways) kicks off a final foray into the deeply comforting books of our childhood–and a discussion of how fantasy nestles into the ordinary.

Mentioned in this episode:

Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)
E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops (1909)
Anthony Trollope, The Warden (1855)
Frank Capra, It Happened One Night (1934)
Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley (1939)
Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (1868)
E. Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902), The Railway Children (1905)
Read the transcript here; Episode 26 Ferry Plotz

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Angelica Cheng, "The Fast Track" (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Angelica Cheng's YA rom-com, The Fast Track (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2026) brings readers into the world of F1 racing. Justine Kwong has always dreamed of becoming a Formula 1 champion. There’s just one problem: no female driver has ever done it before. So when she’s offered a coveted chance to race in Formula 3, she leaps at the opportunity. Sure, half the fans think she’s just there to fill a diversity quota, and her teammate—the infuriatingly cute Cameron Evans—mistakes her for an intern, but Justine knows her talent will leave them all in the dust.
But driving well isn’t the only prerequisite to getting noticed, and Justine’s forced to fend for herself in a sea of prejudice, paparazzi, and petty backstabbing. There’s a lot riding on her ability to navigate the complicated trackside hierarchy—like the open F2 seat that could be her ticket to the big leagues.
Except…when Justine and Cameron’s bickering gives way to unexpected chemistry, the boy she’s falling for may be the one person standing in the way of her dreams—because while they may be teammates, they are also each other’s biggest competitor. And with her only shot at glory on the line, this race could break more than just hearts.

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Paul Yoon, "Etna" (Scribner, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Beloved author and winner of The Story Prize, Paul Yoon, is back with the unforgettable story of a working dog, Etna, who, after a devastating war, embarks on an odyssey in the hopes of returning home.
Set in a fictional country in the present day, this is a story told through the eyes of an ex-military dog, Etna. After surviving years of a devastating war, Etna decides one night to leave the men he has fought alongside for years and return home—to the place where he was taken from when he was young, in the thin but persistent hope that if a home exists for him, it might be there.
Thus begins an exhilarating odyssey told through the eyes of a dog as he traverses across ruined landscapes and fights to survive in a world that, even in peacetime, proves to be just as precarious. Along the way, he encounters other animals and humans who are attempting to figure out how to start again. What makes a life when there is no home to go back to? How do we begin to trust each other again after such profound loss?
Etna (Scribner, 2026) is a novel about the power of an idea, about never giving up, and ultimately a novel about finding hope in the most dire of times.

Paul Yoon is the author of five previous works of fiction: Once the Shore, a New York Times notable book; Snow Hunters, winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award; The Mountain, an NPR Best Book of the Year; Run to Earth, a Time Must-Read Book of 2020 also longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; and The Hive and the Honey, winner of the 20th annual Story Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize.

Recommended Books:

Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act
Johnathan Buckley, One Boat

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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.

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Robyn Gigl, "All We Hide" (Soho Crime 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In All We Hide (Soho Crime 2026), after Lauren Kelly transitions to female in a small-town District Attorney’s Office, her bosses do whatever they can to push her into retirement. Now stuck in the Homicide Cold Case unit, she investigates the 20-year-old murder of a trans sex-worker whom she knew in high school. Already grappling with a teenage daughter, an ex-wife she still loves, and her father, a former cop struggling with Alzheimer’s, Lauren discovers evidence of a cover up. She’s stunned to find troubling connections to her family, calls her famous film star brother for support, and assembles a team. Someone is definitely trying to stop her.
Robyn Gigl is an attorney and the author of the critically acclaimed Erin McCabe Legal Thrillers, which include: Survivor’s Guilt, named one of the 100 best Mystery/Thriller Books of All Time by TIME Magazine, and winner of the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing; By Way of Sorrow, selected by CrimeReads as one of the best crime novels of the year; Remain Silent, a Joseph Hansen Award nominee; and Nothing but the Truth, named one of the best crime novels of 2024 by the New York Times. When she's not writing, practicing law or hanging out with her granddaughters, she loves to go for a jog along the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore.

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Caroline Bicks, "Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King" (Hogarth, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

After Caroline Bicks was named the University of Maineʼs inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, she became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (including her) have asked themselves: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?
Bicks focuses on five of his most iconic early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, ʼSalemʼs Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, story lines, and characters to cast his enduring literary spells. While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.
Part literary master class, part biography, part memoir and investigation into our deepest anxieties, Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026)—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine. Her academic books include Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; her popular writing has appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and includes a humorous Bard-themed cocktail book, Shakespeare Not Stirred. She is the co-host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast.

Recommended Books:

Ben Lerner, Transcription
Libby Edwardson, We Sent Them Down Singing
Daniel Mason, Country People

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Lauren Delapenha, "Supermarketing" (Spring, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Lauren Delapenha speaks to Emily Everett about her poems “Supermarketing” and “If You Are Learning English,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. Lauren also discusses her process and revision methods, her time at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, and how balancing both teaching and writing challenges her.

Lauren is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart nominations. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.

Read Lauren’s poems in The Common here.

Learn more about her work here.

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 Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Rhys Bowen, "The Castle in the Glen" (Lake Union Publishing, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

I love Rhys Bowen’s historical mystery series, especially Her Royal Spyness books, which feature Lady Georgiana Rannoch. The Castle in the Glen (Lake Union Publishing, 2026) appears to be a standalone, although there’s room for it to develop into a series if the author so decides

The novel opens with an excerpt from The Wild Girl, a work-in-progress by an acclaimed mystery writer, Iris Blackburn (to quote from the Cast of Characters, “Think Agatha Christie”). Set on the Isle of Skye, off Scotland’s western coast, The Wild Girl purports to be the first case of Iris Blackburn’s pet detective, Inspector Melrose. But Iris, who’s approaching eighty and suffering from early-stage dementia, hires a young Australian named Emma Callander, whose first book recently appeared in London to great acclaim, to finish the novel.

To secure Emma’s agreement, Iris offers an all-expenses-paid trip to Skye, where Emma can absorb the atmosphere, appreciate the setting, and connect with the character of Inspector Melrose before sitting down to write. Only after Emma reaches the island does she begin to suspect that the fictional mystery may not be fiction after all.

Bowen juggles the three historical timelines—1904, the time of the original deaths; 1932, when Iris visited Skye; and Emma/Iris in 1965—with her usual aplomb. She also leaps nimbly between the novel and the novel-within-the-novel, which Emma reads so that she can get a sense of what the book needs and how she can contribute to finishing Iris’s story. The result is a delightful tale that never takes itself too seriously yet kept me turning pages to the end.

And if you’ve never visited Skye yourself, it really is exactly as described. That I have such vivid and fond memories of my short time there just added to my appreciation of the novel.

Rhys Bowen’s work has sold close to 10 million copies in over 30 languages. She has been nominated for every major mystery award and has won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. Her books include the Royal Spyness and Molly Murphy historical mysteries, as well as several international bestselling stand-alone novels. The Castle in the Glen is her latest book. Find out more at here.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including one co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in September 2026.

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Huang Chongkai, "The Formosa Exchange" (Honford Star, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Jeremy Tiang about his English translation of The Formosa Exchange (Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but is available for preorder).
Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize—and has served as a judge for the National Book Award for translated literature. Beyond translation, his novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and his play Salesman之死 won a Obie Award for Outstanding New Play in 2023.

Originally published in Mandarin in 2021 as 新寶島 and winner of that year's Taiwan Literature Award, The Formosa Exchange is a work of speculative fiction by Taiwanese novelist Huang Chongkai (黃崇凱). The novel kicks off with a fantastical occurrence: one night, the entire populations of Taiwan and Cuba swap places, with Taiwanese people ending up on the island of Cuba and Cuban people on the island of Taiwan. This “Great Exchange” becomes a lens for examining national identity, indigeneity, and colonialism, especially with reference to Taiwan’s and Cuba's shared position in the shadow of their much larger neighbors of China and the United States.

Scholars and learners across history, political science, anthropology, literature, and beyond will find much food for thought in The Formosa Exchange. The novel is dense with allusions—it nods to Western thinkers like John Mearsheimer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, while also weaving in references to Taiwanese and Cuban literature, art, and film.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

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Seamus O’Reilly, "Prestige Drama" (Cardinal, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A dazzling novel about a community where an upcoming film production brings their past into sharp focus--and nobody's version is the same.

In Derry, the locals are already in a twist about the arrival of Hollywood actress Monica Logue to research her role for a show about the Troubles--and then she goes missing. Everyone has a story to tell--about Monica's possible whereabouts, and about the historic events that brought her here in the first place: the show's screenwriter, desperate for this last shot at success; the grieving mother whose story he's adapting; the ex-IRA member who knows the price of survival; the local psychic who's seen too much ...

Prestige Drama (Cardinal, 2026) brings to life a chorus of characters as they locate themselves in Monica's disappearance, and in the truth about their own history. From the author of the acclaimed memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, Prestige Drama is heartbreaking, hilarious, and profound, an indelible portrait of a community both obsessed with its past, and desperate to forget it.

SÉAMAS O’REILLY is a writer and author who has worked as a columnist for the Observer, the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner. He is Features Editor of London satirical magazine, The Fence and his writing has appeared in The Guardian, the New Statesman and the New York Times. His memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died topped the Irish Times Bestseller List for seven weeks, and won Best Biography at the 2021 Irish Book Awards. Séamas currently lives in Walthamstow, London with his family.

Recommended Books:

Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling
Susannah Dickey, Into the Wreck
Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory: A History of the World Cup

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M. H. Ayinde, "A Song of Legends Lost" (Saga Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A Song of Legends Lost (Saga Press, 2025) is the first, highly praised instalment in the Invoker Series. Set in a world offering an unique combination of an African inspired culture and a fallen tech-based empire at war, the novel feels at once epic and deeply personal. M. H. Ayinde deftly creates an entire, well-imagined society with a minimum of distracting exposition. Her clear prose and astute characterization leave the reader intrigued but never confused.

Onto the story itself—it begins with two protagonists from very different backgrounds who find themselves involved in momentous events. Both are overwhelmed by the unexpected powers they now wield. Jinao, a noble who has failed repeatedly to magically bond with an ancestor, suddenly succeeds, but continues to be plagued by indecision. Temi, a baker from the slums of Nine Lords, hosts a mysterious presence after she is cursed by a witch. From the initial setup, the book widens in scope, introducing a traumatized captain — Elari, a ruthless monk — Boleo, and a penniless girl — Runt.

The world of the Nine Lands, ruled over by the royal Ahiki Clan, who have fought the tech creatures they call grey bloods for generations, has enough war for all of them.

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Christopher R. Rogers, "My City Need Something" (Common Notions, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Moving between word and image, the call-and-response collaboration between writer Christopher R. Rogers and photographer karim brown improvises a contemporary portrait of present-day Black Philadelphia, replete with the unfinished activism present since the transnational upsurge of the George Floyd Uprising.
Arriving five years after the crucible of that period, this experimental essay-as-LP challenges us to prioritize the urgency of reckoning with our own hang-ups and half-steps and to reground ourselves within the daily, prefigurative life-work of rehearsing Black liberation. This is a hyperlocal, future-forward recommitment to ongoing principled struggle and a hopeful model of contemporary self-criticism.
Taking its title from a song by the late, beloved Uptown Philadelphia rapper PnB Rock, My City Need Something (Common Notions, 2026) challenges readers to strive for clarity in a time of Black suffering, in a city resplendent with Black joy.

Christopher R. Rogers, PhD is a Philadelphia-based cultural organizer and educator hailing from Chester, PA with more than a decade of experience in supporting radical arts, culture, and community-building. He is a Facilitator with the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction and co-coordinates the Friends of The Tanner House, incubating a revitalized National Historic Landmark rowhome that Dr. Carter G. Woodson once dubbed the “center of Black intellectual life in Philadelphia.” He previously published with Common Notions as Lead Editor for How We Stay Free: Notes on a Black Uprising (2022) alongside novelist Fajr Muhammad. You can find Chris on Instagram @justmaybechris.

After listening to this episode, head over to the Additions to the Archive Substack, where Chris and Sullivan talk further about community education and activism.

Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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Tsering Döndrup, "The Red Wind Howls" (Columbia UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events, The Red Wind Howls weaves together experiences of labor camps, unrelenting hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of language into a powerful exploration of twentieth-century Tibetan history.

In this episode, I speak with the novel’s translator, Christopher Peacock, about the challenges of translating a work that weaves together oral storytelling and history. We discuss the recurring character Alak Drong, the novel’s striking use of dark humor, the ways its characters navigate famine, labor camps, political campaigns, and shifting systems of survival, and above all the importance of reading literature by Tibetan authors.

Listeners should also seek out Chris’s translation of Tsering Döndrup’s short story collection, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, and his article on the use of language in Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, here.

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Tom Lin, "Babylon, South Dakota" (Little, Brown and Co, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re welcoming novelist Tom Lin back to the show, whose new novel Babylon, South Dakota (Little, Brown and Company: 2026) moves his fascination with the American West into stranger and more uncanny territory.

A Chinese family moves to a new farm in South Dakota; after the government takes an interest in a plot near their home for some Cold War-era experiments, the family’s life gets much odder, and much stranger. Babylon, South Dakota’s Cold War setting gives the novel a chance to explore nuclear dread, government conspiracies, and even an interest in the paranormal that’s reminiscent of the viral internet phenomenon, the SCP Foundation.

Listen to our interview with Tom Lin on The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu here!

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Babylon, South Dakota. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Amy B. Scher, "The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose" (Tiny Ghost Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Amy B. Scher's The Unexpected Afterlife of Salon Rose (Tiny Ghost Press, 2026) college hopeful Salon Rose arrives to the Nowhere in Between, a way-station between life and death, only to learn she’s been murdered.

Returning to the life she had before is not an option, but before Salon can move on, she is determined to discover who was responsible for her death.

With the help of her new friends––all recently deceased-–and maybe even a fresh crush, Salon must learn to let go if she has any hope of getting out of there. Even if it means confronting some hard to swallow truths.

A darkly funny, touching, suspenseful, and relatable story about moving on, forgiving ourselves, and finding hope in the future.

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Emily McBride, "Queen Mab" (FSG, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

There is a changeling in this story—but who?
Madeleine is young for motherhood, a promising grad student in Victorian and Modernist literature, twenty-three and not long married. Even her mother worries about the timing. But Madeleine’s ambivalence is pushed aside by Tom’s elation and her own joy at bringing new life to the world.
Then comes Maud, perfect and fresh and worth every moment of difficult labor. But after just a few nights, something seems amiss, changed. The child never stops crying. Her hunger is insatiable. Her eyes glint with some kind of ancient mischief. Could Maud be a fairy child, swapped when Madeleine wasn’t paying attention? Is the real Maud dancing in the half-light with the fairies and the foxes? Did the gray cat hide her behind the hedge?
Meanwhile, the world around them continues in its humdrum ease. Tom works toward a promotion, urging Madeleine to connect with other moms and keep in touch with her colleagues. Her parents travel from abroad to meet the baby, but Madeleine is unnerved by her father’s new obsession with genealogy and DNA tests. Interrupted by visions, panicked at her lack of maternal feelings, shut out from her old life, she frantically searches for answers. But the old stories end in sorrow and bloodshed. And fairies do more than kidnap babies.
A riveting portrait of madness, motherhood, the myths that haunt us, and the families who keep us tethered, Emily McBride’s Queen Mab (FSG, 2026) asks us to reconsider what is real and how we might see a truer picture of ourselves through the darkness.

Emily McBride is a Canadian-born editor, writer, and translator living in Barcelona. Her work has been published in The Nation, The Rumpus, and The Stinging Fly. Queen Mab is her debut novel.

Recommended Books:

Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star
Helen Garner, The Children’s Bach

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Tracy Borman, "The House of Boleyn" (Hachette, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When nobleman Thomas Boleyn, lord of Hever Castle, is called to London in 1509 to present himself to a newly anointed King Henry VIII, he sets in train events that ensure the Boleyn name will never be forgotten. His daughters Mary and Anne were young then, and though he was ambitious for his family to prosper, he could not imagine what would transpire in the two decades to come.

Blending the history she knows so well with the creativity of her imagination, Tracy Borman brings the Boleyn family’s three-decade rise and precipitous fall to vivid life in The House of Boleyn (Hachette, 2026). Borman surrounds the main dramatic events of the Boleyn saga with a colorful tableau in which familial and inter-familial rivalries threaten and true love often loses out to keen ambition. Anne’s ever-loyal attendant Esther Frideswide and Thomas Boleyn’s perfidious steward Robert Cranwell are as memorable as Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, or anyone in the increasingly dangerous orbit of the royal court. Henry VIII pursues Anne relentlessly, showering her with gifts as the Boleyns are catapulted to political prominence. But when she can’t give him the son and heir he desperately seeks, the family faces a terrible and bloody fate. With lavish and compelling historical detail, Tracy Borman displays her keen gift for storytelling in this resonant novel of family, fate, and intrigue.

Tracy Borman is chief historian of Historic Royal Palaces, chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, and chancellor and professor of Tudor History at Lincoln Bishop University.

Dr. Kristen Vitale Engel is an Associate Fellow at the Royal Historical Society. She is in the Department of History at Southern New Hampshire University, Global, the Editor-in-Chief of "The Court Observer" for The Society for Court Studies, the Submissions Editor for the Royal Studies Journal and the International Ambassador for HistoryLab+ in partnership with the Institute of Historical Research.

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J.J. Crayhill, "Raleigh and the Pirates" (Raconteur Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

J.J. Crayhill's Raleigh and the Pirates (Raconteur Press, 2026) is the launch of The Adventures of Midshipman Raleigh — a science fiction adventure series built on the bones of the great naval tales, transplanted to the lawless frontier of space. Anthony is small, undertrained, and deeply motivated, which turns out to be a dangerous combination — for everyone involved.

Midshipman Anthony Raleigh wasn't supposed to be the hero. He was barely supposed to be on the bridge.

When a pirate warship drops out of hiding to ambush the cargo freighter Pegasus, Captain Smith has one mission for his youngest crew member: take the shuttle, run, and bring help. Simple enough — except the pirates got there first.

With the shuttle sabotaged and the crew captured at gunpoint, Anthony is alone, unarmed, and hunted through corridors, air ducts, and — when things get truly desperate — across the outside of the ship in a malfunctioning spacesuit.

He has three things going for him: an AI named Fuse who enforces regulations with terrifying consistency; a security key the pirates will do anything to obtain; and a grudge against pirates that burns considerably hotter than fear.

That is going to have to be enough.

When he gets his hands on a classified space fighter hidden inside the Pegasus' sealed cargo pod, the pirates are going to find out exactly what a midshipman with something to prove looks like when he decides he has had enough.

And when the pirate captain makes one final play — a shocking claim about Anthony's supposedly dead father — the stakes shift from saving a ship to something far more personal.

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Meryl Branch-McTiernan, "What You Should Worry About" (Akashic Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 2 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Tune in to this interview with Meryl Branch-McTiernan about her new book What You Should Worry About (Akashic Books, 2026).

It's January of 2020 and thirty-seven-year-old Layla Moody is trying to worm her way into a party at the Sundance Film Festival. When she’s not picking up other people’s abandoned drinks or skinny-dipping in the hot tub, she’s trying to gain access to someone who can jump-start her stymied career as a Hollywood television writer. After a run-in with one of her creative heroines, she lands an opportunity to get her show produced. The only catch is, she has to return to New York, which she’s been avoiding since her father’s death.

But soon all is thwarted when COVID-19 shuts down the entertainment industry and any opportunity to propel her life forward. While quarantining alone in her parents’ apartment in Queens, Layla wrestles with the ghost of an ex-boyfriend who disappeared unexpectedly, the grief of processing the loss of her father, and the notion that she just might be the one responsible for her current state of solitude.

Finally, in spite of warnings and stay-at-home orders, Layla throws caution to the wind and joins a share house on Fire Island where she spent summers in her twenties. By returning to the house and its eclectic denizens, she is reintroduced to the comfort and annoying tendencies of other people, and begins to grasp how to find family on her own terms.

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Abdelwahab Meddeb, "Returns to Marrakesh / Retour à Marrakech" (Syracuse UP, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social classes, Sufi mystics, merchants, and travelers—a richly layered urban space in which cultures, histories, and spiritual traditions continually intersect. Presented in a bilingual edition featuring the original French alongside the English translation, the book introduces a wider readership to the work of one of North Africa’s most significant literary and intellectual voices.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Esposito and Reeck to discuss Meddeb’s distinctive literary and intellectual presence, his movement across languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, and his intimate portrayal of Marrakesh. They also explore the collaborative process of translating his multilingual, layered prose and consider how translation can extend—and even renew—a writer’s literary afterlife.

Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.
Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France.

Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026).

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City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong with Simon Elegant

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 1 Aug 2026 08:00:00 +0000

John chats with writer and journalist Simon Elegant about his third novel, a crime thriller set during the Hong Kong protests of 2019. City on Fire is published by Pegasus Crime, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The novel follows Inspector Killian Tong’s investigation of a brutal murder against a backdrop of political chaos, police tensions, and also personal conflict – Killian’s half-sister is a radical protester. John and Simon also discuss the background to the 2019 protests, including the National Security Law and the earlier 2014 Umbrella Movement.

Among the books mentioned were:

Manchu (1980) by Robert Elegant (a swashbuckling novel by Simon’s father).
Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith
Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy (2023) by Shibani Mahtani & Timothy McLaughlin
Simon’s book recommendations
The Immobile Empire (French 1989, English 1992) by Alain Peyrefitte. This is on the 1973 Macartney mission to Peking.
Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee, which explores Apple’s deep entanglement with China’s manufacturing system.
Ginkgo Season (2025) by Naomi Xu Elegant, a coming-of-age novel set in Philadelphia.

To learn more about Simon Elegant and his novel, visit the publisher’s website here

The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press . Subscribe to the BOA podcast from your favorite podcast service. podcast service.

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Jacqueline West, "Black Point" (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Black Point (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2026) is an insular small town steeped in Norse traditions, a teen’s developing romance with a newcomer becomes fraught as dark secrets from the past rise to the surface in this gorgeously atmospheric mystery by New York Times bestselling author Jacqueline West. Lucia Sorenson holds on hard to the things she loves. Her tiny Wisconsin hometown clings to the bluffs above the Mississippi River, threatened by weather, time, and the creep of climate change. Her mother is pushing her to go away to college and see the world beyond their small town, but Lucia is determined to stay and to keep her grandfather’s Viking museum going. When the Black Point Hotel, a 150-year-old landmark that’s been empty for decades, is bought by an outsider, tongues start wagging. Lucia meets the new owner’s teenage nephew, Max, and as they grow closer, she discovers there’s something thrilling about getting to know someone who hasn’t known her all her life—and maybe something more. Then Max discovers some ominous things about Black Point hidden away in the hotel—stories of ghosts and mysterious disappearances. Lucia refuses to believe that her town is hiding a sinister past. But the river is rising, and more secrets are washing to the surface. Soon, Lucia will have to choose between the home she thought she knew and uncovering the dark truths hidden underneath.

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Elisabeth Rhoads, "Haggard House" (Bodger Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It’s the 19th century, and a village in northern Michigan is the setting for Adam Bolton’s strange, decrepit house, called Haggard House by the community. He’s eleven, and his strictly religious mother only allows him to attend the village school after he promises not to be friendly with the other children. They’re heathens, she tells him. Adam builds an imaginary house in his mind, so when he meets a little girl who likes him, he can imagine her there. His father is a respected carpenter who leads a sad life because of Adam’s over-pious, angry and bitter mother. As a young man Adam escapes for a few years and doesn’t learn of his father’s murder until he returns. And when he goes against his mother’s wishes to marry the woman he loves, everyone pays a price in this well-written tale of madness and piety.

Elisabeth Rhoads is the Vice-President of the second largest branch of the California Writers Club—Orange County. Since 2021, she has been a volunteer juror for the Scholastic Writing Awards. She holds her BA in Theatre and has recently been accepted into Chapman University’s Creative Writing MFA program, starting in Fall of 2026. Originally from Michigan, she spent two summers working on Mackinac Island, which only allows transport by horse and carriage, foot, or bicycle. Her time on this history-soaked island deeply influenced her, and has inspired many stories, including, in part, Haggard House (Bodger Books, 2025)—and is featured briefly in the novel.

She is the author of one novel and has begun a short story series on her Substack, in which she writes a new story each month, based on subscriber prompts. Now living in California with her husband, she enjoys learning Japanese, fermenting foods of all types—although mainly kombucha—and pretends to enjoy exercise-related activities, such as kayaking and running.

As someone who grew up within a strict, religious home, her writing reflects the Victorian influences that made up a large part of her family’s reading habits, such as Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allen Poe. She hopes that modern readers will find much to connect with, as these old-world literary influences combine with her now much broader view of the world.

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Charles Akl, "Red Like Orange" (Hoopoe, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A Conversation with author Charles Akl about his debut novel Red Like Orange (Hoopoe, 2026)

An offbeat tale of creativity, friendship, and finding your voice in this uproarious journey through Cairo's music scene in the early 2000s, where everything from American rock to Egyptian popular songs cultivates big dreams

Winner of the Sawiris Cultural Award

Following a breakup with his long-term girlfriend, “Local,” as he is known to his friends, moves from Alexandria to Cairo. In his new apartment, he discovers an old accordion, while his roommate unexpectedly decides to take up the saxophone, despite never having touched one before. And so, in the blistering summer heat, the two of them, without any formal training, dive into their first musical experiment: they put his mother’s cookbook to music.

Along with an eccentric assortment of acquaintances and occasional bandmates, Local crashes through his twenties and in and out of Cairo hangouts, heated debates on different music scenes, and various impromptu jam sessions and attempts at musical production.

This is a raucous journey through offbeat downtown Cairo in the early 2000s and the music of the era, from Mohamed Mounir to Pink Floyd. Suffused with a sardonic humor and full of hilarious observations, Red Like Orange vividly chronicles life lived just outside the mainstream.

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Mark Kitto, "China Running Dog" (Plum Rain Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In his novel China Running Dog (Plum Rain Press, 2025), a young man in his early twenties lives in Shanghai in the year 2000, in a greed-crazed free-for-all moral and lawless vacuum created by the Chinese Communist Party. Johnny Trent, small-time entrepreneur from Basildon in the UK, ends up in China, where he meets Felix Fawcett-Smith, fresh off the boat and from the other side of the tracks. An unlikely friendship begins.

Johnny impresses the well-bred Felix with his street smarts until Felix takes Johnny’s advice too literally – and too far – and slips into Shanghai’s murky underbelly. He enters a world where the Party, power, and connections to them, are all that matter, where criminals are given sainthoods and saints sent to hell.

Johnny tries to stop Felix’s spiral, not least because Felix is taking a sweet, angelic girl, Anita, down with him and Johnny has feelings for Anita that he has never dared to put into words. But Felix thinks he knows best. Like Johnny, all he wants is respect.

It’s up to Johnny to save whoever he can, besides himself.

Books mentioned in this podcast: Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui, Shanghai by Richie Yokomitsu (transl. Dennis Washburn), Candy by Mian Mian

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A Conversation with LeUyen Pham illustrator of "As I Dream of You" (First Second, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

As I Dream of You (First Second, 2026) illustrated by LeUyen Pham and written by Jennifer Lee. Falling in love is supposed to hurt. That’s what Franny and Sam, two cynical teenagers raised on tales of heartbreak and loss, have come to understand. Yet when they fall for each other, they find the reality of love is something else entirely: it’s electrifying, all-encompassing, and easy. Theirs is a love that can conquer anything...perhaps even death. But Franny and Sam’s quest to stay together—no matter the cost—soon blurs the line between reality and fantasy, and their shared dream threatens to turn into a nightmare.

In this episode, Pham talks about illustrating graphic novels and picture books as well as working as an artist.

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Mohamed Alyahyai, "The War" (Dararab for Publishing and Translation, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A psychological Arabic novel in English translation, The War by Mohamed Alyahyai follows a man who begins to question whether he is truly the one who returned from war.

On a winter night, Issa Saleh prepares a small gathering at his home. By the end of the evening, they are gone—and he is no longer certain they were ever there.

As memory fractures, the war resurfaces not as event but as instability, where identity itself begins to slip and the narratives that sustain survival unravel.

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Julie Buntin, "Famous Men" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known?
Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.
A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men (Random House, 2026) traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again.

Julie Buntin‘s debut novel, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, released in ten territories worldwide, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. She is the co-editor of Notes to New Mothers, a collection of dispatches from postpartum life by sixty writers and artists. Previously, Buntin was an editor and director of writing programs at Catapult. Now, she writes and teaches in Ann Arbor, where she is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

Recommended Books:

Dur E. Aziz Amna, A Splintering
Chloe Benjamin, The Understory
Louise Kennedy, Stations
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

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Marie Léticée, "Camille's Lakou" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Camille’s Lakou (Vanderbilt UP, 2025), a novel by Guadeloupean writer and educator Marie Léticée, tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single‑parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe‑à‑Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming‑of‑age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz‑Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromanefrom the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakoushifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood.
In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée’s Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time.

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Christy Wilhelmi, "Bolting to Seed: A Garden Variety Novel" (Gardenerd Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Lizzie Raju is back in Christy Wilhelmi's sequel Bolting to Seed (Garden Nerd Press, 2026) and she has "Six Reasons Not to Have Kids." Finding a corpse in her happy place wasn't on the list.
It's been six months since Lizzie married the hunky guy she met at Vista Mar Community Garden and, unfortunately for him, she has six reasons for not wanting kids.
But when a dead body turns up in the tool shed, she has to solve the mystery and save her marriage, or her urban oasis will wither to dust. In Bolting to Seed, Lizzie and the eclectic cast of characters return for another growing season, but in-fighting and the threat of death prevent them from finding peace in gardening.
What's a gardener to do when plants aren't the only thing dying behind the locked gates at Vista Mar?
Bolting to Seed is a cozy mystery that follows the lives of Lizzie and a diverse group of urban farmers at Vista Mar Gardens, an organic community garden in Los Angeles, CA. You'll find gardening lessons interwoven with clues as you guess whodunit in this engaging work of women's fiction.
Lizzie tackles the very personal question: To breed or not to breed, as she grapples with the fact that her biological clock has no alarm. Jared struggles to find his way through Lizzie's indecision. Meanwhile, Ralph tumbles head-first into matters of the heart, while Ned and Mary deal with the challenges of aging and contentious members of their community garden.

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April Howells, "The Unforgettable Mailman" (Alcove Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In the midst of texting and cell phones, online websites and GPS, it can be difficult to remember an era when almost all communication took place by landline or snail mail, as it’s now called, and driving depended on the ability to read a printed map. But April Howells’s debut novel vividly recaptures that world.

The Unforgettable Mailman (Alcove Press, 2026) opens in Chicago in October 1966. The post office, overwhelmed with unsolicited mail in the days before the ZIP code, has shut down temporarily, and an elderly resident named Henry Walton decides that someone must deliver the mail. People depend on letters, after all, and without them, connections with their nearest and dearest will fade.

Henry himself suffers from a bad leg leftover from World War I and an increasingly dicey memory. But despite these obstacles, he succeeds in breaking into the post office and leaving with approximately 300 letters, destined for places as far apart as Canada and the Dakotas. Throughout the story we see Henry’s interactions with the recipients of the letters as well as the letters themselves, and through the exchanges Henry’s own past becomes ever clearer. After a while, his journey intersects with that of Roger, a high-school student in search of the father who left home, and the two of them pursue the delivery of the letters as we learn more about what makes each of them tick.

This haunting novel, which came out a couple of months ago, captivated me from the very beginning. Henry is beautifully portrayed and sympathetic, and so are all the people with whom he interacts along the road—including, of course, Roger.

April is a storyteller who finds heartwarming inspiration in little-known pieces of history. With a background in magazine publishing, she’s spent the last decade leading Global Internal Communications and Employee Engagement for premium apparel brand lululemon. The Unforgettable Mailman is her debut novel.

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John Burt, "A Moment's Surrender" (Press Americana, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It’s 1980, a decade after he dropped out of grad school, and Paul Bishop is a lowly writing instructor at a college in Nevada. His former best friend, Tom Corbin is now the celebrated poet that Paul once dreamed of being, but shortly after visiting Paul in Reno, Tom is murdered. The story focuses on Paul’s crippling guilt, Tom’s wife’s ongoing love for her cheating husband, and the difficult girlfriend both Paul and Tom betrayed a decade before. After Tom’s death, all three are forced to confront their grief and painful memories. A Moment’s Surrender (Press Americana, 2026) is a thoughtful and literary deep dive into guilt, marriage, and loyalty.

John Burt has taught English at Brandeis University since 1983. He is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Way Down (1988), Work without Hope (1996), and Victory (2007). His scholarly books include Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism (2013) and Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (1988). He is also the editor of The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (1998), and Robert Penn Warren's Brother to Dragons: A Parallel Text Critical Edition of the 1953 and 1979 versions (forthcoming). Since 1984 he has sung in an ensemble devoted to the polyphonic folk songs and religious music of the Republic of Georgia, and he transcribes and engraves music from Georgia for other singers and ensembles to use. Learn more on his website.

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Molly Fader, "Lady X: A Novel" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Molly Fader's latest novel, Lady X: A Novel (Random House, 2026), the search for a notorious vigilante exposes the secrets between three generations of women in this propulsive novel of female resistance and rage, sweeping from contemporary L.A. to gritty, 1970s New York. Los Angeles, 2024. After learning that her A-List actor husband sent explicit photos to multiple girls on social media, Margot Cooper runs away from the world—and the paparazzi—by fleeing to her childhood home with her teenage daughter in tow. But home isn’t the sanctuary Margot was hoping for. In a cardboard box in the corner of the attic, she finds damning evidence of an infamous urban legend, the mysterious vigilante “Lady X”—including a blurry newspaper photo of a woman who looks an awful lot like Margot’s mother. New York City, 1977. In the midst of an infamous summer, Ginger Daughtry and her two beloved roommates are able to shield each other from the chaos—until one of them is assaulted. Astounded by the lack of response from police, the young women decide to engage in some light payback, signing their handiwork as “Lady X.” Soon copycats appear, and a movement inspired by acts of vandalism against terrible men spirals out of control, with criminals running amok under the guise of the enigmatic “Lady X.” When a body is found fallen—or pushed—from five stories high, the hunt reaches a boiling point. But Lady X has vanished into thin air.

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Juliet McShannon “Rescue” (Spring, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Juliet McShannon speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Rescue,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows a woman on her search for a lost dog through a neighborhood very different from her own, and explores ideas of loss, class, community, and healing. Juliet also discusses how her childhood in Apartheid South Africa, and young adulthood practicing law during the time of transition that followed, has shaped her writing.

Juliet McShannon is an emerging fiction writer who was born in England, raised in South Africa where she practiced law, and now lives in the Colorado Desert in Southern California. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and was selected as a Luso-American Fellow for Disquiet International. Her writing has appeared in Five Points Literary Journal, the New England Review, The Guardian, The Independent, The Star, and elsewhere.

Read the story in The Common at thecommononline.org/rescue.

Follow Juliet on Instagram at @julietmcshannon.

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Andrew Martin, "Down Time" (FSG, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Times Book Review and elsewhere. He lives in New York City with his family.

Recommended Books:

William Demby, Love Story Black

Morgan Meis, The Drunken Silenus

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Judith Starkston, "Achilles's Wife: A Novel of Greek Myth Retelling" (Bronze Age Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 7 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In an ancient kingdom, a princess takes inspiration from a visiting young woman to challenge her father's views and reach for leadership-and then discovers her muse is a man.

The goddess mother of Greek mythology's most famous warrior, Achilles, will do anything to prevent her son's fated early death. In a desperate move, she hides Achilles, against his will, on an island-disguised in a girl's body.

Tormented by inner discord, the miscast "girl" befriends Mia, the eldest daughter of the island's king, launching a transformation of Mia's own. Armed with a new vision she believes comes from a girl, Mia contends with family secrets, a controlling father, her destiny to rule, and the wrath of a goddess.

When fate reveals Achilles's identity, a divine mother's fury drives Mia and Achilles into marriage. Mia must navigate her love for a man with a divided heart and a dangerous measure of immortality. Balancing governance and motherhood, Mia will face an unbearable choice.

Achilles's Wife: A Novel of Greek Myth Retelling (Bronze Age Books, 2026) is a stand-alone novel in the Trojan Threads Series.

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Matthew Del Papa and Andy Taylor, "Supercanucks: An Anthology of Canadian Small-Town Superheroes" (Latitude 46, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 5 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Matthew D. Del Papa, one of the editors of SuperCanucks: An Anthology of Canadian Small-Town Superheroes (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2026). SuperCanucks features eleven stories that explore the usual superhero tropes while shining a spotlight on the unique corners of Canada. Not your typical big city superhero, but those who live in and around Canada’s more often overlooked locales—isolated small towns and rural outposts. These heroes battle unique Canadian dangers, including government bureaucracy and the overreaching neighbours in the south.

About the Editors:

Matthew D. Del Papa spent every Tuesday of his youth crisscrossing his hometown of Capreol in search of newly arrived comic books. He wore superhero-themed Underoos to a truly worrying age and still has his Batman (and Robin) lunchbox, backpack, and wristwatch. A graduate of Laurentian University, Matthew is a writer, editor, and self-publisher, and has released ten titles to some modest local acclaim. He joined the Sudbury Writers’ Guild in 2009 and his writing has appeared in Spooky Sudbury, Nothing Without Us Too, Mighty, and the forthcoming Sudbury Superstack: A Changing Skyline. His first book, a collection of humorous essays titled Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die, was released in 2023 through Latitude 46 Publishing.

Andy W. Taylor grew up as a teen in the 1980s reading Alpha Flight comics and was excited to see Canadian superheroes represented for the first time. Andy was a reader and writer of speculative fiction from an early age thanks in no small part to his mother’s frequent trips to the public library with her kids. He’s a member of the Sudbury Writers’ Guild, a graduate of the Viable Paradise writing workshop and Playwright’s Junction workshop, and a member of CODEX writer’s forum. Originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Andy currently lives in Sudbury with his family. His fiction has appeared in On Spec Magazine, FictionVale, Polar Borealis, Sudbury Ink Anthology, and on the streets of Sudbury. He has a new poem and non-fiction piece coming out in 2024 in the anthology Sudbury Superstack: A Changing Skyline.

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Annakeara Stinson, "Nerve Damage: A Novel" (Knopf, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 5 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Annakeara Stinson's Nerve Damage: A Novel (Knopf, 2026) is a riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself. Clarice’s breakup with P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, countless phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her apartment and her office. He sent her flowers and poems, and, perhaps most sinister of all, a link to the music video for Dido's “White Flag.” Relief arrived only when Clarice finally obtained a restraining order and one-way ticket from New York to L.A. Just as the restraining order expires—and three years to the day since she left him—Clarice spots a man who looks suspiciously like P.T. at a nightclub. Could it be him? Her best friend thinks she’s imagining things. Her therapist wants her to focus on healing her inner child. Her mother is busy planning her wedding to her fourth husband. A psychic medium can reveal only that P.T.’s energy is too volatile to locate on the spiritual plane. As painful memories resurface, Clarice is convinced her ex has returned to ruin her life. But with scant evidence to prove it, she takes increasingly unhinged steps to uncover the truth, ultimately leading to a place where paranoia and reality begin to blur. A profane and poignant debut novel, Nerve Damage is a different kind of survivor narrative, about how far one woman will go to wrest back control of her life in a world determined to send her spiraling.

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L. L. Madrid, "My Lips, Her Voice" (Creature Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 4 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

L.L. Madrid's My Lips, Her Voice (Creature Publishing, 2025) takes place in Copper City, a town who's bloody history is steeped in ghost stories and whispers of serial killers, but three girls have caught the attention of something far more sinister.

A grandmother tormented by visions tried to warn the town, but no one listened. Now, a haunted inheritance has passed to her granddaughters, Audrey and Mara. When Mara’s body is discovered in the old mine, Audrey fears her grandmother’s premonition is manifesting.

The nightmare begins as Mara’s spirit returns—lurking under Audrey’s skin, hellbent on vengeance and desperate to rekindle things with her former girlfriend, Zadie. Willing to hijack Audrey’s body to get what she wants, Mara drags them both into a deadly pursuit.

When another girl in town goes missing, Audrey, Mara, and Zadie know the killer has struck again. In a fight to solve Mara’s death and uncover the mystery of disappearances in Copper City, the girls soon find themselves at war with each other. How do you survive long enough to hunt a murderer on the loose if the person inside you might kill you first?

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Ysabelle Cheung, "Patchwork Dolls" (Blair, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 3 Jul 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this debut story collection Patchwork Dolls (Blair, 2026), Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time.

Set in Hong Kong and America--between the present day and an uncannily altered future--this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman--living under the specter of state and technological surveillance--or trying to break free from it?

In the title story, a young woman of color realizes she can make her fortune by surgically selling her facial features to whiter, wealthier clients. In "Please, Get Out and Dance," a group of rebels escapes a city that is literally disappearing around them--building by building, person by person--to migrate to a new home beneath the ocean, defying their government's mandate. "Herbs" follows an elderly widow who, when the clones of her dead husband start to appear uninvited in her home, must grapple with her memories.

In each of these stories, Cheung tilts the world just slightly off its axis to bring together a haunting meditation on what it means to survive within our increasingly digitized and mechanized world.

Ysabelle Cheung is a writer and art critic based in Hong Kong. Her Fiction has appeared in Granta, Slate, and The Rumpus. She was awarded the 2023 Aspen Words Fellowship and was in residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation in 2024. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Atlantic, Artforum, and Lit Hub. She is the co-founder of a contemporary art gallery in Hong Kong called the PhD Group.

Recommended Books:

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
Sayumi Kamakura, Applause for a Cloud

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David Ly, "Not All Dragons" (Poplar Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with David Ly about his novel, Not All Dragons (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).
What is it that you are, Rhys?

In a land of magic and myth, Rhys awakens on the shore of Lanilia with mysterious wounds on his back and no memory of his life before. Disoriented, he stumbles on the Mernese estuary protected by the mermaid Delia, who is quickly intrigued by this male who doesn't smell like any Lanilian she's ever met and who is unable to answer questions about himself. Determined to figure out his past, Rhys convinces Delia to help, and begins a dangerous journey to discover who he is, or was, and who he might become as they hunt for the truth beneath story and prophecy. David Ly brings readers a fascinating and fresh take on dragons and destiny in this captivating debut novel.

David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and Dream of Me as Water (Anstruther Books, 2022), both short-listed for ReLit Poetry Awards, and the fantasy novel Not All Dragons (Poplar Press, 2026). He co-edited, with Daniel Zomparelli, Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David’s poems have appeared in publications such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, PRISM International, and The Ex-Puritan, where he won the inaugural Austin Clarke Prize in Literary Excellence for Poetry, as well as in the Pan MacMillan anthologies He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (2024) and You’re Never Too Much: Poems for Every Emotion (2025). He is the Poetry Editor at This Magazine. More here.

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Kevin Reilly, "Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness" (Peter Lang, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and biography, and in Irish Studies.

In this interview he discusses his most recent book, Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness (Peter Lang, 2026), a creative non-fiction intervention into Irish literary studies.

This book is a kind of Irish ghost story. In it the ghosts of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) and eight of her family members and colleagues look back over their lives—and sometimes forward beyond them—to try to make sense of them, their times, and one another. Theirs were all turbulent lives played out on the western edge of Europe at a time of great change.
Lady Gregory helped shape that change at a pivotal moment in Ireland’s development into a modern nation state. The author’s fresh approach questions and complicates the image of her as a prim Victorian workhorse. Setting her in the midst of the personal chatter of her departed family, lovers, friends, and collaborators brings home how the historical Irish moment found her just when it needed her.

Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness is published with Peter Lang, as part of their Re-imagining Ireland series

Aidan Beatty is a lecturer in the history department at Carnegie Mellon University and the President of the American Conference for Irish Studies

Transcript here

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“O Albany”: Novelist William Kennedy on His Great Cycle of the City

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from the gutter to the statehouse in narratives of brokenness, resilience, and unexpected grace set against the backdrop of one of America’s most storied underdog cities.

Join Kennedy himself, one of only a handful of living authors in the LOA series, and his longtime friend Paul Grondahl, editor of the LOA edition, for a special, intimate, and wide-ranging conversation about craft, Albany as a protagonist, and what’s next for this titan of American letters, at work on his next book at ninety-eight years old.

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Emily De Angelis, "The Stones of Burren Bay" (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with YA author Emily De Angelis about her acclaimed novel, The Stones of Burren Bay (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024).

In a tragic car accident, 15-year-old Norie loses her father while her distant mother is injured. Her prized possession, an antique artist’s box that traveled from Ireland with her great-great-grandmother, is destroyed along with her deep connection to her art. As Norie grapples with her self-identity, obscured by grief and anger, she and her physically and emotionally fragile mother are forced to relocate. With no other relatives to rely on, they call on the kindness of her mother’s oldest friend Dahlia and her daughter Wil, who run the Jolly Pot Tearoom and Burren Bay Lighthouse Museum on Manitoulin Island. Dahlia introduces Norie to ancient Irish Celtic spiritualism and opens the thin veil between the past and present where Norie encounters the echo of a century’s old spirit, Oonagh. Through Oonagh’s own story Norie comes to terms with her father’s betrayal and death and rediscovers her passion for art. As her mother’s emotional wounds reach a crisis, Norie realizes they must face their guilt and grief together in order to heal and become reunited as mother and daughter.

Emily De Angelis comes from a long line of visual artists, musicians, and storytellers. She was born in Sudbury, Ontario where she lived and taught special needs students for 30 years. A graduate of the Humber School of Writing, her western and Japanese-style poems as well as short stories have been published in various anthologies. The Stones of Burren Bayis her first YA novel. Emily now lives in Woodstock, Ontario while spending summers on Manitoulin Island.

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Naomi Hirahara, "Crown City (A Japantown Mystery)" (Soho Crime, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Crown City (A Japantown Mystery)" (Soho Crime, 2026), Ryunosuke “Ryui Wada is orphaned at 18, with no family or path left in Japan. He’s lucky when merchants from the states pay for him to get to Pasadena to work in their store selling authentic Japanese merchandise. It’s 1903, and although he’s lonely and confused by American customs, he’s committed to his new life. He thinks he’s starting to fit in, making friends with his roommate, Jack, and falling for a pretty seamstress in his boarding house, but the man whose bed he acquired has gone missing, he’s attacked on the street, and a painting is stolen from Pasadena’s most well-known Japanese artist, Toshio Aoki. The artist then hires Jack and Ryui to find his painting, which just might get them both killed.

Naomi Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winning author of multiple traditional mystery series and noir short stories. Her Mas Arai mysteries, which have been published in Japanese, Korean and French, feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes. Her first historical mystery, Clark and Division, which won a Mary Higgins Clark Award, follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago in 1944 after being released from a California wartime detention center. A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Naomi has also written numerous non-fiction history books and curated exhibitions. She has also written a middle-grade novel, 1001 Cranes. Her follow-up to Clark and Division, Evergreen, was released in August 2023 and was on the USA Today bestseller list for two weeks. And she’s passionate about collecting vintage postcards!

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Jason Weiss, "Other Lives Our Own" (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 01:06:00 +0000

In Other Lives Our Own (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) Jason Weiss reflects on travel, language, memory, identity, and the stories we inherit and create. This conversation explores how we inhabit each other's stories, tracing how movement across places and languages reshapes our understanding of self and belonging. Drawing on experiences in New York, Paris, Mexico, California and beyond, Weiss reflects on what it means to be a foreigner, the shifting nature of home, and the limits of labels such as "American."

Weiss reveals his gift for uncovering meaning in overlooked moments. He reflects on the value of curiosity, attentiveness, and recognizing significance in experiences that often go unnoticed. Whether discussing art, literature, family history, or everyday encounters, he argues that "in all our experiences there is more meaning than we normally give them."

This conversation includes Jason Weiss, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo.

Other episodes of the Nuevos Horizontes podcast with Jason Weiss include discussions of his books Listenings (in English and Spanish) and Lights of Home: A Century of Latin American Literature in Paris.
The Instituto Nuevos Horizontes is housed at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.

Topics, scholars, books and quotes mentioned:

Susan Beegel
Aurora Levins Morales
"I think it [home] is a moving perspective." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
Heraclitus the Obscure
"Where are you from? I think that changes." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
"If you say, 'you're from here' - you're too conscious of all that's missing from that answer." -Jason Weiss
"Parisian as a temporary designation felt right, as I enjoyed being a foreigner." -Jason Weiss
The Paradox of Choice
"Most things are like lightbulbs; they burnout and we throw them away" -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
Travel Writing
"…lack curiosity about the ones who went away" (Other Lives Our Own 63).
"Leaving disrupts a shared story, and the return doesn't quite fit the version of you they hold onto." -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
"They thought [the US] was a land of boundless opportunities, not endless forgetting" (Other Lives our Own 37).
"They didn't talk about the old country. The stuff to remember is predominantly not pleasant or they have that attitude that we have to look forward." -Jason Weiss on previous generations of Eastern European Jews
"American culture has always been angled toward not remembering." -Jason Weiss
"Myself, I find it complicated to work with [the word 'American']. But when you use it, I feel like I'm reading the cheeky, brilliant kid sitting in the back of the class, using it with all this other meaning." -Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
"Travel supercharged my desire to learn it [Spanish]." -Jason Weiss
"It should be a requirement for everyone to know at least two languages...I think of it as a toolbox, it gives us the capacity to think in another way." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo
"Every American should have to study Spanish.” -Jason Weiss
Anti-intellectualism in the US
"[A title can be] a wink at the reader." -Jason Weiss
Juanes, "A dios le pido"
"In another place, we are always someone else and maybe also the same. A little disoriented, almost lost, unsure of what we know. We speak another tongue, and our own tongue becomes different too: a secret among strangers, possibly a trap" (Other Lives our Own 21).
Louis Leroy
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise
Bringing Back New Concepts to This Mad City, Caroline Hagood.
Los Angeles Review of Books
"The Gleaners and I," Agnès Varda
"In all our experiences there is more meaning than we normally give them." -Jason Weiss
"The crowd is at the Mona Lisa but in the room next door you see works that make you say. This is so great, how is no one looking at this? Those types of things are happening in our own lives." -Jason Weiss
"UPR as a model for what US universities could do." -Jason Weiss
"On the Puertoricanization of US Higher Ed," Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
"…recognizing the otherness in yourself." -Jorge Rodríguez Acevedo

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Loretta Chefchaouni, "The Lustrous Dark" (Peachtree Teen, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Loretta Chefchaouni's debut The Lustrous Dark (Peachtree Teen, 2026) follows protagonist Shay.Orphaned as a baby, Shay has spent her life training as the midwife’s apprentice. Her role grants her stability, yet Shay has always yearned for more. Namely, motherly affection and answers regarding her mysterious birth—neither of which the midwife deems practical to provide.
After Shay discovers her birth mother, Hind, is still alive and addicted to a magical drug called Snow, she determines to get the woman clean. But when Hind betrays Shay to get her hands on more Snow, Shay’s abandoned within a deadly forest and forced to rely on a band of monstrous ghouls for safety.
Shay’s realm has long stood on the brink of war between the men who control magic and the revolutionaries who want to eliminate it. But in the forest, Shay hears the pleading call of ancient spirits who claim that not only has magic been stolen, but Shay has the power to return it. With the help of a spitfire revolutionary and the boy who’s winning over her heart, Shay discovers the horrific truth of who produces Snow and will have to decide for herself whether to heed the spirits’ charge or fade into obscurity.

This emotionally raw and gorgeously rendered fairy tale combines the lush worldbuilding of This Woven Kingdom with the mother trauma of Snow White and a dash of Tim Burton. Steeped in mysticism and mythology, The Lustrous Dark confronts injustices against women with a righteous scream that’ll inspire readers to rally against the patriarchy and oppressive regimes worldwide.

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Wendy J Fox, "The Last Supper" (Sante Fe Writer's Project, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Wendy J. Fox about her novel, The Last Supper, published by Sante Fe Writer's Project, 2026.

As stay-at-home mom Amanda turns forty, she faces a reckoning. She' s doing her best at parenting eight-year-old Toby, who only wants to eat orange-colored food, and almost-four-year-old Blake, who really should be in pre-school but is home doing YouTube aerobics with her. Amanda' s mother is a successful attorney. Her next-door neighbor makes an enviable living as a visual artist. Her two best friends from college seem to handle careers and motherhood just fine. Yet, Amanda just barely manages to muddle through dinner every night while obsessively Googling life advice. She' s racked up failures, like being swindled into pyramid schemes, and is struggling to launch what she thought was a sure-fire influencer lifestyle brand, AMANDAtory. When her husband loses his job and threatens her with divorce, Amanda is forced to face her choices head-on. Will she finally forge her own identity, or is she doomed to repeat her past mistakes?

Wendy J. Fox is the author of four books of fiction, including What If We Were Somewhere Else, which won the Colorado book and received a star for excellence in the genre of short-stories in Booklist. Her 2019 novel, If the Ice Had Held, was a top pick in audio for LitHub. She has written for many national publications including Self, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Ms. and authors a quarterly column in Electric Literature focusing on small press. She is a former SVP of marketing for a green tech firm and lives outside of Phoenix. Find her at wendyjfox.com. Wendy J. Fox is the author of four books of fiction, including What If We Were Somewhere Else, which won the Colorado book and received a star for excellence in the genre of short-stories in Booklist. Her 2019 novel, If the Ice Had Held, was a top pick in audio for LitHub. She has written for many national publications including Self, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, and Ms. and authors a quarterly column in Electric Literature focusing on small press. She is a former SVP of marketing for a green tech firm and lives outside of Phoenix. Find her at wendyjfox.com.

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Shana Galen, "A Shop Girl's Guide to Wooing a Lord" (Berkley, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Romance novels—especially historical romance novels—thrive on heroes and heroines who don’t match in terms of social class. There must be conflict, after all, or the novel would end before it began. But not even George Bernard Shaw’s mismatched couple in Pygmalion (later My Fair Lady) can claim quite as much distance as Shana Galen’s Tamsin Archer and the Honourable Garret Kildare, the main characters in A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord (Berkley, 2026).

Tamsin’s once comfortable if never opulent life took a sharp downward turn when a Royal Navy press gang hauled her father off to unwanted service on a seagoing vessel, service from which he never returned. By 1813, when we meet her at age twenty-three, she’s doing her best to support her injured mother and two much younger siblings by selling flowers in the street. A young man named Garret speaks kindly to her and pays her a shilling when she’s expecting far less, and as a result she remembers him fondly, but it’s not until two years later that she meets him again. By then, a chimney sweep has taken her younger siblings and holds them hostage to payments she can never make and that he might not honor even if she did. She’s desperate to get them back.

In 1815, Garret’s life also makes a dramatic turn. His father, the Earl of Glenister, announces that the family has run out of money and must sell its ancestral lands in Ireland. Not exactly poverty, especially by Tamsin's standards, but still uncomfortable. Garret and his three brothers—Liam, Killian, and Daire—make a bet that one of them will secure the hand of an heiress, thus sparing their younger sister, Mariah, from having to marry an elderly and decrepit duke. But as Garret sets out to woo his heiress, he encounters Tamsin somewhere she’s not supposed to be …

Shana Galen, a former English teacher, has written more than fifty romances. A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord, first in her The Heiress Hunters series, is the latest. Find out more about her and her books here.

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Kimberly McCreight, "Someone Else's Husband" (Knopf, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight delivers a tour de force of character-driven suspense with her latest novel, Someone Else's Husband (Knopf, 2026), the story of two women whose secrets and desires entrap them in a deadly love triangle. You had to rely on the power of love. That he loved you enough not to do the thing that would break your heart. It was paper-thin ice on which to stake your survival. Gretchen Falk, a Park Avenue sophisticate born into great wealth and blessed with a storybook marriage, knows she lives a charmed life, and she’s not about to risk losing any part of it. That’s why she tried to convince Richard, her devoted husband and the father to their three children, not to join his old college friends on an expedition almost eight thousand miles away, to the imposing peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Little did she know that the beautiful artist climbing alongside him might prove the far greater danger. Frankie Callahan’s dream of artistic success is within reach, with her career-making exhibition at a celebrated New York gallery only weeks away. If all goes well, the show will leave her financially independent, free of the tainted money that ties her to a past—and a man—she’s desperate to escape. To mark this new beginning, she is going to climb Kilimanjaro. But when she learns she’s the sole female accompanying a group of male friends, Frankie realizes that nothing about the trip will be as she expected. She certainly hasn’t counted on meeting anyone like the very charismatic, very rich, very married Richard Falk. By the time they descend—with one fewer in their group than when they began—they have lost more than they ever could have imagined. Now, less than two weeks after their return to New York, Frankie’s East Village loft is a blood-soaked crime scene, and Richard has been charged with her murder. It falls to Gretchen to figure how the life she so carefully constructed could have imploded so completely. There are only two things she knows for sure: she’s the only woman Richard has ever loved, and he would never hurt anyone. Someone Else’s Husband is the sweeping and suspenseful story of two women on a collision course with love—and with each other—in which no one is right and everyone is very, very wrong.

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Justin C. Key, "The Hospital at the End of the World: A Novel" (Harper, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

From author Justin C. Key comes The Hospital at the End of the World: A Novel (Harper, 2026), set in a near future where artificial intelligence runs the world, involving a young medical student who must unravel family secrets to uncover the truth of his father’s mysterious death.

In a time not so far from our own, society is run by a global AI system controlled by an all powerful corporation. The Shepherd Organization oversees every medical school in the country save one in New Orleans, the renegade Hippocrates which still insists on human-led medicine. It is the last choice school for an ambitious young New Yorker named Pok. But after his father—himself a physician—dies under mysterious circumstance that seems connected to “the shepherds” and their megalomaniacal young CEO, Pok finds himself on a quest for answers that leads right to Hippocrates. Once enrolled, he stumbles upon a further mystery: a strange illness is plaguing newcomers to New Orleans who grew up under shepherd rule. What is causing this fatal anomaly? And how does it relate to the mystery of Pok’s father’s death and his own mysterious past?

Justin C. Key is a practicing psychiatrist and a speculative fiction writer. He is the author of the debut novel The Hospital at the End of the World and the story collection The World Wasn’t Ready for You. His stories have appeared in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Lightspeed, and on Tor.com. He received a BA in biology from Stanford University and completed his residency in psychiatry at UCLA. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children.

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Ro Skelton, “Naow’s Boutique” (Spring, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Ro Skelton speaks to Emily Everett about her essay “Naow’s Boutique,” which appears in The Common’s Spring issue. The essay explores Ro’s time living and working in Dakar, where she formed a friendship in her neighborhood that eventually led to a sense of community, and then a community garden, and then a lifelong friendship. Ro also discusses how the essay fits into her focus as a writer – writing about gardening in unconventional spaces – and her memoir-in-progress on the subject, Easement.

Ro Skelton is a writer and gardener from Scotland. She is currently working on her first book, Easement, a memoir about mental health, queer parenting, and radical acts of gardening. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review, Waxwing, New Ohio Review, and Ecotone. Previously a reporter in West Africa and a member of an ocean-going rescue crew, she now lives and gardens on the Isle of Mull.

Read the essay in The Common here.

Learn more about Ro and her work at here.

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Deb Olin Unferth, "Earth 7: A Novel" (Graywolf Press 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.
Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any love—seems so unlikely. Earth is severely depopulated. Some people have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue eternal life as digital code. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts—and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that a future person may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Quixotic? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do?
By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, revelatory, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos as a “soul globule” and between grains of sand as a microscopic tardigrade. A slim book tackling big questions (is all matter conscious? will we tech ourselves into salvation, or out of existence?), Earth 7 (Graywolf Press 2026) is a poignant inquiry into death, mourning, and indefatigable life, the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most original and beloved writers.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including Barn 8 and Wait Till You See Me Dance. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and four Pushcart Prizes, and was a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary.

Recommended Books:

Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra
Jean Stafford, A Mother in History
Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth

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Deb Olin Unferth, "Earth 7" (Graywolf Press 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

With thanks to “forever” plastics, the earth has reverted to sand and dust. Dylan has been raised by her scientist mother, in a pod under the sea, and longs to escape the loneliness of being confined. The only friend she ever had was a pen pal from Mars, who disappeared. With great effort, she’s escorted onto land, to the place of her mother’s employment where she becomes the groundskeeper. Unofficially, she begins studying sand. After a few years, the company sends her on a vacation and she meets Melanie, possibly a robot. Love flourishes on the floundering planet, but death is never far, and Dylan’s pen pal returns too late in Earth 7 (Graywolf Press 2026), a dystopian novel about the frailty of the planet, the ongoing need for scientific research, and the human struggle for survival.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Barn 8 and Vacation, the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, two story collections, and the graphic novel I, Parrot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, fellowships from the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross residencies.

She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary. Unferth founded and directs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program for incarcerated men at a maximum-security prison in south Texas. The program has been running for ten years, and the students regularly win writing awards from Pen America and the Insider Prize. Their work has appeared in many places, including Vice, StoryQuarterly, the Texas Observer, the Stranger's Guide, and the Marshall Project.

Deb and her friend, Lucy Corin, have gone on several research and writing trips together, including to the Sahara Desert for the sand; in 2024, they spent a month in the Arctic to see ice, trying to get as close to the North Pole as possible, and reaching the 82nd parallel. Last year, they rented two pods in a scrub desert Dark Sky area of the US to see darkness. Originally from Chicago, Unferth lives in Austin with philosophy professor Matt Evans.

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Kyra Davis Lurie, "The Great Mann" (Crown, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 9 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite’s invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, Charlie is immediately captivated by the Black opulence of L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.”
Settling in at a local actress’s energetic boarding house, Charlie discovers a different way of life—one brimming with opportunity—from a promising career at a Black-owned insurance firm, the absence of Jim Crow, to the potential of an unforgettable romance. But nothing dazzles quite like James “Reaper” Mann.
Reaper’s extravagant parties, attended by luminaries like Lena Horne and Hattie McDaniel, draw Charlie in, bringing the milieu of wealth and excess within his reach. But as Charlie’s unusual bond with Reaper deepens, so does the tension in the neighborhood as white neighbors, frustrated by their own dwindling fortunes, ignite a landmark court case that threatens the community’s well-being with promises of retribution.
Told from the unique perspective of a young man who has just returned from a grueling, segregated war, The Great Mann (Crown, 2025) is a poignant reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby set amongst L.A.’s Black elite weaves a compelling narrative of wealth and class, illuminating the complexities of Black identity and education in post-war America.

You can find Kyra on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.

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Terese Mason Pierre, "As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories" (Spiderline, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 8 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with editor, poet, and author, Terese Mason Pierre about As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories (Spiderline, 2025).

A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy.

Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother's fourth funeral, only to encounter family she's never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice.

These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire--all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures.

Featuring stories by:
Trynne Delaney
francesca ekwuyasi
Whitney French
Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga
Chimedum Ohaegbu
Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Chinelo Onwualu
Lue Palmer
Terese Mason Pierre
Zalika Reid-Benta

TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto.

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Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 4 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership.

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Terao Tetsuya and translated by Kevin Wang, "Spent Bullets" (HarperVia, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 3 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

With Taiwan Travelogue winning the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese literature in translation has achieved new heights of visibility in the Anglosphere.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with writer and translator Kevin Wang about his English language rendition of Spent Bullets (HarperCollins, 2025), another Taiwanese novel that Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King herself recommended to English-language readers.

Written by a former Google engineer using the pen name Terao Tetsuya, Spent Bullets contains nine interconnected stories about a group of Taiwanese men as they journey through Taiwan’s most prestigious schools to Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies.

Despite being the “elite”, these characters find themselves mired in a swamp of nihilism, resorting to suicide attempts and sadomasochism as outlets for their constantly oppressed psyches. The novel represents a darkly humorous take on Taiwan’s omnipresent achievement culture, as well as another critically celebrated example of the island’s burgeoning body of queer literature.

Other works that Kevin mentions in the podcast:

Kink: Stories — by R.O. Kwan and Garth Greenwell
Overfitting — by Terao Tetsuya, still pending translation
Mobu’s Diary —by Kathy Lam, translated by Kevin Wang and Cindy Ko
Kevin's recent interview by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, in which he discusses communities in Taipei in greater detail

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Martha Conway, "We Meet Apart" (Regal House Publishing, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 2 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It’s 1940 and Gaby’s parents and sister succumb to Typhus after staying in France to care for Gaby and Sabine’s dying grandmother. The war is in full swing and Gaby can’t get home to Poughkeepsie, NY. Her aunt lives in Ireland, which stayed neutral during WWII, so she heads there. But the aunt has just died, and 18-year-old Gaby makes her way to the remote manor of her aunt’s husband’s relatives, where she’s hired as a servant. In a different reality, 17-year-old Sabine is the sister who survived. She also finds her way to Ireland, but Germany has invaded, so she’s in hiding. Then Sabine gets to the same remote manor where for one hour at dusk, a mystical time according to Irish legend, she and Gaby meet and talk. We Meet Apart (Regal House Publishing, 2026) is about family, resilience, and survival in the face of war, death, and the world of ghosts.

Martha Conway grew up in northern Ohio and earned her B.A. in English and History from Vassar College. She received a master’s in English: Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University. Her previous novels include The Underground River, which was a New York Times Book Editor’s Choice, and Thieving Forest, which won the North American Book Award for Historical Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Missouri Review, Folio, and other journals. She is a recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship, and she teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Writing Certificate program. When Martha is not writing or reading, she's playing at being a flaneuse—a city stroller—or traveling to Italy to see Roman ruins with her husband, a former archeologist.

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Mackenzi Lee, "Masters of the Universe: Teela: Daughter of Eternos" (Mattel, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 1 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Mackenzi Lee's Masters of the Universe: Teela: Daughter of Eternos (Mattel, 2026) is a young adult tie-in for the Masters of the Universe (2026) film.

A FALLEN KINGDOM
Four years after Skeletor decimated the kingdom of Eternos, Teela and the scattered refugees of Eternia survive by never staying in one place for long. When a brutal storm of acidic rain deep within the Evergreen Forest leaves their camp ravaged and hope at its thinnest, some, like Teela’s friend Locke, begin to plan for a future beyond Eternia. But Teela knows her father Duncan, the once-mighty Man-At-Arms, won’t survive leaving the land he swore to protect.
A FORBIDDEN ALLIANCE
Desperate to save her people, Teela ventures to Darksmoke to bargain with the ancient dragon Granamyr. He bestows upon her a vial filled with a mysterious, powerful elixir—and no instructions on its use. Enter Evil-Lyn, Skeletor’s ruthless second-in-command, who intercepts Teela with a dangerous proposal: an alliance. In exchange for the vial’s secrets, Teela and the Heroic Warriors must someday help the sorceress overthrow Skeletor himself.
A MAGIC THAT COULD SAVE—OR DESTROY—THEM ALL
The vial heals the sick and brings food back to empty tables—until the forest around the camp begins to change. Rivers vanish. Trees peel to bone. Creatures flee. As the land around them withers at an ever-increasing pace, Teela must confront an impossible question: Has the very magic she used to save her people doomed Eternia instead?

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chaun webster, "Without Terminus: untraining an archive" (Greywolf, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 26 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.
webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.
Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus: untraining an archive (Greywolf, 2026) is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss.

You can find the works chaun references during our conversation, as well as a further discussion about literary form, at the Additions to the Archive Substack.

Follow chaun webster on Instagram.

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Elina Penner, 'Nightberries" (CMU Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Elina Penner about her translated novel, Nightberries (CMU Press, 2026, translated by Bradley Schmidt).

Where is your husband?
Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. Or are memories like nightberries? Nightberries taste good, with sugar, when ripe. But sometimes nightberries are dangerous, and you need to understand when that transformation happens. A tense situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life.

Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and moved to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the US, she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful personal essayist and blogger. Nachtbeeren was her debut novel, in 2022. In 2025, her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen, will be published in Germany.

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An Interview with Senior Literary Agent Stephen Fraser

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Stephen Fraser is senior literary agent with The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, after having worked as an editor for over 25 years before becoming an agent. He represents children’s books in a wide range of genres. We talked about his experiences in the worlds of editing and agenting, his do's and don'ts for submissions, his thoughts on the current state of children's literature, and the importance of the story.

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An Interview with Senior Literary Agent Stephen Fraser

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

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Elizabeth Bradfield's Books in Dark Times (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.

Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.

Liz is in and of and for our whole natural world. Did poetry sustaining her through the darkest hours of the pandemic? What about other sources of inspiration?

Mentioned in the episode:

Eavand Boland, “Quarantine” (from Against Love Poetry; read her NY Times obituary here)

Maeve Binchy, “Circle of Friends“

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology

Louise Gluck Averno and Wild Iris

Brian Teare, Doomstead Days

Derek Walcott, “Omeros“

W. S. Merwin, “The Folding Cliffs”

Natasha Trethewey, “Belloqc’s Ophelia“

Yeats, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

Nest, Eggs and Nestlings of North American Birds (Princeton Field Guides)

Trixie Belden

Shel Silverstein

Lois Lowry, “The Giver“

Liz equates poetry and Tetris

Leanne Simpson, “This Accident of Being Lost“

Elizabeth Bradfield, “We all want to see a mammal“

Listen and Read Here:

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Paige Lewis, "Canon" (Viking, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Canon (Viking, 2026), two unlikely heroes embark on quests to win God’s favor in this outrageously entertaining, profoundly heartfelt novel that announces an ingenious new voice in the tradition of Chain-Gang All-Stars, No One Is Talking About This, and Martyr!
Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.
Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.
As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.

Paige Lewis is the author of the poetry collection Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019) and the novel Canon (Viking Press, 2026). They co-edited Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction and Deliverance (Sarabande Books, 2023) with Kaveh Akbar. Paige teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.
Recommended Books:

Tom Lin, Babylon, South Dakota
Layli Long Soldier, We

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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.

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Mike Papantonio, "A Death in Arcadia" (Arcade Publishing, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 18 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Mike Papantonio's A Death in Arcadia (Arcade Publishing, 2026) Nicholas “Deke”Deketomis Returns to Face His Darkest Case Yet—And His Own Haunted Past When fifteen-year-old Trayvon Clapper is murdered by a guard at Camp B in Florida, his fringe-living mother and boyfriend come to Bergman-Deketomis to file a lawsuit against the facility. Details of the case trigger in Deke memories of his own troubled childhood. As a boy, Deke had no stable parents around him, so he lived with several different families over the years as he grew up, avoiding the foster care system. However, his best friend, Bucky, was not so fortunate. He, too, was killed in a similar facility… and Deke has carried within him a powerful guilt that he has never talked about to anyone, including his wife and children. Cara Deketomis, Deke’s daughter, is a young lawyer at the firm also working on the case. She comes to recognize the pain her father is feeling but she does not have the ability to break through to the truth. An opportunity in Cara’s personal life also hammers a wedge between father and daughter, adding more stress to the situation. Meanwhile, investigation into the case uncovers a hidden threat that could endanger everyone at the law firm. A corrupt Congressman, Bob Minds, and his shady colleague, Skyler Bannock, are “fixers” for Phoenix Industries, the parent company of Camp B and other child “protective” services facilities that do anything but that. Minds and Bannock resort to nefarious crimes to make Phoenix’s problems go away,i ncluding bribery, intimidation, and even murder. And then there’s Skyler’s brother, Midas, a killer straight out of a nightmare, who does the team’s dirtiest work. Will the ugly forces behind the scenes wreak lethal havoc on Deke and his team? Will the echo of Deke’s guilt get in the way of a successful legal action against Phoenix? In the tradition of The Middleman, Suspicious Activity, and Inhuman Trafficking, Papantonio takes Deke and his cohorts on a new and different kind of legal gamble, but full of the action and thrills for which he is known.

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Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie, "A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams" (William Morrow, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

So close to the semiquincentennial, it’s great to see a novel focused on the life of Abigail Adams, a woman appreciated even in her own time—especially by her husband of more than half a century, John Adams, the second president of the United States—but not, at the time, for her determination that her new country should also extend liberty to its female citizens.

Of course, Abigail Adams has received considerable attention since for her views on the need for adult women to control their own futures, but in the process much of the complexity of her life, her character, her surroundings, and her family has dropped out of the discussion. In A Founding Mother: A Novel of Abigail Adams (William Morrow, 2026), Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie dive into the story of Abigail’s and John’s long and loving marriage, their political service and economic problems, their time at home and abroad, and their six children—four of whom survived to adulthood but not all of whom thrived once they got there.

It’s all wonderfully rich and complex, both emotionally and in terms of the history revealed here—enhanced by the feminine perspective. The American Revolution as it happened was not the neat story told in school but messy, sprawling, contentious, risky, and eventful, and the formation of the resulting republic reflected all those competing trends. Unless you’re a historian specializing in this place and time, I can guarantee you will find out things you never knew, and in entertaining ways.

Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie have published numerous novels, together and separately. Find out more about their joint projects here.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear later in 2026.

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K'wan, "House of the Rising Sun" (Akashic Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When Artie Howell moves with his wife back to her sleepy hometown, he must protect their son Nicky from the skeletons coming out of the closets from both of their pasts in House of the Rising Sun (Akashic Books, 2026)

When the Howell family moves into a house on Heckler Lane, it causes quite a stir around the small town of Sunny Cove, Pennsylvania. Elise Howell, a well-known cardio surgeon, has returned home after fifteen years to fill her recently deceased mother’s position at Sunny Cove General Hospital. In a town this size, it’s big news. But it’s Elise’s new husband, Artie, who has the whole town talking.

Artie Howell is a man who always seems to be wearing a smile. He’s an accomplished crime fiction writer, a soccer dad to their young son Nicky, and he volunteers his weekends teaching creative writing to youths in the local detention center. When they first arrived at Heckler Lane, the Howells had seemed like a wholesome American family. Then came the murders.

A nun turning up missing from the Convent of St. Mary becomes the first in a string of unexplained tragedies that have befallen the town. Tragedies that all seem to be tied to scenes from Artie’s novels. The writer now finds himself as the prime suspect in an investigation that threatens to not only tear apart his family, but the entire town of Sunny Cove.

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Caroline Bicks, "Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King" (Hogarth, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

My guest is Caroline Bicks, whose new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026) became a bestseller shortly after release. After she was named the University of Maine's inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, Caroline Bicks became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writer's creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by one question: What makes Stephen King’s writing stick in our heads and haunt us long after we’ve closed the book?
Bicks focuses on five early works—The Shining, Carrie, Pet Sematary, 'Salem's Lot, and Night Shift—to reveal how he crafted his language, storylines, and characters. While tracking King’s margin notes and editorial changes, she discovered scenes and alternative endings that never made it to print, but that King is allowing her to publish now. The book also includes interviews Bicks had with King along the way that reveal new insights into his writing process and personal history.
Monsters in the Archives—authorized by Stephen King himself—is unlike anything ever published about the master of horror. It chronicles what Bicks found when she set out to unearth how King crafted some of his scariest, most iconic moments. But it’s also a story about a grown-up English professor facing her childhood fears and getting to know the man whose monsters helped unleash them.

---------

Caroline Bicks is the Stephen E. King Chair in Literature at the University of Maine, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, early modern culture, and horror fiction. She is the author of Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World and Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England; co- author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas; and co- host of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast. Her essays and humor pieces have appeared in the Modern Love column of the New York Times, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and the show Afterbirth. She lives in Blue Hill, Maine, with her family.

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J.J. Dupuis, "Roanoke Ridge: A Creature X Mystery" (Dundurn Press, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with J.J. Dupuis about Roanoke Ridge—the first book in his Creature X series published with Dundurn Press, 2020.

There’s been a string of Bigfoot sightings in Roanoke Ridge. Do they have something to do with the body in the woods?
When Bigfoot researcher Professor Berton Sorel goes missing in the temperate rainforest of Roanoke Ridge, Oregon, help is summoned in the form of his former star pupil, Laura Reagan, online science populist and avowed skeptic. But what begins as a simple search and rescue operation takes a drastic turn when a body is discovered — and it isn’t the professor’s.
Caught in the fallout of the suspicious death, perplexed by a sudden wave of Bigfoot sightings, and still desperately searching for Professor Sorel, Reagan reluctantly admits two things: her old mentor was right about there being secrets hidden in Roanoke Ridge, and it’s up to her to uncover them.

J.J. Dupuis is the author of the Creature X Mystery series. When not in front of a computer, he can be found haunting the river valleys of Toronto, where he lives and works.

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Maria Ingrande Mora, "A Wild Radiance" (Peachtree Teen, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 13 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Maria Ingrande Mora's latest fantasy romance A Wild Radiance (Peachtree Teen, 2026) brings readers to the magical industrial revolution. Josephine Haven is about to find out exactly where she fits into the march of Progress. Her outbursts are infamous at the House of Industry, the school for children who can wield radiance, an electricity-like magic. She's tried to follow the rules, but her fiery nature is at odds with the core tenet of the House: Never form attachments. If she is meant to feel nothing, why are her emotions so volatile? No one is surprised when, upon graduation, Josephine is banished from the city to a remote Mission. In Frostbrook, she must work under standoffish Julian, the former golden boy of the House of Industry who seems determined to watch her fail. And then there's Ezra, the flirtatious stranger who's a little too curious about how the Mission operates. But there are bigger problems than Julian and Ezra's secrets. A deadly disease is spreading across the countryside, and in Frostbrook, not everyone is eager to embrace Progress. As Josephine questions the system that raised her--and gives in to desire she's been taught to suppress--she must decide what she's willing to sacrifice to expose not just corruption within the House but the devastating truth about the radiance in her core.

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Shannon Chakraborty, "The Tapestry of Fate" (Harper Voyager, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Shannon Chakraborty’s novel The Tapestry of Fate, the second installment in the The Adventures of Amina-al Sarafi, encounters the titular Amina at a time of transition. trying to balance her work on her ship chasing arcane artifacts and time on land spent raising her daughter Marjana. After interference from her estranged husband, Amina finds herself and her crew on a possibly futile quest to steal a spindle from a mysterious sorceress on an island that no one can escape. Despite the presence of magic that complicates the perception of reality itself, Amina remains determined to find a way home for herself and her crew.

In this interview, Chakraborty describes her longstanding affection for the history of the Indian Ocean in the 12th century, the wealth of primary sources we have from that time period, and the process of sharing her love of history with readers. She discusses the role of magic and gender in the medieval Islamicate world, research rabbit holes, and the importance of middle aged protagonists in fantasy. We also chat about crafting a fun adventure story and the role of textiles and religion across time.

The Tapestry of Fate is a joyful and empathetic novel full of adventure and a deep appreciation for the past. It was an absolute joy discussing it with the author.

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Sarah Stone, "Marriage to the Sea: Linked Novellas" (Four Way Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Six years ago, Katya Zamarin’s mother was murdered by a stranger who also maimed her Aunt Julia. More recently, her father died of a heart attack. He visits Katya in a dream, and she believes he wants her to head to Paris for a conference organized by his environmentalist hero. Katya’s youngest sister, Arielle, a recovering addict and aspiring actress, tags along. And Aunt Julia, once an infamous soap opera star, flies to Paris when Arielle suffers an unexplained sleeping sickness. Everyone is grappling with survival, grief, and worry about the climate in these two entwined novellas about sisters, family, identity, and finding one’s purpose. Listen to this interview about Marriage to the Sea: Linked Novellas (Four Way Books, 2026)

Sarah Stone was born in San Francisco; her father was a professor of psychology and an environmental activist and her mother a collagist, assemblagist, and ceramic sculptor. Sarah studied art and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later got her MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has taught ESL in Bujumbura, Burundi, and in person and on TV in Seoul, South Korea. She was a volunteer at the Jane Goodall chimpanzee orphanage in Bujumbura, a psychiatric aide in a locked facility by the Pacific Ocean, and office help at an apparently haunted massage school and retreat center in the Santa Cruz mountains. She has taught at UC Berkeley and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, among other places. She now lives in the SF East Bay and teaches creative writing online through Stanford Continuing Studies. She’s also a facilitator of the Jewish Studio Process. Her books include Hungry Ghost Theater, a finalist for the 38th annual Northern California Book Awards; The True Sources of the Nile; and now Marriage to the Sea. She is also the co-author, with her spouse, Ron Nyren, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. When she’s not writing or reading (though mostly she is writing or reading), she loves drawing, inventing recipes, exploring art museums, or picnicking on the beach with her extended family (bundled up, winter or summer, because the Northern California beaches tend to be bracing). You can find Sarah online at here.

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Wesley Brown, "Looking for Frank Wills" (McSweenys, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Wesley Brown about how novella, Looking for Frank Wills (McSweenys, 2026).
It's 1972. Tricky Dick is in office, James Brown is on the radio, and Wayne Beasley reluctantly presides over the comings and goings of his barbers and patrons at Wayne's Clip and Trim in Augusta, South Carolina. When one of Wayne's former customers, an unassuming small-town son, is designated 4-F, unfit to serve in Vietnam, he seeks refuge in becoming the next best thing—a security guard for a downtown DC hotel. It is there on a hot summer's night, that Wayne's wayward patron interrupts a break-in that will disrupt the course of a nation's history and his own. Wesley Brown, author of Tragic Magic, Darktown Strutters, and Blue in Green: A Novella, once again remaps the tributaries that run into the stream of our American subconscious, by dipping into the headwaters of pivotal memories and histories to tell the tale from the perspective of the real folks whose stories were too long submerged. Without Frank Wills there is no Watergate. And without Watergate the veil of secrecy and corruption that came to define the Nixon years, warping the very fabric of political discourse from that moment on, would have remained firmly in place. Wesley Brown's re-imagining of the life of Frank Wills reconciles the greatest heist of all—our place in the American story. What was stolen from Wills as he was briefly thrust into the spotlight, while excluded from the annals of history, is reclaimed, as Brown gives voice and breath to the people who loved him and the barber who did his best to guide him.

Wesley Brown is an acclaimed novelist, playwright, and teacher. He worked with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1965 and became a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968. In 1972, he was sentenced to three years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent eighteen months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. For twenty-six years, Brown was a much-revered professor at Rutgers University, where he inspired hundreds of students. He currently teaches literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock and lives in Chatham, New York.

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Elana K. Arnold, "Holloway" (Clarion Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 9 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In her latest young adult novel, Holloway (Clarion Books, 2026), award-winning author Elana K. Arnold returns with a boldly visionary, deeply felt story that crosses space and time to examine loss and love in a world on the brink. It is the late summer of 2021, and a girl named Nora is on the Paris Metro. Nora, whose mother loved her, even though Nora was broken. Nora, who couldn't help her mother when her mother needed her most. Nora, from whom the pandemic has taken nearly everything, save the object she clings to: a cylinder containing her mother's ashes. With no family left, no friends to speak of, and no way to turn back time, Nora has come to France to keep a promise she never got to make: to spread the ashes in a place her mother never got to see. But instead, Nora finds herself on the run through a forest in the night, taking refuge in a dark holloway. And when she wakes, and tries to make her way back to something she recognizes, she realizes that is impossible. Because it is no longer 2021. Questioning everything--including her own sanity--Nora sets out on a journey through a time and place completely foreign to her, and yet one that, much like the time and place she came from, is defined by death, loss, fear, and uncertainty. A journey in which she must find a way to honor her mother--and heal herself--in a world that feels irrevocably broken.

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A. J. Bermudez, “The Sixteenth Brother” The Common Magazine (Fall, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 8 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A. J. Bermudez speaks to Emily Everett about her story “The Sixteenth Brother,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. With a fable-like feel, the story explores the dynamics of family and gender roles in Morocco, as fifteen brothers scheme to convince their youngest sibling to allow the sale of the family’s ancient and opulent riyad. A. J. discusses the story’s framing device—a storyteller relaying it, almost like gossip—and how it creates both intimacy and distance. She also talks about her work in film, and the interplay between writing for the page and for the screen.

A. J. Bermudez is an award-winning writer and director who divides her time between Los Angeles and New York. She is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. She is a recipient of the PAGE Award, the Diverse Voices Award, the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Steinbeck Fellowship. In addition to writing and filmmaking, she is also a former boxer and EMT, and her work gravitates toward contemporary intersections of power, privilege, and place.

Read the story in The Common here.

Learn more about A. J. and her work here.

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 here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

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JoAnn McCaig, "Beneficiary" (U Calgary Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 8 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with JoAnn McCaig about her new novel, Beneficiary (U Calgary Press, 2026).

A novel about what it means to face the world as a woman on her own terms from the award-winning author of The Textbook of the Rose and An Honest Woman.

Seren was doomed to a country club cage and a leash of pearls until out of the blue on a Tuesday night in 1969, she found herself suddenly saying “no.” More than fifty years later, she looks back on her life and each choice that followed, beautiful, tragic and completely her own.

Leaving her family for the freedom of the 1970s, Seren began a quest to discover how to live in this world as her true self—a quest that would take her from the heady countercultural milieu of communal houses on Vancouver Island through marriage and motherhood, divorce, and an unexpected inheritance that changed everything. Suddenly wealthy, Seren must wrestle with money, with class, and what it means to have more than most.

What does it mean to live truly, through tragedy and heartbreak? How do we create ourselves in a world that keeps changing? What does it mean to have money when so many people don’t? A richly written, fiercely feminist novel imbued with real bravery, Beneficiary weaves the past and the present in a rich tapestry of life.

JoAnn McCaig is the author of The Textbook of The Rose and An Honest Woman. She is the proud owner of Shelf Life Books, an independent bookstore in her hometown of Calgary, AB.

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Peter Darbyshire, "The Wonder Lands War" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 7 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Peter Darbyshire about the fourth book in his Cross series, The Wonder Lands War (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

The Book of Cross 4

I would take the whole world apart to find her.

The immortal Cross is back in a wild new adventure – a desperate hunt to find the enigmatic Alice from the Wonderland tales. Alice has helped Cross save the world countless times over since she stepped out of the pages of her book, but now she is the one that needs rescue after vanishing during an apocalyptic battle. Aided by the faerie queen Morgana and her court, Cross journeys to mystical islands populated with murderous immortals and into famous libraries with powerful librarians and magical texts until they reach the chaotic and terrifying Wonder Lands, the dangerous inspiration for the original Alice tales. But they are not the only ones looking for Alice – a rogue group of angels are also hunting her for mysterious reasons of their own. The very fate of the world may rest upon who finds Alice first.

Peter Darbyshire is the author of six books and more stories than he can remember. He lives near Vancouver, British Columbia, where he spends his time writing, raising children and playing D&D with other writers. It’s a good life.

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Sara Maurer, "A Good Animal" (St. Martin's Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 6 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Sara Maurer's debut, A Good Animal (St. Martin's Press, 2026). Staying is his dream. Leaving is hers. One secret threatens them both. In the farm country outside Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan—a border town where life moves slow and dreams run fast—most kids want out. Not Everett Lindt. He’s set on staying put, rebuilding his family’s sheep farm, and carving a future from the land he loves. Then he meets Mary, a new girl in town with restless energy and bigger plans. When their relationship reaches a crossroads, Everett sees a life together. Mary, however, is desperate to find a way out. Together, they make an impulsive choice—one that could change everything. Tense, lyrical, and deeply felt, Sara Maurer's unforgettable debut breathtakingly captures the ache of first love, the beauty and brutality of rural life, and how one decision can echo through generations and shape who we become.

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James Cahill, "The Violet Hour" (Pegasus Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 5 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

A wealthy, old art collector always wants more, a successful gallery owner finds herself alone, and a famous painter at the top of his game might have been involved with the mysterious death of an art gallery employee. The world of buying and selling art is portrayed as hazy and ridiculous, but the astronomical numbers are serious. While some of the characters are a bit unlikable, everyone has a story and perceptions about who they are and what they need to be happy. The Violet Hour (Pegasus Books, 2026) is a well-written novel about the business of art, the power of wealth, and the transitional aspect of relationships.

JAMES CAHILL was born and grew up in London. He has worked in the art world and academia for the past fifteen years, having originally studied Classics and English at Magdalen College, Oxford, followed by a master’s degree in contemporary art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. In 2018, he was awarded a PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His debut novel, Tiepolo Blue (2022) was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and selected for H.M. The Queen’s Reading Room. To quote Her Majesty Queen Camilla: “Surprising, unsettling and gracefully told; ‘Tiepolo Blue’ is a story about art and academia, which reads like a thriller.” He writes for publications including Artforum, the Financial Times, the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. Cahill has curated several exhibitions spanning contemporary art and classical antiquity. He divides his time between London and Los Angeles.

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Ray Welling, "Byline for the Dead: A Novel of Labor, Conspiracy, a Bloody Uprising and Two Ambitious Journalists" (Sager Group, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 3 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Byline for the Dead: A Novel of Labor, Conspiracy, a Bloody Uprising and Two Ambitious Journalists (Sager Group, 2025) is a historical mystery-thriller that interweaves stories from different eras as two journalists, five decades apart, work to unravel the truths about one of the most violent labor strikes in American history. In 1984, Gray Wheeler is a disillusioned young reporter working for The Toledo Sword. Assigned to cover the 50th anniversary of the Auto-Lite strike-known as the "Battle of Toledo," a bloody, five-day labor uprising involving 10,000 union workers and 1,300 Ohio National Guard troops-Gray stumbles across a mystery left unpublished a half-century earlier by another young reporter that connects the 1934 massacre to present-day political machinations. Putting together the pieces, past and present, the two reporters work in tandem across the decades, unravelling the corruption that led to the deadly strike. As the story proceeds, we learn of desperate workers, soulless political agitators, ruthless National Guard troops, suppressed government reports, buried testimonies, and suspicious deaths. As Gray and newspaper librarian Kirby Peters dig deeper into the story, they discover the chilling truths behind the spark that ignited the bloodshed. And they find their lives at risk. The deeper they dig, the greater the danger. Threats culminate in a deadly confrontation in the ruins of the old Auto-Lite factory. Byline for the Dead explores themes of journalistic integrity, institutional memory, and the power of the past to shape the present. As Gray confronts Toledo's forgotten history and the ghost of his own unfulfilled ambitions, he must decide whether exposing the truth is worth the cost-especially when the truth fights back.

Ray Welling, PhD, grew up in Toledo, Ohio and earned a journalism degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. Later, he migrated to Australia, where he has worked as a journalist, editor, publisher, content director, writer, marketing manager, lecturer and podcaster. He lives in Sydney with his wife. Byline for the Dead is his first novel and was a finalist for the 2025 American Writing Awards for Best New Debut Fiction.

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Brianna Jett, "Under a Carnivore Sky" (Page Street YA, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 2 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Under a Carnivore Sky (Page Street YA, 2026) is Brianna Jett's debut young adult novel in verse. Sixteen-year-old Lili is a hunter, which means she has one goal: Find the monster lurking in the carnivorous, labyrinthian swamp that borders their hometown—and slay it. Her father failed to kill the beast, and like all townsfolk over eighteen, bits of his flesh and bone are being stolen away by its curse. With all roads out of town leading back in, they’re trapped with the curse unless Lili stops it; yet the ease with which she wanders the swamp leaves her more feared than favored. When a boy, Caleb, offers to map the swamp in exchange for her help in finding a way through it, Lili agrees, hoping to track down the monster. But the more they explore, the more she resents the town and questions the curse itself. Confronted with the truth, Lili must decide if duty or her own freedom is a worthier pursuit.

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Jinwoo Park, "Oxford Soju Club" (Dundurn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 1 May 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jinwoo Park about his novel, Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025).

A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025 • A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2025 • A CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF 2025

The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean. When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the only breadcrumb given to him in Doha’s last breath: “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” In the meantime, a Korean American CIA agent , Yunah Choi, races to salvage her investigation of the North Korean spy cell in the aftermath of the assassination. At the centre of it all is the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, owned by Jihoon Lim, an immigrant from Seoul in search of a new life after suffering a tragedy. As different factions move in with their own agendas, their fates become entangled, resulting in a bitter struggle that will determine whose truth will triumph. Oxford Soju Club weaves a tale of how immigrants in the Korean diaspora are forced to create identities to survive, and how in the end, they must shed those masks and seek their true selves.

Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and currently works as a marketer in the tech industry. In 2021, he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award. Oxford Soju Club is his first novel.

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Kaie Kellough, "Interposition" (McClelland & Stewart, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks wit Griffin Prize winner Kaie Kellough about his new long poem, Interposition (McClelland & Steward, 2026).

Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 Preview
From Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd.
Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Prize winner, 2020) returns with a long poem that repurposes the language of the present. Interposition borrows its vocabulary from the news, entertainment, war, advertising, technology, and the everyday tragedies of popular culture. It reveals the morbid humour of our inability to distinguish between the urgencies of personal achievement and climate crisis. It compresses sound and rhythm into paradox, and it conflates absurdity and emergency.
Mapping the continued encroachment of capital and virtual culture upon our psychic space, Interposition examines how, with each click, we are reconstituted online and sold back to ourselves, and asks: How do we uncouple our selves from our avatars?

KAIE KELLOUGH is a poet, fiction writer, and sound performer living in Montreal. His previous collection, Magnetic Equator, won the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. He is a writer and vocalist for the group FYEAR and is pursuing graduate work in English at Queen’s University.

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Dawn Macdonald, "Northerny" (U Alberta Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Dawn MacDonald about her Griffin Prize winning collection, Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024).

Northerny: winner of the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, awarded by the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are no tidy tales of aurora borealis and adventures in snow. For Dawn Macdonald, the North is not an escape, a pathway to enlightenment, or a lifestyle choice. It’s a messy, beautiful, and painful point of origin. People from the North see the North differently and want to tell their own stories in their own way, including about their experiences growing up on the land, getting an education, and struggling to find jobs and opportunities. Expertly balancing lyric reflection and ferocious realism, Macdonald busts up the cultural myths of self-interest and superiority that have long dominated conversations about both Northern spaces and working-class identities.

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon where she grew up without electricity or running water. Her poetry collection Northerny (University of Alberta Press) won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Nelson Ball Prize. Her latest publication is the chapbook Weeds of Canada (above/ground press)

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Radha Lin Chaddah, "And the Ancestors Sing" (Rising Action, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Starting in the late 1970s, three women navigate post Cultural Revolution China: Lulu, who’s forced to become a prostitute in Shanghai to save her mother and sister from starving, Lei who is sold in marriage for cigarettes and a few eggs, and Yan, Lei’s smart, beautiful daughter, whose kindness to the farmer master’s neurodivergent son allows her to get an education. Both Lei and Lulu must put aside their dreams and suffer indignity after indignity, Lei from her husband, and Lulu from her pimp, while Yan ultimately sacrifices her career to help her family. With a cast of unforgettable characters struggling through China’s transition to modernity, and grappling with the impact of mental illness, prostitution, and Aids, And the Ancestors Sing is a stunning gripping historical novel.

Radha Lin Chaddah was born in London to an East Indian father and a Malaysian Chinese mother, and grew up in Kenya, the UK and the US, graduating from New Trier High School in Winnetka, IL. She majored in Biology at the University of Chicago, earned medical and law degrees at the University of Illinois, and a Master of Public Health at Harvard University. She completed Internal Medicine residency training, and later practiced, at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School in Boston. Radha and her family moved, over the course of twenty years, from Boston to NYC to Taipei to Shanghai to Beijing to Princeton, and finally to Philadelphia. Radha worked as a primary care physician in Boston, NYC and Beijing; worked with the China CDC to co-write the book, HIV/ AIDS: Beyond the Numbers; and provided mental healthcare to patients in several states as a telemedicine doctor upon settling in Philadelphia. When not reading and writing, Radha enjoys learning new Mandarin characters, tackling novice knitting projects, painting with watercolors and acrylics, catching a live, stand-up comedy show with her husband, Avery, trying out new recipes with their young adult daughters, Yani and Ayo, and, of course, jotting down story notes for her next writing project. You can visit Radha online at radhalinchaddah.com.

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Lauren J.A. Bear, "Aphrodite in Pieces" (Ace, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Aphrodite in Pieces gathers diverse myths featuring the goddess and unites them to create a comprehensive portrait. Beginning with her innocent days on the island of Cyprus, progressing to her disappointing welcome in the pantheon of Olympus, and culminating in her shattering experiences of the Trojan war, Aphrodite is depicted in all her aspects—calculating and vengeful, kind and forgiving, passionate and abandoned.

A woman does not live her life independent of society. As it is above, so it is below. Sometimes Aphrodite is praised for her beauty, and other times, her pulchritude condemns her to be judged as a whore. As Aphrodite grows in wisdom, she finds compassion for women such as Helen of Troy who suffer a similar fate.

The stories of Aphrodite remain pertinent today. In them, Lauren J.A. Bear finds reflections and connections between art, love, and beauty.

Gabrielle Mathieu writes historically inspired fantasy with a dash of romance and a dollop of adventure. You can find out more about her books and upcoming interviews on authorgabrielle.com.

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Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and Russian, tell the stories of ordinary people living on after the devastation of the Holocaust. Filled with memories, love, and loss, these narratives describe not only how people died, but also how they continued to live. Despite the official view in the Soviet Union that Jewish deaths should be subsumed under the larger tragedy of Nazi Germany's invasion, Jews in the USSR profoundly engaged with thinking about and memorializing the Holocaust, addressing it in a wide range of literary works.

Interviewees: Sasha Senderovich is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures and of International Studies at the University of Washington. Harriet Murav is Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Brooklyn Odyssey: My Journey out of Hasidism and Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Sayantani DasGupta, "Theft of the Ruby Lotus" (Scholastic Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Sayantani DasGupta's latest middle grades novel, Theft of the Ruby Lotus (Scholastic, 2026) is an adventure heist. Ria Bailey finds herself in quite a fix, and it's all because of a strange treasure that turns up in the mail one fateful day. It might be a ruby, and it just might hold the key to some troubling developments in her life. Most importantly, if she and her besties Miracle Owusu and Annie Hernandez can trace the significance and stay one step ahead of the mysterious strangers tracking their moves through the Metropolitan Museum of Art and out into the city streets of New York, then just maybe Ria can turn things around for herself. Sayantani DasGupta returns in rare form with a brand new story that's part love letter to the Metropolitan Museum and New York City immigrant families, part twisting and turning heist, and completely an examination of where art belongs, who gets to keep it, and what it means to be on display.

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New Book Releases 2026 on Japan, Taiwan

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

This episode of the Books on Asia podcast introduces new fiction and non-fiction on Japan to be published this year, 2026, along with two upcoming books on Taiwan. Books are presented in the order they appear on the podcast. Listen to the episode for more information on each title:

Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria, by Kay Enokido (Bold Story Press, January 13, 2026)
Kokun: The Girl from the West, by Nahoko Uehashi (transl. Cathy Hirano) (Europa Editions, January 13, 2026)
When the Museum Is Closed, by Emi Yagi (transl. Yuki Tejima) (Soft Skull Press, January 27, 2026)
Hooked: A Novel of Obsession, by Asako Yuzuki (transl. Polly Barton) (HarperVia, March 17, 2026)
Sisters in Yellow, by Mieko Kawakami (transl. Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio) (Knopf, March 31, 2026)
Hollow Inside, by Asako Otani (transl. Ginny Tapley Takemori) (Pushkin Press, May 5, 2026)
Japan’s Anime Revolution!: Twenty Animated Films That Changed the World, by Jonathan Clements (Tuttle Publishing, May 12, 2026)
Troubled Waters, by Ichiyō Higuchi (transl. Bryan Karetnyk) (Pushkin Press Classics, May 26, 2026)
Taiwan 22: Travels in Paradox, by Tyrel Eskelson (Plum Rain Press, TBA)
Hidden Formosa: Life and Travels in Rural Taiwan, an anthology edited by John Ross
(Plum Rain Press, TBA)

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Jinwoo Park, "Oxford Soju Club" (Dundurn Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Doha, a North Korean spymaster, is found stabbed in an alley in Oxford. Doha tells his mentee–another North Korean spy named Yohan—to go to the Oxford Soju Club, a restaurant in the British college town. That starts a dance between three different Koreans: Yohan; Jihoon, the South Korean owner of the Soju Club; and Yunah, a Korean-American recruited to weed out Yonah.

Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025), the debut novel from Jinwoo Park, uses this spy thriller setting to explore ideas of history, migration and identity.

Jinwoo Park is a Korean Canadian writer based in Montreal. He completed a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford, and currently works as a marketer in the tech industry. In 2021, he won the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Oxford Soju Club. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Linda Hamilton, "The Fourth Wife" (Kensington, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

There must be a shift in the Zeitgeist of the publishing world, because after a long drought in Gothic novels, this is the second one I’ve encountered in little more than a month. The Fourth Wife (Kensington, 2026) takes place near Salt Lake City, Utah, during the years when the Mormon community there still practiced polygamy but was coming under increasing pressure from the US government to abandon the practice, pressure that included a law making multiple, simultaneous marriages a criminal offense.

It’s 1882. Twenty-year-old Hazel Russon, a talented pianist, has grown up in a polygamous family, but she has a secret agreement with her childhood friend Elijah Crowther that they will become each other’s only spouse once they are permitted to marry. When Elijah’s father, a powerful figure in Salt Lake City society, summons Hazel and informs her that Elijah has rejected her in favor of a return to the fundamental principles of Mormon life—the most fundamental of which is polygamy, known only as the Principle—she is shattered by her love’s betrayal. As a result, she allows Elder Crowther to talk her into becoming the fourth wife of Brother Jacob Manwaring, a wealthy older man who promises Hazel a home of her own, including a piano.

Hazel has long struggled with what most of us in the twenty-first century would categorize as an anxiety disorder, in part caused by the difficulty she has in meeting the extreme demands of her religion for female submissiveness. And although initially attracted to Jacob, she soon discovers that not everything Elder Crowder told her about her husband-to-be was the truth….

It’s all delightfully creepy and fast-paced, and the interactions among Jacob’s wives are even more interesting than those between them and Jacob.

Linda Hamilton studies and writes about nineteenth-century Mormon life as both a historian and a novelist—including, most recently, The Fourth Wife.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer of 2026.

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Lisa Lee, "American Han" (Algonquin Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player.

But where they started is nowhere near where they have ended up: Jane has stopped going to her law school classes, and Kevin, now a policeman, has become increasingly distant. Their parents, each on their own path toward the elusive American Dream (their mother hell-bent on having the perfect house and the perfect family, their father obsessed with working his way up from one successful business to the next), don't want to see the family unraveling. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is until it erupts, forcing them all to come to terms with their past and present selves in a country that isn't all it promised it would be.

Both deeply serious and wickedly funny, American Han (Algonquin Books, 2026) is a profound story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee's debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

Lee is the recipient of the Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, a n Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and a Pushcart Priz e. She has received additional fellowships and awards from Kundiman, M illay Ar ts, H edgebrook, the Rona Ja ffe Foundation, T in House, J entel Art i st Residency, the Korea Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, Tusculum Review, Reed Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles and grew up in Napa, California.

Recommended Books:

Giada Scodellaro, Ruins, Child
Morgan Day, The Oldest Bitch Alive
Elaine H. Kim, “Home is Where the Han Is”

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Jason Reynolds, "Soundtrack: A Novel" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The print adaptation of Jason Reynolds acclaimed, award-winning audiobook Soundtrack (Crown Books, 2026)—a stirring story of music, friendship, and finding your voice in 2000s New York City. Stuy Grey plays the drums, just like his mom, a founding member of the all-black punk band the Bed-Stuy Magic Dusters. He teaches himself by watching videos of tap dancers. Now he’s left home, estranged from his mom and her abusive boyfriend. He’s camping out with his uncle on the Lower East Side. His landlord, Dunks, has chops: He shreds on only five strings. Add Alexis on bass guitar and Keith on horn: These teens are a band, busking in New York City subway stations to scrape enough money to record an album. As their popularity grows, so do the pressures, from complicated family dynamics to the glare of unexpected public attention. And when the police start looking for their bassist, Stuy faces his toughest decision yet. Adapted from the acclaimed Listening Library original audiobook and written with Jason Reynolds’s signature rhythm, heart, and honesty, Soundtrack: A Novel is a raw, resonant story about friendship, creativity, and what it truly means to find, and fight for, your voice.

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Danielle Girard, "Pinky Swear" (Simon and Schuster, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In Pinky Swear (Simon and Schuster, 2026) Lexi thought she knew everything about Mara Vannatta. Best friends since middle school, they drifted apart after a tragedy derailed their senior year. But when Mara shows up on Lexi’s doorstep sixteen years later fleeing an abusive husband, Lexi takes her in without question. Lexi’s own marriage has been strained by her desire to have a baby, and when Mara offers to become her surrogate, their friendship feels stronger than ever.
But four days before the due date, Mara disappears.
Lexi is shocked but certain there must be something wrong—Mara would never willingly leave with her unborn child. Or would she? As she embarks on a perilous cross-country hunt for the truth, Lexi is forced to reconsider a friendship she thought she knew—and what really happened that terrible night their senior year. How many secrets lie in their shared past, waiting to be uncovered? And just how far will Lexi go to bring her child safely home?

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Casey Walker, "Islands" The Common Magazine (Fall, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Casey Walker speaks to Emily Everett about his story “Islands,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Set at an old lake house rife with unresolved family tensions, the story explores the dynamics between three orphaned brothers, and between the narrator and his pregnant wife. Casey discusses how the piece evolved over more than a decade, and how he always hopes a story will take on a life of its own during the writing process. Also discussed is his forthcoming novel Mexicali, set in the US-Mexico borderlands during the first half of the 20th century.

Casey Walker's new novel Mexicali is forthcoming from Knopf in 2027. He is also the author of the novel Last Days in Shanghai and has published fiction and essays in The Common, Ninth Letter, The Believer, The New York Times, and El País, among others. He holds a PhD in English Literature from Princeton University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Read Casey’s story in The Common here.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Ed Simon, "Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling" (Bloomsbury, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.
In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. In Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling (Bloomsbury, 2026) he also addresses the wider question of what it's like to write during what could be the last decades of human civilization, arguing that to craft imaginative spaces through the magic of words isn't superfluous. Instead it exists at the core of human experience – as it always has and always will.

Ed Simon is the Public Humanities Lecturer in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University and the founding editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books. He is a contributing editor to The Montreal Review, and a monthly columnist for both 3 Quarks Daily and LitHub. Simon has authored over a dozen books, including An Alternative History of Pittsburgh from Belt Publishing, Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology from Abrams, and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain from Melville House.

Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. Email here @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar” and the gossip columnist Irv Kupcinet, holding forth as many as six times a week for 60 years, wrote a garrulous, glamorous story of the city. While the increasingly unhinged narrator of his novel investigates the mysterious death of Kupcinet’s daughter in 1963, Peter delves into his own family’s history, anxiously asking “we can’t hurt our dead, can we?” The novel swerves between fact and fiction, including photographs that are both real artifacts from the historical record and staged photos that participate in the fictional world of the novel. Peter laughs off this contradiction, remarking “the closer I get to real things, the more fictional it becomes.” How to describe such a complicated novel? Sarah offers this gem: “It’s as if Philip Roth were less cancellable and wrote a murder mystery,” a line that results in a poignant conversation about what it means to be Jewish and socially striving in Chicago in middle of the 20th century and what it means to be a cultural outsider, “just slightly outside of the circle.” Peter brings the conversation to a close with a memory of going to the University of Tish.
Mentions:

Reverend Hightower appears in William Faulkner’s Light in August
Irv “Kup” and Essie Kupcinet were Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet’s parents
An Edna O’Brien story appears in Andre Dubus’s Dancing After Hours
Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano
Phyllis Diller at the Palmer House
Bette Howland’s line about Chicago being “the raw materials for a city” appears in Blue in Chicago
Alberto Paniagua
Philip Roth
Tish O’Dowd Ezekiel’s Floaters

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Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison" (Hogarth, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 8 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), Serpell brings her unique experience as both an award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful experiments with literary form.

This is Morrison as you’ve never encountered her before, a journey through her oeuvre—her fiction and criticism, as well as her lesser-known dramatic works and poetry—with contextual guidance and original close readings. At once accessible and uncompromisingly rigorous, On Morrison is a primer not only on how to read one of the most significant American authors of all time but also on how to read great works of literature in general. This dialogue on the page between two black women artist-readers is stylish, edifying, and thrilling in its scope and intelligence.

Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Furrows, was a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was selected as one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year. Her book of essays, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, the Caine Prize for African Writing, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Harvard University.

Derek Adams is Associate Professor of African American literature at Ithaca College and is currently teaching an upper-level seminar on Toni Morrison titled Across the Decades that challenges the origins of an assumed mythic status generally applied to her.

Recommended Books:

Maya Binyam, Hangmen
Akwaeke Emezi, Freshwater

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Dana Mele, "The Beast You Let In" (Sourcebooks, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 7 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Dana Mele talks about their latest book, The Beast You Let In (Sourcebooks, 2026). Everyone in the rural town of Ashling knows the tale of Veronica Green, a teen who was murdered in the woods. But did a party trick bring her back to claim her revenge? A fast-paced, suspenseful YA horror from the author of Summer's Edge and People Like Us. There is no one Hazel trusts less than her self-centered twin, Beth. Like when Beth storms out of a party, abandoning Hazel when she didn't want to attend in the first place. Rather than chasing after her, Hazel throws herself into flirting and telling ghost stories over a Ouija board. She might not be the popular twin, but she can be fun too. Except Beth doesn't come home that night, and Hazel's anger morphs into anxiety. It only sharpens when Beth reappears a day later, disoriented and claiming to be Veronica Green, a teen who was murdered in their small town years before. If it isn't a possession, Beth is really good at faking it. Did they accidentally release a vengeful horror during the party? Hazel must uncover what happened to Veronica all those years ago if she's going to save Beth. But the truth may destroy them both--if they don't destroy each other first.

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Zhou Meisen, "Property of the People" (Sinoist, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 3 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

"Honoured Investors,

As Zhongfu Group enters its eighth decade, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of two famous coal mines. These assets further demonstrate our steadfast commitment to promoting the interests of local government and the people of Jingzhou.

While the recent death of a Discipline Inspection Committee member has been regrettable, rest assured that any accusations of accounting irregularities or missing wages are unfounded, used by rumourmongers to incite valued employees to down tools.

To assuage any possibility of misconduct, Qi Ben’an along with his siblings Shi Hongxing and Lin Manjing will be promoted to oversee these new assets with immediate effect. They will ensure the operations are run according to company values without deviation.

Nothing can stop this bright era of unprecedented prosperity. We thank you for your continued support - The Board of Directors, Zhongfu Group.”

Find out more in Property of the People (Sinoist, 2025) by Zhou Meisen, translated by James Trapp.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Cameron Sullivan, "The Red Winter" (Tor Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 3 Apr 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Cameron Sullivan’s novel The Red Winter (Tor Books, 2026) follows Sebastian Grave, a centuries old monster hunter, recounting events that occurred in largely the woods of Gévaudan during the years leading up to the French Revolution. The story centers around a terrible beast that hunts the local people and has not been stopped by even the resources of the French crown itself. Sebastian is drawn in not just by the promise of slaying the creature, with whom he has something of a history, but also by his attraction to a young aristocrat, Antione, who Sebastian, for all his experience and better judgement, cannot quite seem to get over.

In this interview, Sullivan describes building a magic that feels deep and rooted to our world, the shadow of the French Revolution, and the challenges and excitement of turning historical legend into fantasy. He discusses the research process, queer relationships over time, and what we can and can’t know about the past. We also chat about the joys of footnotes and the importance of humor in the face of the horrific.

The Red Winter is a lush and complex novel full of longing and regret and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Teddy Jones, "Far From Uncertain: One Woman’s Life of Crime and Other Righteous Deeds" (Stoney Creek, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

When a young reporter comes to interview Margaret Kenyon, the oldest practicing nurse in the Texas panhandle, she tells him that he’ll have to listen to her story before she answers any questions. It’s 2000, but her story begins in 1925, with Frankie, a beautiful 15-year-old who has never known anything other than violence, hunger, and fear. Frankie grabs the opportunity to escape her home with a charismatic gambler who shows her the world of bootlegging and uses her beauty for his own ends. After being violently abused, Frankie finds solace in a quite hospital laundry room and begins to rebuild her shattered life. Today we're discussing Far From Uncertain: One Woman’s Life of Crime and Other Righteous Deeds (Stoney Creek, 2026).

Since completing a graduate degree in creative writing in 2012, Teddy Jones has made creating fiction her full-time occupation. She’s had six novels—including A Family of Good Women, which first introduced readers to Frankie—and a collection of short stories published and collected some prizes along the way.

Jackson’s Pond, Texas was finalist in the Women Writing the West Willa Award for contemporary fiction in 2014, and one of her short stories won the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition first prize medal in 2015. Marva Cope, another novel, was named finalist for the Sarton Award in 2024.

Jones earned a degree in nursing and a doctorate in education, worked as a family nurse practitioner and was founding dean of the School of Nursing at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. She focused on rural health promotion and was a monthly columnist for The Farmer Stockman for thirteen years. When she and her husband decided in 2001 to leave their “real jobs” and begin farming, opportunity presented itself. “If you’re going to write fiction, now’s the time,” she told herself. She’s been at it ever since.

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Alison Gadsby, "Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive" (Guernica Editions, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

n this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alison Gadsby about her collection of short fiction, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026).

Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers... the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived.

Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review and more. She is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series.

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Why Did Langston Hughes's "Troubled Lands" Go Unpublished for Nearly a Century?: A Conversation with Ricardo Wilson

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century?

A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes (Princeton University Press, 2026), his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba.

Ricardo A. Wilson II is a creative writer and scholar. He is associate professor of English at Williams College and founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus.

Mentioned in this episode

By Billy-Ray Belcourt:

Also mentioned:

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Daniel Poppick, "The Copywriter" (Scribner, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. He is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals. The recipient of awards from MacDowell and Yaddo and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Victoria University (New Zealand), Coe College, and the Parsons School of Design. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and coedits the Catenary Press.

Recommended Books:

Joy Williams, Pelican Child

Leah Flax Barber, The Mirror of Simple Souls

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Esther Goldenberg, "Song of the Bluebird" (Row House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Much of history has revolved around the journeys, challenges, and relationships, of men, but Serrah, daughter of Asher describes the teachings of her mother, grandmother, and all the women who shared their skills, compassion, hopes, and dreams. She’s mentioned once in passing in Genesis and again in the Book of Chronicles, but in Song of the Bluebird (Row House 2026), she’s known as Blue, who lives for generations, always a hard-working presence as the ancient Twelve Tribes of Israel grow in numbers, follow Joseph into Egypt, suffer as slaves, follow Moses across the sea, wander in the desert for forty years, and finally exult in freedom in the Land of Israel. Song of the Bluebird is a sweet and filling journey through the eyes of a wise and ageless woman.

Esther Goldenberg was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where both her parents told her stories and she spent a lot of time daydreaming. As the daughter of an elementary school teacher, Esther spent more time in the classroom than the average child. She studied child development in college and went on to become a teacher. Esther spent a lot of time reading books to students and, over time, began writing books of her own. She has helped many children write stories and many adults write stories for children. She was the editor of a New York Times bestselling children's book (A Day With No Words). Esther considers herself an educator first, even though she is also an editor and writer.

Two of Goldenberg's non-fiction books, Resistant to Reading: Tricks and Tips for Parents of Reluctant Readers and A Story Every Week: Torah Wisdom for Today's World were Amazon bestsellers in their categories, and her debut adult fiction novel The Scrolls of Deborah won the 2024 Foreword Indies gold medal for Religious Adult Fiction. That book is the first installment in The Desert Songs Trilogy of novels that retell the story of the Bible. These books highlight the everyday lives of the women, the relationships between family members, and the (sometimes surprising) similarities between life in modern times and life in ancient times. When not reading, writing, or leading workshops, Esther enjoys the process of making art -- regardless of the end-product.

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Janice Hadlow, "Rules of the Heart" (Henry Holt and Company, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Janice Hadlow about her fascinating novel, Rules of the Heart (Henry Holt & Company, 2026).

A beautifully evocative historical novel about the perils of all-consuming love, inspired by a real-life eighteenth-century love affair, from the bestselling author of The Other Bennet Sister
“When I love at all, it is with my whole soul—my heart must be torn to pieces before it can forget or resign the objects of its affections.”
England, 1794. Now in her thirties, Lady Harriet Bessborough, already the veteran of several liaisons, finds herself pursued by a much younger man. This isn’t unusual in her circle, where married women often take younger lovers. No one minds much, provided they follow the rules of the game: Don’t embarrass your husband, maintain complete discretion at all times, and never ever make the mistake of falling in love.
So when Harriet meets Lord Granville—brilliantly handsome, insistently ardent, and twelve years younger than her—she’s confident she can manage their affair. Until she finds herself falling uncontrollably under his spell.
As she’s plunged into an all-consuming passion, Harriet’s worldliness and sophistication desert her. With each besotted step, she finds herself edging ever closer to exposure and ruin. She knows she should leave Granville but can’t bring herself to do it—she loves him far too deeply now to escape the scandal that threatens to engulf her.

Janice Hadlow worked as a television producer and commissioner for most of her career. She graduated with a first-class degree in history from King’s College London and has always been fascinated by the eighteenth century. She is the author of A Royal Experiment, a family biography of George III, Queen Charlotte, and their children. The Other Bennet Sister, her fiction debut, was named a best book of 2020 by Library Journal, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor. It is currently in production as a drama for BBC television.

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Sean Bedell, "Shoebox" (Now or Never, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author and retired paramedic and fire captain, Sean Paul Bedell, about his novel, Shoebox (NoN Publishing, 2025).
In this gritty and emotional exploration of the human condition, Steve Lewis, a dedicated paramedic, faces the devastating aftermath of a fatal accident that casts a dark shadow over his once-passionate commitment to saving lives. Plagued by guilt and grief, he finds his career, family, and very existence hanging in the balance as he navigates the complexities of trauma both personal and professional. As Steve grapples with the high stakes of his job amidst the scrutiny of a community that admires yet questions him, each life he saves rekindles his passion for his work, reminding him of the profound connections he can forge through compassion and care. A compelling and visceral journey of personal redemption and triumph over adversity, Shoebox explores the human spirit's capacity for healing.

Author of the novel Somewhere There’s Music, Sean Paul Bedell has been writing and publishing for more than 30 years. A longtime paramedic and captain with the fire service, he lives with his wife Lisa in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

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Alice Martin, "Westward Women" (St. Martins Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

It starts with an itch.
In homes across the country, women ages eighteen to thirty-five begin to slow down.
Tired. Blank. Restless.
Drawn to the Pacific Ocean like it’s calling them home. They abandon their lives—jobs, families, their very selves. And once they reach the West, they vanish forever.
At the center of the story are three young women caught in the pull of something unstoppable.
Aimee follows the trail of her missing best friend to a man called the Piper—known for leading infected women West.
Teenie, afflicted and unraveling, clings to a single memory as she looks out the window of the Piper’s van.
And Eve, a former journalist, is chasing the story that might just consume her.

Alice Martin holds a PhD in Literature from Rutgers University. She is an Assistant Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University, where she teaches fiction writing and American literature. She lives outside of Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, her son, and too many typewriters. She is the author of Westward Women (St. Martins Press, 2026)

Recommend Books:

Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams
I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman

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Meg Merriet Wahlberg, "Chivalry in the Shadows" (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Medieval Brittany, with all its contradictions and complexities, comes alive in Meg Wahlberg’s Chivalry in the Shadows (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024). The author has studied and taught medieval literature, and it shows in her richly imagined descriptions of a world long lost, ruled by assumptions and obligations very different from our own.

But however evocative of the time and place in which it is set, Chivalry in the Shadows (Parkwood Manor Press, 2024) goes far beyond standard descriptions of the Middle Ages. Its heroine, Rowen, and her twin brother, Roland, would have to have been born in each other’s bodies to fit neatly into their society. Rowen will gladly fight for the woman she loves, whereas Roland would rather abandon chivalry altogether for music—to the great disgust of their father, determined to see both his children honor the traditions that have defined his life.

How the twins negotiate the gap between their individual strengths and the expectations placed upon them, you will have to read the novel to find out.

Meg Wahlberg specializes in medieval literature, which she teaches at Rowan University. Excavating the lives of marginalized and forgotten individuals, she writes fiction that reconstructs the stories that history has underrepresented. Chivalry in the Shadows is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P. K. Adams. Her next book, Song of the Silk Weaver, will appear in the summer of 2026.

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Mahesh Rao, "Half Light" (Penguin Random House India, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

On Sep. 6, 2018, India’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 377, a law that criminalized consensual homosexual activity, was unconstitutional, reversing an earlier decision from 2013. Both news headlines and LGBT activists hailed the decision as a major step forward for same-sex rights in India.

But in Mahesh Rao’s new novel Half Light (Penguin Random House India, 2025), the court’s deliberations sit in the background behind the budding relationship between Pavan, a hotel worker in Darjeeling, and Neville, a young, confident student. They meet first in Pavan’s hotel in Darjeeling in 2014; after a tragic incident, they meet again four years later, in Mumbai in 2018.

We’re joined again by Prarthana Prakash as a guest host.

Mahesh Rao grew up in Nairobi, Kenya. He has worked as a lawyer, academic researcher and bookseller in the UK. His debut novel The Smoke is Rising won the Tata First Book Award for fiction. His short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards. One Point Two Billion, his collection of short stories set across 13 Indian states, and Polite Society, a Delhi-set reimagining of Jane Austen's Emma, have both been published to critical acclaim. Mahesh has written for the New York Times, The Baffler, Prospect and Elle.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Half Light. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Christine Estima, "Letters to Kafka" (House of Anansi, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Estima about her novel, Letters to Kafka (House of Anansi, 2025).

A sweeping, tragic romance and feminist adventure about translator and resistance fighter Milena Jesenská’s torrid love affair with Franz Kafka. In 1919, Milena Jesenská, a clever and spirited twenty-three-year-old, is trapped in an unhappy marriage to literary critic Ernst Pollak. Since Pollak is unable to support the pair in Vienna’s post-war economy, Jesenská must supplement their income by working as a translator. Having previously met her compatriot Franz Kafka in the literary salons of Prague, she writes to him to ask for permission to translate his story “The Stoker” from German to Czech, becoming Kafka’s first translator. The letter launches an intense and increasingly passionate correspondence. Jesenská is captivated by Kafka’s energy, intensity, and burning ambition to write. Kafka is fascinated by Jesenská’s wit, rebellious spirit, and intelligence. Jesenská and Kafka meet twice for lovers’ trysts, but can such an intense connection endure beyond a fleeting affair? In her remarkable debut novel, Christine Estima weaves little-known facts and fiction into a rich tapestry, powerfully portraying the struggles of a woman forced to choose between the roles of wife, lover, and intellectual.

CHRISTINE ESTIMA is an Arab woman of mixed ethnicity (Lebanese, Syrian, and Portuguese) and the author of the short story collection The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society. She has written for the New York Times, The Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve, the Toronto Star, and the CBC. Her story “Your Hands Are Blessed” was included in Best Canadian Stories 2023. She was shortlisted for the 2018 Allan Slaight Prize for Journalism and a finalist for the 2023 Lee Smith Novel Prize. Christine has a master’s degree from York University and lives in Toronto.

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E. and H. Heron, "Flaxman Low: Occult Detective" (MIT Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Flaxman Low, literature’s first professional, full-time “occult detective”—that is, an intrepid investigator who deploys the scientific method when tackling paranormal phenomena—appeared in a dozen stories first published from 1898–1899. Flaxman Low: Occult Detective (MIT Press, 2026), the latest edition to the Radium Age series from MIT Press, is introduced and discussed by Dr. Alexander B. Joy.

Flaxman Low’s creators, the mother-and-son team Kate O’Brien Ryall Prichard and Hesketh “Hex” Prichard (who published as “E. and H. Heron”), endowed the Oxford-trained psychologist with the bravery and acumen to tackle every sort of adversary from ghosts, mummies, and vampires to a mushroom mannequin. Both less credulous and less cynical than earlier fictional investigators of the spirit world, Low always triumphs in the end . . . but not before scientifically demonstrating that even the most outré incidents and situations can’t hold a candle to the bizarre capacities of the human mind.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Aaron Gwyn is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynn’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism) and Novel Dialogue’s own John Plotz, we learn that Robert Lemmons is a real historical figure and so is Levi English.
One way to grasp Gwyn’s achievement is to consider the contrast between his durably realist work and Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 Blood Meridian. Much as Aaron and Sean admire that novel, McCarthy’s characters strike them as monstrous and incredible. How about Charles Portis’s True Grit, asks John? Aaron loves it for its ventriloquizing power, and its truth-loving willingness to weave in unsettling back stories like Rooster Cogburn’s ties to Quantrill’s Rangers, an eerily modern pro-Confederate terrorist paramilitary. In our signature question, we learn why Aaron’s favorite teacher was Robert Hill, Pink-Floyd-loving drummer and perennial inspiration (audio here).

Mentioned in the episode:

Richard Slotkin’s notion of “the man who knows Indians” comes from Gunfighter Nation
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Herman Melville, Moby Dick
William Faulkner Absalom Absalom
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow.
John Williams, Stoner (but also Butcher’s Crossing –-which John loves— and Augustus, which did indeed split the National Book Award (not the Pulitzer) in 1973 with John Barth’s Chimera.
Larry McMurtry’s hard-to-get-into Lonesome Dove

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An Evening with Philip Roth: A Conversation with Bernard Avishai, Igor Webb, and Steven Zipperstein

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The YIVO Institute was pleased to present a special evening with acclaimed novelist Philip Roth. Roth read excerpts from his new novel, Nemesis (2010), which tells the story of a terrifying polio epidemic raging in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 and its devastating effect on the closely knit, family-oriented community and its children. Through this story, Roth addresses profound questions of human existence: What types of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand circumstance?

Preceding the reading was a panel discussion with YIVO Executive Director Jonathan Brent, Bernard Avishai (Hebrew University), Igor Webb (Adelphi University) and Steven Zipperstein (Stanford University).

This reading and discussion originally took place on May 18, 2011.

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April Reynolds, "The Shape of Dreams" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In The Shape of Dreams (Random House, 2026) April Reynolds introduces readers to a trio of women bond in friendship as a neighborhood tries to seek justice from a system that has forgotten them. It’s the mid-eighties in East Harlem: a twelve-year-old black boy's murdered body is found by Mathilda "Twin" Johnson, an unlikely hero who is both the neighborhood’s troublemaker and its conscience. When she breaks a cardinal rule—“don’t call the cops”—her decision ensnares a community and brings unmanageable grief to a mother. Anita, a postal worker and army widow, is determined to solve her son's Tyrone's murder, and her quest galvanizes the neighborhood, which is itself a complex character in this teeming novel, with its Mets fans and gossips, immigrant shop owners and latch-key kids. The local dreamers include a charismatic man of the cloth, a teenage girl with a Whitney Houston voice and no prospects, and Anita’s opinionated friend Wanda, whose truant son the police harass and arrest on a regular basis. Everyone is struggling. Anita, Wanda and Twin, the triad of this vibrant novel, are drawn into the neighborhood drug trap, while a singer, a preacher, and the church ladies who follow him believe their dreams can shape a city. Will the three be able to break away from crack's dangerous allure? Will the reverend’s pressure on the authorities to find Tyrone’s killer yield answers? Will justice come to East Harlem? In the end, during the New York Mets’ banner summer of 1986, this community will come together to mourn, fight for a better life, and shape their dreams as best they can.

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Joe Mungo Reed, "Terrestrial History" (Norton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

Joe Mungo Reed is the author of the novels Hammer and We Begin Our Ascent, one of the best novels about sport that I’ve ever read. He Teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in London.

Recommended Books:

Flesh, David Szalay

Tokyo These Days, Taiyo Matsumoto

White River Crossing, Ian McGuire

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K.R. Wilson, "Stan on Guard" (Guernica Editions, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 8 Mar 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with K.R. Wilson about his novel, Stan on Guard (Guernica Editions, 2026).

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

As their stories braid together toward a final reckoning they take us through, among other things, a subversive retelling of the Odysseus story, the resistance of pagan Lithuania against Papal crusaders, the decline of Friedrich Nietzsche in a German clinic, the arts scene in belle epoque Paris, and the descent of Europe into the horrors of the Great War.

Strap in.

Stan On Guard is the follow-up to K. R. Wilson’s tragical-comical-historical novel Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millennia, which was long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal for Humour.

K. R. Wilson’s novel An Idea About My Dead Uncle won the inaugural Guernica Prize in 2018, and his novel Call Me Stan was long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal. His work has appeared in various literary journals and the flash fiction anthology This Will Only Take a Minute.

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Nicole Glover, "The Starseekers: A Murder and Magic Novel" (Harper Voyager, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 7 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The Starseekers: A Murder and Magic Novel (Harper Voyager, 2026), the fourth offering in the Magic and Mystery series follows Dr. Cynthia Rhodes as she investigates two separate murder mysteries that appear to be unrelated, while trying keep her job at NASA and raise two younger sisters. Old family friend Theo Danner teaches at Brewster University and provides moral support, investigative acumen, and a few smooches.

The first murder involves an unpleasant co-worker at NASA who dies in an apparently accidental explosion. Yet when Cynthia observes him seconds before, he appears to be expecting a disaster. Soon afterwards, a shady character who goes by the name of Fitzgerald is murdered, but not by the pistol pointed at him through the stacks of books from an unknown assassin.

The more you read in this richly layered narrative, the more surprises there are. In between chapters presenting pivotal events and introducing new suspicious characters, the attentive reader uncovers the complicated dynamics of the multi-generational Rhodes family.

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Brit Griffin, "The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien" (Latitude 46, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 7 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Brit Griffin about her novel, The Haunting of Modesto O’Brien (Latitude 46, 2025).

A gothic tale from deep within the boreal forest…

Violence and greed have intruded into a wild and remote land. It’s 1907, and silver fever has drawn thousands of men into a fledgling mining camp in the heart of the wilderness. Modesto O’Brien, fortune-teller and detective, is there too - but he isn’t looking for riches. He’s seeking revenge.

O’Brien soon finds himself entangled with the mysterious Nail sisters, Lucy and Lily. On the run from their past and headed for trouble, Lily turns to O’Brien when Lucy goes missing. But what should have been a straightforward case of kidnapping pulls O’Brien into a world of ancient myths, magic, and male violence.

As he searches for Lucy, O’Brien fears that dark forces are emerging from the ravaged landscape. Mesmerized by a nightmarish creature stalking the wilderness, and haunted by his past, O’Brien struggles to maintain his grip on reality as he faces hard choices about loyalty, sacrifice, and revenge.

Brit Griffin is the author of the climate-fiction Wintermen trilogy (Latitude 46) and has written essays, musings, and articles for various publications. Griffin spent many years as a researcher for the Timiskaming First Nation, an Algonquin community in northern Quebec. She lives in Cobalt, northern Ontario, where she is the mother of three grown daughters. These days, she divides her time between writing and caring for her unruly yard.

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Ann Packer, "Some Bright Nowhere" (Harper Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 6 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They’ve raised two children in their sleepy Connecticut town and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long life spent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it's time to gather loved ones and prepare for the inevitable.

Over the years of Claire’s illness, Eliot has willingly—lovingly—shifted into the role of caregiver, appreciating the intimacy and tenderness that comes with a role even more layered and complex than the one he performed as a devoted husband. But as he focuses on settling into what will be their last days and weeks together, Claire makes an unexpected request that leaves him reeling. In a moment, his carefully constructed world is shattered.

What if your partner’s dying wish broke your heart? How well do we know the deepest desires of those we love dearly? As Eliot is confronted with this profound turning point in his marriage and his life, he grapples with the man and husband he’s been, and with the great unknowns of Claire’s last days.

Ann Packer makes a triumphant return with this powerful novel that is tender and raw, visceral and unexpected. Emotionally vibrant and complex, Some Bright Nowhere (Harper Books, 2026) explores the profound gifts and unexpected costs of truly loving someone, and the fears and desires we experience as the end of life draws near.

Ann Packer is the author of two best-selling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, the latter of which received a Great Lakes Book Award, an American Library Association Award, and the Kate Chopin Literary Award. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Real Simple. Also the author of Mendocino and Other Stories, she lives in northern California with her family.

Recommended Books:

Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt
The Spare Room, Helen Garner
Everything/Nothing/Someone, Alice Carrier

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Ani DiFranco and Lauren Coyle Rosen, "The Spirit of Ani: Reflections on Spirituality, Feminism, Music, and Freedom" (Akashic Books, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Rebekah Buchanan talks with Ani DiFranco about her latest collaborative work The Spirit of Ani: Reflections on Spirituality, Feminism, Music and Freedom (Akashic Books, 2026). In this powerful collaborative work, the legendary folk-rock star and feminist icon is in conversation with author, artist, and cultural anthropologist Lauren Coyle Rosen. In these exchanges, Ani is remarkably open about her creativity, spirituality, personal experiences, and evolving consciousness. She is vulnerable and unapologetic, offering an unprecedented window into her fiercely prolific journeys. Rebekah

Expanding on themes from her best-selling memoir, Ani also offers fascinating reflections on contemporary popular culture—ranging from gender and queer politics, to the music industry in the virtual age, to climate change. The book includes previously unpublished photographs and journal entries, song-birth sheets, paintings, and the lyrics for some of her most treasured songs. The coauthors explore how Ani’s music and art are profoundly tied to her experiences of the interconnectedness of all consciousness and tuning in to receive creative inspiration. Ani’s striking openness produces a book that is both meditative and activating. This is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the dedication, intuition, and vision that drive Ani’s lifelong journey of creating art that not only reflects, but also empowers, transforms, and heals.

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Cynthia Leal Massey, "Well of Deception" (Stoney Creek Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Leta Becker was thirty-seven when she married Amos after a fifteen-year courtship, and they never had kids. Leta and Amos are related to lots of people, but their closest neighbors are Leta’s brother, Sam and his wife, Maggie Schneider. Amos thinks the Schneiders use more than their fare share of water to raise turkeys, and Sam thinks Amos has something wrong with him, like all the Beckers. When Maggie is shot while feeding her turkeys one March morning in 1958, Amos is the main suspect, but he’s gone missing. Months pass and some think he fled to Mexico, but others suspect that like family members before him, he took his own life. This is a novel about the harshness of Texas farm country, the hardships of the Depression, and the difficulty of living without love. Inspired by a true story, Well of Deception (Stoney Creek Publishing, 2025) describes decades of drought, difficulties, and deception.

Cynthia Leal Massey is a former corporate editor, college instructor, and magazine editor. She has published hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, and several award-winning books, including Death of a Texas Ranger, A True Story of Murder and Vengeance on the Texas Frontier, which won a San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award and a Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award, and What Lies Beneath, Texas Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards, also a SACS Award winner. Her first novel, Fire Lilies, a saga of the Mexican Revolution, was an Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition Award Finalist for Best Historical Fiction and its sequel, The Caballeros of Ruby, Texas, was a WILLA Literary Award Finalist for Best Original Softcover Fiction. Cynthia also won the Lone Star Award for Magazine Journalism for her article “Is UT Holding Our History Hostage?” published in Scene in SA Monthly. The article was also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award for Magazine Journalism. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, Cynthia has resided in Helotes, twenty miles northwest of the Alamo City since 1994. She served on the town’s city council for sixteen years. She holds a master’s degree in English from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. A full-time writer, she is a past president of Women Writing the West and a member of Western Writers of America.

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Lindsay Wong, "Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies" (Penguin Random House Canada, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed author Lindsay Wong about her novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies (Penguin Random House Canada, 2026).

A woman signs her life away in the ancient Chinese tradition of corpse marriage in this wickedly hilarious novel about class, ambition, and the burden of being an impoverished model minority.
Poor, vicious Locinda Lo is a nobody with a powerful witch for a grandmother and an undead corpse-kid-sister as her only friend. A broke MFA dropout living in Vancouver with six roommates and zero job prospects, she’s buried so deep in debt she might as well be six feet under—and her family is in danger of being buried along with her.
Desperate to escape her financial woes and save her grandmother and sister, Locinda signs a contract with a nefarious company, Joyful Coffin & Co. Matchmaking Services, to be auctioned off as a corpse bride to the highest bidder. Next thing she knows, she’s being smuggled underground into the damp caves where her training coffin awaits.
As Locinda prepares for a rich, dying dearly beloved to claim her as his bride-to-be in the Afterlife, her past becomes twisted with that of her grandmother, Baozhai. A feared and revered Villain Hitter, or witchy curse-monger, Baozhai’s legacy stretches from 1920s China to the Battle of Hong Kong in the 40s to New York City thereafter. Across the generational divide, one thing becomes achingly clear to them both: you can’t outrun your ghosts.
Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a daring, genre-bending meditation on life, death, and the murderous cost of living in between. It lays bare the societal and cultural expectations placed on Chinese women and the devastating price of enduring them. This chilling masterclass in fiction cements Lindsay Wong as one of the most provocative Canadian horror writers of our time.

Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg. Follow her on Twitter @LindsayMWong, Instagram @Lindsaywong.M, or visit www.lindsaywongwriter.com.

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Iman Humaydan Yunis, "Songs for Darkness" (Interlink, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Only songs are able to comfort the soul in its darkness—but can anyone hear them?

Iman Humaydan’s saga Songs for Darkness (Interlink, 2026) recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment.

Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away from her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion.

These women’s legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honoring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently preserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice—and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times.

A conversation with translator Michelle Hartman

Iman Humaydan Yunis is a Lebanese novelist, creative writing teacher, editor, and freelance journalist. Her novels received wide international acclaim and were translated into English, French, Italian, Dutch, German, Armenian, Polish, and Georgian. She is the author of five novels, including B as in Beirut, Wild Mulberries, Other Lives, and The Weight of Paradise, all published in English by Interlink. She is also the editor of the collection of short stories Beirut Noir. She is the president of the Lebanese chapter of PEN, and splits her time between Beirut and Paris.

Michelle Hartman is a literary translator and professor of Arabic literature at McGill University. She has translated more than a dozen novels from Arabic to English including three other novels by Iman Humaydan, The Weight of Paradise, Other Lives, and Wild Mulberries. Her latest translation is A Long Walk from Gaza (Interlink, 2024). She has also written on Lebanese women and the Civil War in two co-authored volumes (with Malek Abisaab), Women’s War Stories: The Lebanese Civil War, Women’s Labor and the Creative Arts (Syracuse UP, 2022) and What the War Left Behind: Women’s Stories of Resistance and Struggle in Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2024).

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Lauren Groff, "Brawler: Stories" (Riverhead, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Acclaimed TC contributor Lauren Groff speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her new story collection, Brawler, out this month from Riverhead, and her origins as a writer at Amherst College, where The Common is based. She also discusses how a story collection comes together over many years, how working with her longtime agent Bill Clegg has shaped her work, and what she’s working on now and next. Groff’s work appears most often in The New Yorker these days, but The Common published a story of hers in Issue 01, more than 15 years ago.

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2024 she was named one of the “TIME 100 most influential people.” Groff’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband run an independent bookstore, The Lynx.

Read Lauren Groff’s story “Exquisite Corpse” in The Common here.

Learn more about Brawler and order it here.

Find out more here.

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 here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her 2025 debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Saleem Haddad, "Floodlines" (Europa, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the rediscovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father’s legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize.

As the sisters fight to preserve, erase, or repurpose the past, Zainab’s estranged son Nizar, a war correspondent haunted by trauma and heartbreak, returns to the family fold. With the reemergence of buried memories comes a reckoning, and the family is forced to confront the personal and political betrayals that tore them apart.

Spanning continents and decades—from 1950s Baghdad to contemporary London, from the Tigris River to Yemeni refugee camps—Floodlines (Europa, 2026) is at once an intimate family drama and, in its scope, a modern epic. It is a rare novel that bridges the historic and the immediate and a heartfelt meditation on what it means to belong, to create, to endure.

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to a Palestinian-Lebanese father and an Iraqi-German mother, and educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and has advised on humanitarian and peacebuilding issues throughout West Asia and North Africa. He is the author of the acclaimed debut Guapa, a 2017 Stonewall Honor Book and the winner of the 2017 Polari Prize. His 2019 directorial debut, Marco, was nominated for the 2019 Iris Prize for “Best British Short Film” and is available to watch on YouTube. He is currently based in Lisbon.

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Mohamed Mansi Qandil, "The Country Doctor's Tale" (Syracuse UP, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In a remote Egyptian village, a young doctor arrives to open a long-abandoned clinic. Recently released from prison for political dissent, he’s been exiled from Cairo to this dusty outpost. As he immerses himself among the myriad ailments of the impoverished villagers, from scorpion stings and boils to the debilitating effects of bilharzia, he is drawn to a young nurse who becomes a trusted companion and provides an emotional refuge from his traumatic past. Farah represents everything the city doctor thinks he wants and offers a chance to rebuild his life. But are her ambitions really in line with his? And if this is love, is redemption certain to follow?

In this absorbing novel The Country Doctor's Tale (Syracuse UP, 2026), Qandil weaves together forbidden love, political corruption, and the clash between tradition and desire. The doctor’s world expands to include al-Jazya, the queen of a marginalized tribe who sees through his pretensions, and a menacing district chief of police reminding him that no one escapes the reach of authority.

Qandil’s novel evokes the beauties and cruelties of life in a small community on the edge of the Nile as our doctor’s journey takes him through the muddy lanes of the village, the verdant fields of maize, and finally a grim quest in the haunting landscape of the White Desert—all the while struggling with an imperfect moral compass.

A conversation with the translator R. Neil Hewison

Award-winning Egyptian novelist Mohamed Mansi Qandil worked as a physician before becoming an author and literary critic. He is the author of several short-story collections and novels, including A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore.

R. Neil Hewison served as editorial director of the American University in Cairo Press until his retirement in 2017. He has translated works by Egyptian writers Yusuf Idris, Yusuf Abu Rayya, Gamal al-Ghitani, and Naguib Mahfouz. He lives in the village of Tunis in the Fayoum.

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Howard Langer, "The Last Dekrepitzer" (Cresheim Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The Last Dekrepitzer follows the life and spiritual quest of Shmuel Meir Lichtbencher a/k/a Sam Lightup, from his isolated shtetl in the mountains of southern Poland, where he is brought up to be the future rebbe, to the wharves in Naples, where he jams with Black soldiers waiting to ship home at the end of the war. Dressing him in the uniform and dog tags of an AWOL soldier, they smuggle him home to rural Mississippi. He lives for years among Blacks, speaks Black English, preaches and plays the blues with the Brown Sugar Ramblers trio. His marriage to a Black woman, Lula Curtin, results in a cross burning that forces them to flee to Manhattan. He plays on the streets of Harlem and Midtown with the Reverend Gary Davis, the great blind guitarist whose mission is saving souls for the next world. Through it all, Shmuel Meir fiddles his prayers in defiance of God.

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Jo Nesbø, "Wolf Hour" (Random House, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Wolf Hour (Knopf, 2026) When a small-time criminal and gun dealer is shot down in the street, all signs point to Tomas Gomez, a quiet man with a mysterious past—and deep connections to a notorious gang—who has seemingly vanished into thin air. Other murders soon follow, and it appears Gomez is only getting started. Meanwhile, Bob Oz, a down-and-out suspended police officer with a dubious past of his own, becomes fascinated by the case: he is obsessed with the notion of hunting down a serial killer who only he can understand, a killer with a story as tragic as his own. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2022. An enigmatic Norwegian man with ties to Minneapolis—a self-described crime writer—has traveled to the United States to research the Gomez case, in the hopes of writing a book about it. But as his investigation progresses, the writer’s seemingly neutral position reveals itself to be more complicated than the reader is initially led to believe. Wolf Hour is a twisty and unforgettable thriller in classic Jo Nesbø style, which bears out Vanity Fair’s observation that “Nesbø explores the darkest criminal minds with grim delight and puts his killers where you least expect to find them. . . . His novels are maddeningly addictive.”

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Gabriel Tallent, "Crux" (Riverhead Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In Crux (Riverhead Books, 2025), Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert. One is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout. Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure.
As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by change and pulled apart by irreconcilable obligations. Differences of class, talent, and prospects take on new importance; options dwindle, and their decisions grow ever more consequential and perilous. It feels inevitable, finally, that something must give.
With a magnificent gift for nature writing and a joyful appreciation for the redemptive power of friendship, Gabriel Tallent gives readers a rollicking, adrenaline-filled, and soul-searching novel about risking everything to change your life.

Gabriel Tallent is the author of My Absolute Darling, which was a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the John Leonard Prize. Gabriel was born in New Mexico and raised on the Mendocino coast by two mothers. He studied English at Willamette University, with a focus on eighteenth-century cultural history. After graduation, he led trail crews, scrubbed toilets at Target, worked in the dining room at the Alta Lodge, and bussed tables at the Copper Onion. He now lives in Salt Lake City with his wife, Hattie, and their three rambunctious boys.

Recommended Books:

R.O. Kwon, Exhibit
Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles

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Yishay Ishi Ron, "Dog" (Soncata Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Told through the eyes of an Israeli combat officer who’s haunted by the trauma of fighting in Gaza, Dog (Soncata Press 2025) is a gritty story about PTSD, the effects of war, and resilience. Dog was translated into English by the renowned New translator Yardenne Greenspan , and centers on “Geller,” once a prize-winning hero, who has spiraled into heroin addiction and lives from hit to hit, surrounded by filth, despair, and other broken men. Geller is barely surviving the streets of Tel Aviv when his days are brightened by the arrival of a stray dog. Dog leads him to Dorit, a lonely woman who has also experienced loss and living on edge of society. This moving novel, a Jewish Book Award winner, describes the anguish of Geller’s brutal memories, the physical and mental wounds he’ll carry always, and his quest to bend a spoon like Uri Geller.

Yishai Ishi Ron is an acclaimed Israeli author, a former elite combat soldier, and a survivor of severe PTSD. Writing has been an essential part of his healing journey, enabling him to transform deeply personal wounds into stories of trauma, resilience, and redemption. Ron’s previous works in Hebrew include Holiday Apocalypse, which was nominated for the Geffen Award, and Vincent’s Nose, a children’s book that was adapted into an award-winning play. Across genres, his writing continues to explore the fragile boundary between suffering and survival, silence and voice, despair and imagination. His next novel, The Girl Who Rode the White Lion, will be published by Soncata Press later in 2026. He’s passionate about reading, especially world literature and contemporary Israeli fiction. Because of his PTSD, he doesn’t leave the house very much and has a very close relationship with my wife of 29 years, Elinor. Yishai always writes while standing, usually at the kitchen island, because standing helps him maintain a certain emotional balance.

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Shaunna J. Edwards and Alyson Richman, "The Thread Collectors" (Harper Collins, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The Thread Collectors (Harper Collins, 2022) by Shaunna J Edwards and Alyson Richman takes readers to 1863, where, in a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband, who is stationed in Louisiana with the Union Army. Between abolitionist meetings, Lily rolls bandages and crafts quilts with her sewing circle for other soldiers, too, hoping for their safe return home. But when months go by without word from her husband, Lily resolves to make the perilous journey South to search for him.

As these two women risk everything for love and freedom during thebrutal Civil War, their paths converge in New Orleans, where an unexpected encounter leads them to discover that even the most delicate threads have the capacity to save us. Loosely inspired by the authors' family histories, this stunning novel will stay with readers for a long time.

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Sandra Freels, "Anneke Jans in the New World (She Writes Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

With the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America fast approaching, a small flood of novels set in the early days of colonization and statehood seems likely. Anneke Jans in the New World (She Writes Press, 2026) stands out because, rather than focus on the Puritans or the revolution and the founding of the nation, it explores the life of the author’s ancestor, who joined the fledgling Dutch colony known as Fort Amsterdam between 1630 and 1663. This is New York City as you can’t imagine it, an outpost on the mighty Hudson, surrounded by forest and mountains, with not a skyscraper or even a paved street to be seen.

Anneke crosses the ocean with her husband, Roelof Jans, under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company, which in the seventeenth century was expanding across the globe. Roelof, a former sailor, sees the opportunity to settle down as a landowner in the New World, and Anneke joins him at the urging of her mother—who both wants to see her daughter settled and establish a beachhead for herself as a future midwife to the new colony. Eventually, the whole family emigrates, and the novel follows Anneke through numerous personal upheavals and joys amid the gradual disintegration of Fort Amsterdam’s relationship with the Native American nations surrounding the fort.

This is classic historical fiction in its focus on one central character and the many evolving relationships that define her life. It works because Anneke herself is such a well-thought-out and appealing person, and that—as well as the richly portrayed and, to me, relatively unfamiliar world that surrounds her—kept me turning pages as fast as I could.

After a long career in academe, an interest in genealogy led Sandra Freels, a specialist in Russian language and literature, to the Council Records of New Netherland and the delicious stories of the people who once lived there. She claims descent from Anneke Jans and sixteen other major and minor characters in her debut novel, Anneke Jans in the New World.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025.

Sandra's website here.

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K.J. Aiello "The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell" (ECW Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author KJ Aiello about their book, The Monster and the Mirror: Mental Illness, Magic, and the Stories We Tell (ECW Press, 2024). Revelatory memoir and cultural criticism that connects popular fantasy and our perceptions of mental illness to offer an empathetic path to compassionate care

Growing up, K.J. Aiello was fascinated by magical stories of dragons, wizards, and fantasy, where monsters were not what they seemed and anything was possible. These books and films were both a balm and an escape, a safe space where Aiello’s struggle with mental illness transformed from a burden into a strength that could win battles and vanquish villains.

A unique blend of memoir, research, and cultural criticism, The Monster and the Mirror charts Aiello’s life as they try to understand their own mental illness using The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and other stories as both guides to heroism and agency and cautionary tales of how mental illness is easily stereotyped as bad and violent. Aiello questions who is allowed to be “mad” versus “sane,” “good” versus “evil,” and “weak” versus “strong,” and who is allowed to tell their own stories. The Monster and the Mirror explores our perceptions of mental illness in a way that is challenging and tender, empathetic and knowledgeable, and offers a path to deeper understanding and compassionate care.

K.J. Aiello is a mentally ill, award-winning writer based in Toronto, ON. Their work has appeared in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, Chatelaine, The Walrus, and This Magazine. They are still waiting for their very own dragon. Sadly, this has not happened, so their cats will have to suffice.

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Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this RTB and Novel Dialogue episode from 2021, Helen Garner sits down with John and Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature. Helen’s novels range from the anti-patriarchy exuberance of Monkey Grip (1977) to the heartbreaking mortality at the heart of The Spare Room (2008). She has also authored a slew of nonfiction, plus screenplays for Jane Campion’s Two Friends and Gillian Armstrong’s wonderfully Garneresque The Last Days of Chez Nous. After a reading from John’s favorite, The Children’s Bach, the trio discusses Garner’s capacity for cutting and cutting, creating resonant, thought-inducing gaps. Garner connects that taste for excision, perhaps paradoxically, to her tendency to accumulate scraps, bits and pieces of life. She relates her father’s restlessness to her own life-total of houses inhabited (27). “Why wouldn’t I write about households?” asks Helen, “They’re just so endlessly interesting.”

Who shaped her writing? Raymond Carver: packed with power, but the pages white with omissions and excisions. Helen offers an anecdote about her own pruning that ends with her “ankle-deep in adverbs.” That’s how to escape the “fat writing” that stems for distrust of the reader. She thoughtfully compares the practical virtues of keeping notebooks for the “music” of everyday life to the nightly process of diary-writing (more analytical). John raises the question of pervasive musical metaphors in Helen’s writing, and she reports her passion for “boring pieces” and the “formal” side of Bach, which makes a listener feel that there is such a thing as meaning. “There’s something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical.”

Mentioned in the Episode

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (the fixed people and the wandering people), Gilead, Home,
The West Wing (yes, the TV show! Helen watched it during lockdown when she couldn’t bear fiction…)
Raymond Carver‘s minimalist fiction (his first collection)
Tess Gallagher (as writer and as Carver’s editor)
Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922; on how to un-furnish fiction, leaving it an empty room)
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Sigmund Freud on “the day’s residue” (e.g. in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900)
George Eliot, Quarry for Middlemarch

Listen to Episode

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Tracee de Hahn, "Swiss Vendetta" (Minotaur Books, 2017)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Agnes Luthi is a police officer in Lausanne, Switzerland who transfers from financial to violent crimes just in time to investigate the death of a young art appraiser in a magnificent mountain chateau. An employee of a London auction house, the young victim is at the chateau to take inventory of a priceless medieval art collection and other historical treasures. She’s stabbed to death on the eve of a blizzard that shuts down all power and the roads heading in and out. Everyone has a story; some are newcomers, others go back generations, and no one is forthcoming. Agnes feels trapped, but she’s determined to solve her first murder case. This is the first novel in Tracee de Hahn’s Agnes Luthi mystery series.

Tracee de Hahn is a writer and educator. She is the author of traditional mysteries set in Switzerland: Swiss Vendetta and A Well-Timed Murder, both published by Minotaur Books, as well as several non-fiction works on historical topics. Prior to writing fiction, she began her career in the practice of architecture and later received an advanced degree in European history. Each of these of these play a role in her writing. Born in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, she grew up in Kentucky and currently lives in Virginia. Tracee is the immediate past president of the National Board of Sisters in Crime. When not working on her own manuscripts, she acts as a writing mentor and lectures on topics related to writing and publishing. Otherwise, she fills her time baking, and occasionally painting dog portraits.

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Michael Mirolla, "How About This…?" (At Bay Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Michael Mirolla about his fascinating novel, How About This…? (At Bay Press, 2025).

It’s a little after the middle of the 21st century. Loving couple Elspeth and Marybeth are both shocked and excited when a stroller with identical twins is left on their back deck with a recorded message that warns them not to try to return the babies or they could face arrest for kidnapping. Using false starts, footnotes, direct approaches to the reader, lists, questions about who the author(s) might be, and even a dose of self-criticism, the story unwinds from that point as El and Mar work hard to create a family under the circumstances. This becomes even more difficult when they discover the babies come with unusual features that perhaps might explain why they were left in the first place. And it all takes place in a disintegrating world that may leave humans incapable of telling their own stories.

Michael Mirolla's publications include a novella, The Last News Vendor, winner of the 2020 Hamilton Literary Award for fiction, as well as three Bressani Prizes: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). His latest poetry collection, At the End of the World, was short-listed for the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award. In the fall of 2019, Michael served a three- month writer’s residency at Vancouver’s Historic Joy Kogawa House, during which time he finished the first draft of a novel, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. A symposium on Michael’s writing was held in Toronto on May 25, 2023. In September of 2023, Michael took part in a writers’ residency in Olot, Catalonia where he completed the latest draft of his novella, How About This …? In the summer of 2024, Michael will take part in a one-month writers’ residency in Barcelona where he hopes to tackle a new draft of The Second Law. When not busy writing, Michael helps run Guernica Editions, a Canadian independent literary publishing house. Born in Italy and raised in Montreal, Michael now makes his home outside the town of Gananoque in the Thousand Islands area of Ontario.

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Jenny Mustard, "What a Time to Be Alive" (Pegasus Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 6 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Jenny Mustard is a writer and content creator, born in Sweden but living in London. Jenny and her work have featured in the Observer, the Independent, Vogue, Stylist, the Evening Standard and elsewhere. She has over 600k followers, and more than 50 million views on YouTube. Her acclaimed debut novel, OKAY DAYS, was published in 2023 and her novels have been translated to ten languages. What a Time to Be Alive (Pegasus Books, 2025) was a New York Times Editors Pick.

Recommended Books:

Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Joy Williams, 99 Stories of God;
--“After the Haiku Period,” Paris Review

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Eric Chopra, "Ghosted" (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 5 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Delhi is haunted—by its ghosts, its ruins, and its unending capacity for rebirth. In the shadow of medieval mosques and Mughal tombs, the past refuses to stay buried. Saints, Sultans, poets, and lovers—all linger in the city’s imagination, their stories shaping how we remember what once was.

In Ghosted, historian and storyteller Eric Chopra journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites—Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, the Mutiny Memorial, and Malcha Mahal—to unearth a Delhi that exists between worlds: a palimpsest where Sufis bless kings, jinn listen to grievances, and begums occupy dilapidated hunting lodges. What begins as a search for Delhi’s haunted monuments becomes a meditation on why we are drawn to the dead and how ghost stories become vessels of collective memory.

Blending archival research with folklore, myth, and reflection, Chopra paints an intimate portrait of a city forever in dialogue with its former selves. Through invasions and rebirths, he reveals that Delhi’s spirit resides not just in its monuments but in the unseen presences that linger among them.

Ghosted is a lyrical, haunting journey through the city’s spectral landscape— an invitation to listen to what its echoes tell us about memory and identity.

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Neelum Saran Gour, "Requiem in Raga Janki" (Penguin Viking, 2018)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In the early years of the twentieth century, in what was then British India, culture thrived in the city of Allahabad. In this vibrant hub of musicians, poets, scholars and freedom fighters, Janki Bai Ilahabadi was a musical star, counting among her fans maharajas, poets, judges, nawabs, government officials and multitudes of ordinary people. Popularly known as Chhappan Chhuri, Janki Bai’s career, originating in a nautch house and vexed by many trials and torments, soared to stellar heights lifting her from penury to palaces and even the Delhi Durbar of 1911.
Based on the real-life story of Hindustani singer Janki Bai Ilahabadi (1880–1934), Requiem in Raga Janki (Penguin Viking, 2018) by Neelum Saran Gour is the beautifully rendered tale of one of India’s unknown gems. Moving from Hindustani classical music’s earliest times to the age of the gramophone, from Baiju’s mysticism and Tansen’s magic to Hassu Khan’s stringent opposition to recordings, this is a novel that brings to life a tapestry of music lore through the eyes of a gifted performer.

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Hollay Ghadery, "The Unravelling of Ou" (Palimpsest Press, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 4 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, award-winning and celebrated author Farzana Doctor interviews Hollay Ghadery about her novel, The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press, 2026).

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and untangle herself from her dependence on it, and reconnect with the people she loves.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, (Guernica Editions 2021) won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. She is the author of Rebellion Box (Radiant Press, 2023) and Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2024). She is a host on The New Books Network and HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM, and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay here. The Unraveling of Ou, is her debut novel.

About Farzana Doctor:

Farzana Doctor is a writer, activist, and Registered Social Worker/Psychotherapist. Her ancestry is Indian, and she was born in Zambia while her family was based there for five years, before immigrating to Canada in 1971. Learn more here

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Sunny Dhillon, "Hide and Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sunny Dhillon about his book, Hide & Sikh: Letters from a Life in Brown Skin (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In 2018, Sunny Dhillon resigned as a journalist with the Globe and Mail. His blog post announcing his departure went unexpectedly viral. It was a decision that had been long brewing and Dhillon posted the piece with the hope that it would lead to “meaningful reflection on the lack of diversity in Canadian journalism and the problems therein.” But he was not optimistic.

In this sharply funny memoir, shaped as a series of letters to his daughter, Dhillon explains why he was not hopeful. From his earliest memories, his experience of being Canadian was shaped by race, and as a child he’d often found himself confused by what he should do when the fact he was “different” was raised. His first reaction was to hide – from his skin colour, from his native tongue and even from his name. Until he realized he didn’t feel the need to hide anymore, that he didn’t want to hide anymore. With warmth, honesty and lots of humour, Dhillon shares his journey so that his daughter will not have to struggle through the lessons he took too long to learn, so that she will know who she is and be proud.

Sunny Dhillon is a former news reporter whose viral essay “Journalism While Brown and When to Walk Away” highlighted the significant challenges that journalists of colour can face. Sunny worked as a print reporter for ten years. He has also appeared on television and radio and has spoken at conferences. He is passionate about racial justice and continues to write on that theme. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of British Columbia. He and his young family now live in Ontario, where Sunny attends law school. This is his first book.

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Iida Turpeinen, "Beasts of the Sea" (Little, Brown, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 2 Feb 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Iida Turpeinen is a literary scholar writing a dissertation on the intersection of the natural sciences and literature. Her short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals won the J. H. Erkko Young Writers’ Competition in 2014. Her 2023 debut novel, Beasts of the Sea (Little, Brown, 2025), was published in Finland to wide acclaim, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel, and was a finalist for Finland’s biggest literary award, the Finlandia Prize. Translation rights have been sold in twenty-six territories to date. Iida is currently writer in residence at the Helsinki Natural History Museum writing her second novel not far from the skeleton of sea cow. Turpeinen lives in Helsinki, Finland.

Recommended Books:

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Princess Joy L. Perry, "This Here Is Love" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Three people—two enslaved, one indentured—living beside each other, struggling against their circumstances, trying to bend destiny.

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America’s character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom.

Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother’s only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the boundaries of love.

David is a helping child and a solace to his parents, and he gave a purpose to their trials. His survival hinges on his mother’s shrewd intellect and ferocious fight, but his sustenance is his freed Black father’s dream of emancipation for the entire family.

Jack Dane, a Scots-Irish boy, sails to Britain’s colonies when his father sells him into indentured servitude as an escape from poverty. There Jack learns from the rich the value of each person’s life.

A breathtaking, haunting, and epic saga, This Here Is Love (W.W. Norton, 2025) intimately intertwines us with these beautifully drawn, unforgettable American characters. Bless, taken to serve the slaveowner’s daughter, must decide where she belongs: with the enslaved or above them. David, sold away from his people, retreats into himself even as he yearns to unite with others. Jack, acting impetuously, changes his fortune, but will doing so sacrifice his humanity?

All three come together on Jack’s land. As they face and challenge each other, they will relinquish and remake beliefs about family and freedom, even as they confront the limits of love.

Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. You can find her on Instagram.

Host Sullivan Summer is at her website, Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Princess went to continue their conversation.

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Luis Rechani Agrait, "My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts" (Swan Isle Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:37:00 +0000

My Excellency: Comedy in Three Acts (Swan Isle Press, 2025) by Luis Rechani Agrait was translated into English by William Carlos Williams but not published in his lifetime. This first-ever edition of Williams’s translation was edited and has an introduction by Jonathan Cohen. It includes a foreword by Julio Marzán and an afterword by José Luis Ramos Escobar. It also includes the lecture Williams gave on poetry at the 1941 Inter-American Writers’ Conference of the University of Puerto Rico, where he met Rechani Agrait and received from him the published play as a gift.

William Carlos Williams's English translation of the play, Mi Señoría, by Puerto Rican playwright Luis Rechani Agrait, reflects Williams's connection to his Puerto Rican roots and deft skills as a translator. The play is a satirical critique of political corruption, featuring comical malapropisms and an idealistic but naive politician's rise, highlighting themes of materialism and power, and showcasing Williams's adept handling of language.

William Carlos Williams’s mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, was from Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Williams was deeply engaged with translation and the unique cultural worlds wrought by migration. His rendering of My Excellency invites us to think about translation not simply as a linguistic act, but as an ethical and artistic one: What happens when a Puerto Rican political satire crosses languages, audiences, and power structures? What is gained, what is altered, and what remains unresolved? In this episode, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera (UPR-M) and editor Jonathan Cohen discuss the historical context of the play, Williams’s role as translator, and the broader questions the work raises about voice, authority, and cultural mediation. By looking closely at My Excellency, we open a wider conversation about literature in translation and the complex relationships between language, migration, text, and translation.

This conversation forms part of the STEM to STEAM initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which seeks to connect medicine, science, technology, and engineering with the interpretive and ethical sensibilities cultivated in the humanities. By foregrounding literature, poetry, history, philosophy, and the arts, the initiative reimagines how humanistic study can serve as a central component of technical and scientific education.

In this episode are:

• Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, Professor of Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPR-M) and Director of the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes.
• Jonathan Cohen is an award-winning translator of Latin American poetry and scholar of inter-American literature. He is editor of Williams’s verse translations from Spanish, By Word of Mouth, and his translation of the Spanish Golden Age novella The Dog and the Fever.

Topics discussed and scholars mentioned:

Emilia Quiñones Otal, Directora del Departamento de Humanidades, UPR-M
Julio Marzán, The Spanish American Roots of William Carlos Williams.
Marta Aponte Alsina
"The Art and Science of Translation"
Rebecca Ruth Gould and “co-translating”
William Carlos Williams Society 2024 conference at the UPR-M
Last Nights of Paris, Philippe Soupault
"Translation will motivate English to do new things ... to serve as an apprentice to a master writer."—Jonathan Cohen
"The Sugarcane Girl who was my mother"
Walter Scott Peterson podcast, “[M]y ‘case’ to work up’: William Carlos Williams’s Paterson”
“Williams struggled throughout his life, and the conflict produced great literature.”—Jonathan Cohen
David Unger

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Cush Rodríguez Moz “Future Remains” The Common Magazine (Fall, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Cush Rodríguez Moz speaks to Emily Everett about his essay “Future Remains: The Mysterious Allure of a Town in Ruins,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. The piece chronicles a trip to Villa Epecuén: once a vacation destination for the wealthy in Argentina’s golden age, now a site for disaster tourism after salt-water flooding first ruined and then preserved it. Cush discusses how the piece evolved from simple travelogue to a complex personal essay examining national and personal decline, climate and political change, and our fascination with destruction and decay.

Cush Rodríguez Moz is a journalist, writer and photographer currently based in Madrid. His investigative articles and long-form narrative pieces cover an array of themes that include environmental issues, agriculture and urbanism. His work has appeared in El Malpensante, Altäir, The New Yorker and Climática, among other outlets. He also collaborates regularly with Revista Late. He holds degrees in history, geography and journalism. Prior to Spain, he lived in Italy and Argentina.

Read Cush’s essay in The Common here.

Read more from Cush at linktr.ee/cush.moz, and follow him on Instagram @cush.moz.

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 here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Lesley Chamberlain, "The Mozhaisk Road" (Austin Macauley, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In The Mozhaisk Road (Austin Macauley, 2025) the time is 1978 and Moscow is still the capital of a Communist country. The political police continues to suppress the protests of dissident leader Alexander Razumovsky and his tiny group of supporters. Western observers Howard Wilde and Gels Maybey face an uncertain Christmas after a public rally is roughly broken up in the city's Pushkin Square. But when the elderly Razumovsky suddenly steps down in the New Year and a new young leader emerges, the whole world sees a sign of hope. Can this sluggish, downtrodden Russia, despised by its own leaders, suddenly change, inspired by the courage of one Boris Marlinsky?As the Kremlin responds behind the scenes, how close can Western reporters come to grasping the hidden ways of power which seem to seal Russia's troubled fate?

This forcefully imagined prequel to the real events of 1991 changes the lives of Howard Wilde and Gels Maybey, and their American friends Arthur and Harriet. But what then of their Russian friends? Is it only Western hearts and minds that long for freedom along the Mozhaisk Road?

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Mia Tsai, "The Memory Hunters" (Erewhon Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Mia Tsai’s novel The Memory Hunters centers Kiana Strade, Key, a reckless young archaeologist and religious figure, who is capable of diving deeper into blood memories than anyone else alive and Valerian IV, Vale, her guardian, who is tasked with the challenging proposition of keeping her alive. The story follows the pair as Key uncovers ancient secrets that and tackles questions of generational memory and the right to knowledge.

In this interview, Tsai discusses the way human memory works and the impact on the novel, building a sapphic body guard romance, and the role of climate disaster in fantasy. We discuss family obligations, mentorship, and building institutions around technologies and magic systems.

The Memory Hunters is a complex and empathetic adventure and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Katie Welch, "Ladder to Heaven" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadert speaks with Kamloops, BC author Katie Welch about her novel, Ladder to Heaven (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

In 2045 an earthquake ravages the Pacific Coast of North America and the world shifts. Suddenly people and animals can understand each other, while the chaos of climate change combines with the destruction of the earthquake in terrifying ways. Inland, where she should be safe, Del Samara finds her life spiralling out of control. Struggling with addiction and with her ranch in ashes around her, Del decides her family would be better off without her. Leaving her daughters behind, she retreats to her father’s fishing cabin with her dog, Manx. When she emerges three years later, she finds the world since the earthquake has become a very different place and she begins a dangerous journey to Vancouver Island to find her family and, perhaps, find peace.

Katie Welch lives in Kamloops and on Cortes Island, BC. Her debut novel, Mad Honey, was nominated for the 2023 OLA Evergreen Prize. She is a two-time alumnus of the Banff Centre and was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize. Find her online here.

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Linda Wilgus, "The Sea Child" (Ballantine, 2026)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Cornwall, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was best known for its smuggling. The combination of an insular and impoverished countryside, a rugged coastline characterized by numerous inlets and coves, and price hikes caused by the ongoing wars between Britain and France—played out in high tariffs and embargoes—created the perfect conditions for people desperate to make a living to defy what they saw as an unfair law. Over the years, those same characteristics have appealed to novelists from Daphne du Maurier to the present day.

The Sea Child (Ballantine, 2026)—which takes place in an isolated village in Cornwall, although on a river leading to the sea rather than the coastline itself—certainly dips into the long and contentious struggle between Cornish villagers and the British Crown. But at the heart of the story we find Isabel Henley, a young woman who, as a child of four, was plucked from the sea with no knowledge of her parents or her home. Adopted by local landlords, Isabel has grown up, moved away, married a naval man, and, following his death at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), returned to her childhood village. There she discovers that the legend surrounding her—that she is not entirely human but a daughter of the Sea Bucca, a merman who haunts the waters of the Cornish coast—survives and thrives.

Isabel discounts the locals’ tale, but she can’t deny that the river calls to her as she strolls along its banks at twilight …

Linda Wilgus—a former bookseller, knitting pattern designer, and writer of short stories, many of which have been published in literary magazines—lives in Cambridge, England, with her family. The Sea Child is her debut novel. Website here

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Booksellers Best of 2025

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Lisa Swayze has been the General Manager at Buffalo Street Books for 8 years and will transition to becoming the Executive Director of the bookstore’s new literary nonprofit in 2025. Lisa is on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association and the Downtown Ithaca Alliance.

Laura Larson is the owner of Odyssey Bookstore. In 2019 Laura decided to return to her hometown of Ithaca NY to satisfy her life-long dream of opening her own bookstore. Now Laura enjoys spending her days talking about books, reading books and thinking about what to read next.

Recommended Books from our Booksellers:

Lisa's Favorites

Cursed Daughters - Oyinkan Braithwaite
The Bone Thief - Vanessa Lillie
Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy
The Hounding - Xenobe Purvis
I Want to Burn This Place Down - Maris Kreizman

Laura's Favorites

Calculation of Volume I-III by Solvej Balle (9780811237253, 9780811237277, 9780811238397)
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada (9780811237871)
The End of Drum Time by Hanna Pylvainen (9781250871817)
January by Sara Gallardo (9781953861641)
Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (9781250338020)
Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (9780593854280)
Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (9781984820716
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (9780307700155)

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Sean Minogue, "Prodigals" (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025).

When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than just regrets.

Sean Minogue has written for film, television and theatre. His poems, stories and essays have been published in ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Shift, THIS Magazine, Full Stop, Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail.

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David Elias, "Into the D-Ark" (Radiant Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed Manitoba author David Elias about his new novel, Into the D/Ark (Radiant Press, 2025).

Rose Martens struggles with the aftermath of a terrible fire that has left her sons, Jake and Isaac, horribly disfigured. The boys have gone to live in an abandoned house they’ve named Bachelor’s Paradise, where they spend all their time watching American network television. Their father Clarence works day and night in his blacksmith shop, producing bizarre metallic creations no one can make any sense of. Martha Wiebe returns to the stifling conformity of the valley to discover that her brother Abe, a preacher, has abandoned his congregation to devote himself to the construction of “The Ark”, a massive and mysterious edifice whose purpose he will not divulge. When the first major snowstorm of the year roars into the valley, it unleashes a chain of bizarre events that the valley may never recover from.

About David Elias:

David Elias is the author of seven books, most recently The Truth about the Barn: A Voyage of Discovery and Contemplation, published by Great Plains Publications. It was featured in the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top titles for 2020. His most recent work of fiction is an historical novel, Elizabeth of Bohemia: A Novel about Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. It was published in 2019 by ECW Press, and was a finalist for The Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction at The Manitoba Book Awards. His previous works have been up for numerous awards including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, the Amazon First Novel Award, and The Journey Prize. His short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across the country, and in addition to writing he spends time as a mentor, creative writing instructor, and editor. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

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Brad Smith, "Billy Crawford's Double Play" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Brad Smith about his new novel, Billy Crawford's Double Play (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

Everything is legal – if you can get away with it.

Billy Crawford is a hero. The star of the Rose City Rounders, the baseball player has been thrilling fans of the city for years. But Billy’s not as young as he used to be and his tendency to play hard is catching up with him. A string of losses for the Rounders puts his position at risk as the team’s owner, local developer Carroll Miller, doesn’t like being associated with anything that loses. Miller’s thinking of making changes, and not just at the team. When he decides to enter politics Billy suddenly finds himself facing an offer he can’t refuse.

In this wise-cracking, fast-paced novel, Brad Smith lampoons today’s scandal-ridden politics and politicians. But among the laughter, Smith also shows us there can be hope, and even integrity, where we least expect it.

Award-winning author Brad Smith is a novelist and screenwriter, born and raised in southern Ontario. Billy Crawford’s Double Play is his fifteenth novel. His 2019 novel – The Return of Kid Cooper – won the Spur Award for Best Western Traditional Novel from the Western Writers of America. His novels One-Eyed Jacks and Copperhead Road were shortlisted for the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He adapted his book All Hat to feature film, starring Keith Carradine and Luke Kirby. He now lives in a ninety-year-old farmhouse near the north shore of Lake Erie, where he tinkers, respectively, on his vintage cars and his golf swing.

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Diane Botnick, "Becoming Sarah" (She Writes Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Sarah Vogel was born in Auschwitz and liberated at age three, but she has no memories of being there and nobody to tell her the story of her birth or her mother. Becoming Sarah (Diane Botnick, She Writes Press 2025) grapples with identity, memory, belonging, and reinventing oneself. Sarah’s trajectory is filled with both happiness and extreme loss, and she finds love, friendship, and home, but the lies she invented as a survivor follow her through her daughters and granddaughters, each of them survivors of something.

Diane was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, but always knew she'd wind up in New York City. Her first night in Greenwich Village she went to a double feature of Godard’s “Weekend” and Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies,” and her romance with the city began. For the next 30 years, Diane worked around, starting out in Italy assisting people like Jerome Robbins and Ellen Stewart with their contributions to the Spoleto Festival, then back in the City for the Dia Art Foundation, Isamu Noguchi, Great Performances at WNET, and finally, Workman Publishing. Along the way, she returned to school in pursuit of a master’s in creative writing at City College. Fulfilling all requirements but unable to pass the French exam (with a dictionary!), she was never awarded her diploma. However, the privilege of being mentored by Donald Barthelme and being appointed student editor of the literary magazine FICTION gave her far more than a diploma ever could.

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Amber Day, "Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars" (Indiana UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope.

Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars (Indiana UP, 2025) delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, who should be in the intended audience, what is appropriate behavior for which performing bodies, and what the boundaries of comedy ultimately are.

Caught in the Crosshairs is an examination of how feminist comedy reflects the tensions of our times, disrupting established narratives and challenging traditional power structures.

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Somia Sadiq, "Gajarah" (GFB, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

With stunning lyricism, Somia Sadiq's Gajarah (GFB, 2025) tells the story of a fearless woman torn between two worlds-Pakistan and Canada-whose life is upended by sexual violence. Emahn is big haired, mischievous, and larger than life. Born in the Arabian Gulf, she spends extended summers with her grandparents, aunties, and cousins on the rooftops of Lahore. But tucked away beneath her spirited exterior, Emahn carries the weight of childhood trauma. When she marries and moves to Canada, she quickly learns the art of navigating multiple realities and compartmentalizing memories of the world she left behind, even as she clings to the stories of her home. She is resilient; she is driven; she is unbreakable. Almost. When tragedy strikes, Emahn must draw upon the deepest wells of her ancestral strength to survive, even if it means revisiting her gutting past. Braided together with prose, poetry, and mythical parables, Gajarah confronts the realities of forgiveness and justice, and asks what it means to belong to a land that so forcefully pushes one away.

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Stephanie Reents, "We Loved to Run" (Hogarth, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls’ chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin’s confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.
Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run (Hogarth, 2025) deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination.

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Recommended Books:

Marisa Crane, A Sharp Endless Need
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

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Daria Lavelle, "Aftertaste" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 9 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster, 2025) Konstantin Duhovny’s father died when he was young, and his mother is too anguished to raise him, so he raises himself, but not very well. After a sad breakup, he advertises for a roommate and finds a chef who becomes his best friend. Kostya starts to realize that although he doesn’t see ghosts, he can taste the food they once loved. He figures out how to prepare special dishes that unite people with their dead loved ones, and in hopes of helping people, decides to really learn how to cook. But he falls in love with someone who has an inkling about the afterlife and she wants to stop him from feeding ghosts. This is a beautiful but crazy novel about New York’s food scene, the most esoteric and expensive foods, ghosts, finding a soulmate, and losing one’s soul.

Daria Lavelle is a speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, Dark Matters, and elsewhere, and her debut novel, Aftertaste, was published by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025, and is currently being translated into thirteen languages. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and can often be found in a coffee shop, inventing new worlds or distorting this one. When she's not writing, she enjoys opera, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and Escape Rooms.

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Caitlin Galway, "A Song for Wildcats: Stories" (Dundurn Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 8 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Caitlin Galway about her short fiction collection, A Song for Wildcats (Dundurn Press, 2025).

An arresting, vividly imaginative collection of stories capturing the complexity of intimacy and the depths of the unravelling mind.
Infatuation and violence grow between two girls in the enchanting wilderness of postwar Australia as they spin disturbing fantasies to escape their families. Two young men in the midst of the 1968 French student revolts navigate — and at times resist — the philosophical and emotional nature of love. An orphaned boy and his estranged aunt are thrown together on a quiet peninsula at the height of the Troubles in Ireland, where their deeply rooted fear attracts the attention of shape-shifting phantoms of war.
The five long-form stories in A Song for Wildcats are uncanny portraits of grief and resilience and are imbued with unique beauty, insight, and resonance from one of the country's most exciting authors.

Caitlin Galway is the author of the novel Bonavere Howl. Her work has been published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets throughout Canada, and she has won or been nominated for numerous prizes. She lives in Toronto.

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Michael Kardos, "Fun City Heist" (Severn House, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 2 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Mo Melnick has perfect pitch, which didn’t help him in his career as a drummer, but he used to be in a rock band and now his job is sitting on the Jersey Shore renting out chairs and beach umbrellas. When the singer from his old band shows up and begs Mo to reunite for a final gig at the beachfront amusement park where they first started, Mo is skeptical. But Johnny Clay persuades Mo and the other band members that in addition to performing together again, they’re going to pull off a major robbery of the resort. Mo’s estranged teenage daughter shows up and is enthusiastic about both the gig and the Fun City Heist (Severn House, 2025). Mo hopes everything goes according to plan – what could possibly go wrong?

Michael Kardos is the two-time Pushcart Prize-winning author of three previous novels: The Three-Day Affair, Before He Finds Her and most recently Bluff, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time, all of which have earned acclaim and starred trade reviews. Originally from the Jersey Shore, Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Princeton and received an M.F.A. from Ohio State and a Ph.D from the University of Missouri. He co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for over a dozen years before moving with his family to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2022. Michael played the drums professionally in his twenties as part of a band who were booked at a lot of clubs, slept on a lot of sofas— and accrued a lot of musical war stories. But he’s never pulled off a heist (that he’ll admit to).

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Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 1 Dec 2025 09:00:00 +0000

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”.

Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome.

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Emily Hunt Kivel, "Dwelling" (FSG, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.
And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.
And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.
A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a fun-house mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

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Yvonne Blomer, "Death of Persephone: A Murder" (Caitlin Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Yvonne Blomer about her stunning narrative poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024).

In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him.

In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule.

Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core?

About Yvonne Blomer:
Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.

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Aviva Rubin, "White: A Novel" (RE: Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Sarah Cartell, who grew up in a White Supremacist family controlled by a violent grandfather who preaches hate and violence, learns from books and a kind librarian that there’s another way to see the world. In White: A Novel (RE: Books 2024), Aviva Rubin’s protagonist starts researching her family’s history of intolerance and learns about a grandmother and aunt who ran away. She manages to get into college in Montreal, but rather than focusing on her studies, decides to infiltrate a Neo-Nazi gang and stop the hate crimes before they happen. The duplicity and other factors chip away at Sarah’s sanity until she ends up in a psychiatric ward wondering if she’ll ever escape the hate.

Aviva Rubin is a Toronto-based writer of memoir, essays and social commentary. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Toronto Life and Zoomer as well as numerous anthologies. She wrote a memoir, Lost and Found in Lymphomaland, that tracks her harrowing and funny trip (she doesn’t like the word journey) through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. WHITE is her debut novel. In her so-called spare time, Aviva bakes cookies, runs, argues and commiserates about the world with her super-senior parents, and passes somewhat informed judgement. She is the mom of two young adult sons who have math and science skills that seem to have bypassed her. For more information about Aviva, visit her website here.

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Zoe Dubno, "Happiness and Love" (Scribner, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love (Scribner, 2025) is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.
As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.

Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere. Happiness and Love is her first novel.

Recommended Books:

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

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Sharon White, "If the Owl Calls" (WTAW Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

As the Sami community (Norway) struggles to protect ancestral lands from the building of a damn in 1979, Oslo detective Hans Sorensen arrives in the north of the country to investigate sabotage on a damn. Then a body is discovered, and Sorensen has to delve into his own past and heritage. He is Sami but no longer immersed in the culture, and Sorensen is also mourning the recent death of his wife, so he’s hesitant to return to his hometown. He ends up following the trail of two women, a journalist and a musician, and discovers the writings of a relative, a real-life Sami author who wrote about his struggle to survive. If the Owl Calls (Sharon White, WTAW Press 2025) is a fascinating mystery filled with Norwegian and Sami history, about identity and memory.

Sharon White is an award-winning author whose work spans nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. She has written extensively about nature, place, and memory, bringing a lyrical and reflective voice to her storytelling. Her books include Vanished Gardens, the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction winner; Boiling Lake, winner of the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction; and Minato Sketches, a Rosemary Daniell Prize winner. White received her BA in English Literature from Colby College and spent a year studying at Manchester College, Oxford University. She has an MFA from Goddard College, where she was a member of the first class of graduates in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s innovative program. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Denver. An Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University, White has dedicated her career to writing and teaching. A passionate traveler, she draws inspiration from diverse landscapes and cultures. In Scandinavia she researched the life of Danish painter Emilie Demant Hatt, and in 2019, as an artist-in-residence in Dunedin, New Zealand, she immersed in the region’s literary and artistic culture. She has also taught creative writing at Temple University Japan. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Scott Masker. When not working or traveling, she loves to garden and take walks around the city. She also enjoys skiing and biking.

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Ann Cavlovic, "Count on Me" (Guernica Editions, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Ann Cavlovic about her new novel, Count on Me (Guernica Editions, 2025).

Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan’s meddling in their parents’ lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money.

About Ann Cavlovic:

Ann Cavlovic lives in Western Quebec where she writes fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in Canadian Architect, CBC First Person, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, Grain, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), Today’s Parent, and elsewhere. Her writing has been listed for various literary prizes and awards, including winning the 2017 Little Bird Writing Contest. Her stage play Emissions: A Climate Comedy won “Best in Fest” at the 2013 Ottawa Fringe festival.

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Stephanie Wambugu, "Lonely Crowds" (Little, Brown and Co., 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown and Co., 2025) Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl's school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria's orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.

While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.

Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York. Stephanie is an editor at Joyland magazine.

Recommended Books:

Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana
Sula, Toni Morrison

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Maren Halvorsen, "The Bailiff’s Wife" (Cuidono Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Despite the long-held perception that medieval and early modern women were as quiet, pious, and obedient as society expected them to be, the truth is more complex. The Bailiff’s Wife (Cuidono Press, 2025) builds on a historical event recorded in a seventeenth-century English broadsheet to create a picture of a society in flux, the result of far-reaching political and religious changes that found expression in the English Civil War and its aftermath, the Restoration of King Charles II.

Sarah Kidd, a woman whose husband has gone missing, along with the small fortune with which he intended to support her and their infant son, sets out—defying the demands of social convention—to find out what happened to her missing Nathaniel. She tracks him to the Cotswold village of Chalfont St. James, where despite relentless hounding, the local constable and magistrate refuse her requests for an exhumation of the body discovered in the village three years before and never identified.

After annoying pretty much everyone in town by her refusal to take no for an answer, Sarah finds support from the unlikely combination of Frances Bright, a relatively well-off Quaker widow with two daughters, and Arthur Brunskill, the local vicar whose Puritan religious sympathies have fallen out of favor with the Restoration. As the tale unfolds, it develops into a classic murder mystery. Someone in Chalfont St. James caused the death of Nathaniel Kidd, and Sarah will not let matters rest until she sees the killer brought to justice. And this small, insular setting turns out to harbor plenty of suspects anxious to avoid drawing notice to themselves …

Maren Halvorsen is a historian of medieval and early modern Europe and lifelong writer of fiction. The Bailiff’s Wife is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025.

Maren's website here

Cuidono Press's website here

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Paula Bomer, "The Stalker" (Soho Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Paula Bomer is the author of The Stalker (Soho Books, 2025), which received a starred Publisher’s Weekly, calling it “dark and twisted fun”. She is also the author of Tante Eva and Nine Months, the story collections Inside Madeleine and Baby and other Stories, and the essay collection, Mystery and Mortality. Her work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, The Mississippi Review, Fiction Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Green Mountain Review, The Cut, Volume 1 Brooklyn and elsewhere. Her novels have been translated in Germany, Argentina and Hungary. She grew up in South Bend, Indiana and has lived for over 30 years in Brooklyn.

Recommended Books:

Chris Kraus, The Four Spent the Day Together
Stephanie Wambugu, The Lonely Crowds

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Maya Arad, "Happy New Years" (New Vessel Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Happy New Years (New Vessel Press, 2025), after finishing her teaching degree, Leah emigrates to the U.S. for a teaching position that she thinks of as temporary. She ends up staying for 5 decades. She keeps up with her old classmates in an annual new year’s letter that outlines mostly her triumphs, with brief allusions to her losses, her failures, her misery. She tells the truth to just one friend who is still in Israel. We slowly come to understand Leah’s optimism and cheerfulness as she glides over the secrets and shame that turned her into who she is. Leah falls in love, is the object of vile gossip, gets unfairly maligned, makes some bad decisions, is alternatingly proud or aggravated about her sons, and is betrayed more than once. Despite the hardships and her flaws, Leah has moments of great joy, travels the world, and lives a full and rich life.

Maya Arad is the author of twelve books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

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Robert de la Chevrotiere, "Tall Is Her Body" (Kensington, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, Hollay Ghadery speaks with Robert de la Chevrotiere about his novel, Tall is Her Body (Kensington, 2025).

Readers of Black Cake and Family Lore will be captivated by this sweeping, multicultural family story of keen observation and the supernatural in which one man’s journey to wholeness—both emotionally and physically—is shaped by the lands of his childhood and those of his ancestors, still reeling from the effects of colonialism and immigration.
Before the oracular gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, 6-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.
Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.

Robert de la Chevotiere is an Afro-Caribbean immigrant to Canada, who teaches French and English language arts. He is a member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and has recently had a poem published in Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2021 fall issue.

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Concetta Principe, "Disorder" (Gordon Hill Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Concetta Principe about her poetry collection, DIsorder (Gordon Hill Press, 2024).

Disorder, the newest collection of poetry from Concetta Principe, explores the metaphorical relationship between the home and the mind, where a home should be place of sanctuary but can have its safe borders destabilized by mental illness. The poems work through these questions with Principe's characteristic subtlety, intelligence ? a nuanced and compassionate meditation on what it means to be at home.

About Concetta Principe:

Concetta Principe is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction, and scholarship on the impact of the secular unconscious on culture and political thought. Her recent collection, This Real (Pedlar Press 2017) was long-listed for the League of Canadian Poet's Raymond Souster Award. Her essays, ?Who Shot Meriwether Lewis was long-listed for the 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Award at The New Quarterly, and ?I Title it ?Suicide Letter was short-listed for The Malahat Review 2019 Constance Rooke award. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review, experiment-o, and Hamilton Arts and Literature. Her academic monograph exploring trauma in contemporary secular thought, Secular Messiahs and the Return to Paul's Real: A Lacanian Approach, came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. She teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at Trent University, Durham.

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David Giuliano, "The Upending of Wendall Forbes" (Latitude 46, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews David Giuliano about his novel, T he Upending of Wendall Forbes (Latitude 46, 2025).

Wendall and Ruby Forbes are confronting the vagaries of aging boomers: – sleeplessness, loneliness, memory loss, and the fear Ruby is showing signs of dementia. A blizzard hits their small town of Twenty-Six Mile House and a remarkable, perhaps unbelievable, band of strangers — : an Indigenous Colombian refugee, his environmental academic wife, an environmental academic, and their child; a young man on an accidental journey quest; a teenage activist and her ten-year-old gay half-brother; and a sleep consultant in from Indianapolis —– all take refuge in the Forbeses’ home.

In this heartwarming, funny, wise, and hopeful story, the companionship of strangers, a foul-mouthed raven, and a lynx, restore Wendall and Ruby’s hope for the future.

About the Author

David Giuliano is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction. His first novel, The Undertaking of Billy Buffone (Latitude 46, 2021), was awarded the 2022 Bressani Prize for Fiction. It’s Good to Be Here: Stories We Tell About Cancer is a memoir about the power of story to heal. Postcards from the Valley, a collection of essays, was a Canadian bestseller. He has also published two illustrated children’s books. David lives on the north shore of Lake Superior.

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Harini Nagendra, "Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery" (Pegasus Crime, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home invasion gone wrong: An elderly woman in 1920s India, murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murthy, amateur detective, takes on the case–and soon uncovers a whole array of other mysteries in the coffee plantations of Coorg: a ghost leopard stalking the woods, and a series of murder attempts against a widely-disliked colonial plantation owner.

London-based business and culture journalist Prarthana Prakash joins me on the show today as a guest host.

Harini is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on sustainability, with honors that include the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award for interdisciplinary research in India. Her non-fiction books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future (Oxford University Press: 2016), Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities (Penguin Random House India: 2023), So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities (India Viking: 2019)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Into the Leopard’s Den. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Erin Somers, "The Ten Year Affair: A Novel" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 5 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

When Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town, the chemistry between them is undeniable. Both are happily married young parents with two kids, and neither sees themselves as the type to engage in an affair. Yet their connection grows stronger, and as their lives continue to intertwine, the romantic tension between them becomes all-consuming—until their worlds unravel into two parallel timelines. In one, they pursue their feelings. In the other, they resist.
As reality splits, the everyday details of Cora’s life—her depressing marketing job, her daughter’s new fascination with the afterlife, her husband’s obsession with podcasts about the history of rope—gain fresh perspective. The intersecting and diverging timelines blur the boundaries of reality and fantasy, questioning what might have been and what truly matters.
The Ten Year Affair is a witty, emotionally-charged exploration of marriage, family life, and the roads not taken, that ultimately asks: do we really want our fantasies to come true?

Erin Somers is a reporter and news editor at Publishers Lunch. Her first novel, Stay Up with Hugo Best was a Vogue Best Book of the Year in 2019. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, The Best American Short Stories, and many other publications. She lives in Beacon, New York, with her family.

Recommended Books:

Flesh, David Szlay

Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt

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Lorne Daniel, "What Is Broken Binds Us" (U Calgary Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews poet Lorne Daniel about his poetry collection, What is Broken Binds Us (University of Calgary Press, 2025).

What is Broken Binds Us is a collection of poems of the disruptions and emotional tremors that shape us: enslaved families broken and dispersed, histories hidden, addiction and estrangement, and the shocks of bodily trauma.

What is Broken Binds Us shares stories of loss, absence, acceptance, and hope. Returning to the page after a long absence, poet Lorne Daniel provides a unique perspective on crisis that balances raw emotion with vulnerability, thoughtfulness, and care.

In seven sections, Daniel braids the stories of empire, personal traumas, addiction and family estrangement, shifting emergencies, and the wisdom of elders and the natural world. Lessons in Emergency Preparedness traces accident, injury and recovery, facing the trauma of a sudden loss of physical competence through the metaphorical and literal breaks of a shattered body and the slow movement towards mending. When the Tributaries Ran Rich unravels empire and a five-century narrative of hard-working immigrants with the discovery of enslavement in family records, forcing a deep reconsideration of the truth of the past. Episodic Tremor & Slip speaks of the tectonic shifts in family life that occur when facing substance abuse, addiction, and mental health struggles, of the pain of estrangement and the love that continues. In the Family Name is a reflection on time, on people, and on the natural world that revisits and turns over all that came before, exploring it from new angles.

Lorne Daniel writes with calm, conversational assurance. These poems are accessible and evocative, speaking from their specificity to the many people who have faced injury, estrangement, struggle, and pain, and must carry it—and carry on.

About Lorne Daniel:

Lorne Daniel is a Canadian poet and non-fiction writer. He has been deeply engaged in the literary community, including the emergence of a Canadian prairie poetry scene in the 1970s. He has publsihed four books of poetry, edited anthologies and literary journals, and written freelance journalism. His work has been published in dozens of anthologies, journals, newspapers and magazines in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. Lorne lives on the traditional territories of the Lək̓ʷəŋən people in Victoria, BC.

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Maya Arad, "The Hebrew Teacher" (New Vessel Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Nov 2025 17:45:00 +0000

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises.

Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade.

Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

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Tamara Jong, "Worldly Girls" (Book Hug*Press, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Tamara Jong about her memoir, Worldly Girls (Book*hug Press, 2025).

Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

About Tamara Jong:

TAMARA JONG is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book.

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Janet Burroway, "Simone in Pieces" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Simone Lerrante is a Belgian orphan whose memory is damaged by the trauma of her father being shot by Nazis and her subsequent escape to England. From 1940 to 2000, we see 9-year-old Simone standing through the long voyage and later through various perspectives of those whose lives she touches. From Sussex, she reaches New York and ends up across the states, married, divorced, and alone. She falls in love with literature, experiences new traumas, but cannot remember her early years. Over the years, she recalls snippets of the parents she loved, the life she escaped, and the people who saved her along the way. Janet Burroway’s beautiful novel is a remarkable portrait of a fascinating woman.

Janet Burroway is the author of poems, plays, essays, children’s books, a memoir and nine novels, including The Buzzards; Raw Silk; Opening Nights; Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of NYTBR); and Simone in Pieces (Nov. 2025). Her Writing Fiction, the most widely used creative writing text in America, is now in a tenth edition; her four-genre text Imaginative Writing is in its fifth. Her plays have been produced and read in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London. Her stories and poems appear in many literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Narrative Magazine, and Five Points. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University and winner of the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Brian Evenson, "Further Reports" (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 2 Nov 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently Good Night Sleep Tight (Coffeehouse Press 2024). His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

Brian Evenson’s Reports (2018) and Further Reports (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2024) are interrogations. Relationships real and imagined—with bygone chairs, vanished kitchen implements, friends of yore—and the linguistic positioning that defines such interactions are subject to particular scrutiny. In turns intimate and speculative, paranoid and expository, disparate and amalgamated, Evenson’s observations and inquiries into the nature of connection, description, and signification will permit you, too, to question the meanings that make your life.

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Marcy Dermansky, "Hot Air" (Knopf, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Hurricane Girl, Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. She has received fellowships from McDowell and the Edward F Albee Foundation. She lives with her daughter in Montclair, NJ. Today we are discussing Hot Air (Knopf, 2025)

Recommended Books:

Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory
Jessica Francis King, Fonseca

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Theresa Muñoz, "Archivum" (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Archivum (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Theresa Muñoz is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meadows, Canongate Kirkyard and Water of Leith provide a meditative backdrop to the poems.

The archives - in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about ourselves: the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes -- including recipes, telegrams, letters -- stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief.

With a focus on women writers and interracial relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s imaginary: along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor and psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer.

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Sadiqa de Meijer, "In the Field" (Palimpsest Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Governor General Award-winning author Sadiqa de Meijer about her new essay collection, In the Field (Palimpsest Press, 2025).

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

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Howard Lovy, "Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story" (Vine Leaves Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Howard Lovy is a journalist, book editor, and author with forty years of experience covering everything from Jewish issues and the Mideast conflict to nanotechnology and the auto industry. His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Longreads, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, and other publications.

Howard’s debut novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, follows two musicians who reconnect in middle age when their 40-year-old song goes viral. The book explores themes of music, faith, aging, and second chances.

In addition to writing and editing, Howard produces and hosts podcasts for the Alliance of Independent Authors. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, Heidi, and their dog, Henry.

About Found and Lost: "In 1985, they met by chance.
As a young guitarist and violinist, Jake and Cait created something transcendent each time they locked eyes and finished each other’s musical phrases.... until the music stopped.
Forty years later, the song that started it all brings them back together. But time changes everything."

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Aamir Hussain, "Under the Full and Crescent Moon" (Dundurn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aamir Hussain about his debut novel, Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn, 2025).

In a battle of words and beliefs, a young woman must defend her city against zealotry during the Islamic Golden Age.
After his long-time scribe retires, Khadija’s father, the city’s leading jurist, offers his introverted daughter the opportunity to take on the role of his assistant. In accepting, Khadija is thrust into her community, the medieval hilltop city of Medina’tul-Agham, where she, as a motherless young woman, has spent little time. Led by Imam Fatima and guided by the Circle of Mothers, it is a matriarchy — the only one in the empire. Though forced to set aside her quiet life among the books and parchments of her family home, Khadija thrives, finding her power and place in the world with the support of her new friends and strong female mentors.
Yet Khadija’s idyllic new life is shattered when fanatical forces weaponize Sharia law to threaten the very fabric of the society. Using only the power of her parchment and quill, Khadija must win the support of the people and write fatwas to fight against injustice, or the peace and prosperity of her city will be nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history.

About Aamir Hussain:

Aamir Hussain was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario.

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Gretchen Felker-Martin, "Black Flame" (Tor Nightfire, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame (Tor Nightfire, 2025) from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret. The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her. As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control. Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind. Do you want it? More than anything? Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin: Manhunt Cuckoo

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Hari Krishna Kaul, "For Now, It Is Night: Stories" (NYRB, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Hari Krishna Kaul’s short stories, shaped by the social crisis and political instability in Kashmir, explore – with a sharp eye for detail, biting wit, and empathy – themes of isolation, alienation, corruption, and the social mores of a community that experienced a loss of homeland, culture, and language. His characters navigate their ever-changing environs with humor as they make uncomfortable compromises to survive. Two friends cling to their multiplication tables while the world shifts around them; a group of travelers are forced to seek shelter in a rickety hostel after a landslide; a woman faces the first days in an uneasy exile at her daughter-in-law’s Delhi home.

In For Now, It Is Night (Archipelago Books, 2024), translated from Kashmiri by Gowhar Fazili, Gowhar Yaquoob, Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Kaul dissects the ways we struggle to make sense of new surroundings. These glimpses of life are bittersweet and profound; Kaul’s characters carry their loneliness with wisdom and grace. Beautifully translated in a unique collaborative project, For Now, It Is Night brings many of Kaul’s resonant stories to English readers for the first time.

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Brandon Taylor, "Minor Black Figures" (Riverhead, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 09:30:00 +0000

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, 2025), The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Recommended Books:

Jordan Castro, Muscle Man
Grace Byron, Herculine
Edith Warton, Ethan Frome
Emile Zola, Germinal
The History of Sound (Film)

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Caskey Russell, "The Door on the Sea" (Solaris, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Caskey Russell’s novel The Door on the Sea (Solaris, 2025) follows Elan, the youngest member of once revered Flicker Clan, on a journey to find a weapon that can defend his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders threatening their existence. To reach his goal, Elan must captain a canoe crewed by an unlikely team and force the cooperation of a raven who is the only one who knows the weapon’s location. Throughout their journey, the crew must navigate an increasingly hostile political landscape, as the Koosh invasion throws old laws and alliances into disarray.

In this interview, Russell describes the process of developing the novel over several years and the ways that he built a world inspired by nineteenth century Tlingit culture. We discuss survivalist elements in fantasy, shifting relationships with violence, and the role of journeys and quest in fantasy.

The Door on the Sea is an engaging, thoughtful story and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Mary Birk, "Violent Seed" (Rookwood, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Lady Anne is in the Cotswolds with her 8-month-old son, there to restore a famous walled garden. The magnificent home has been hosting a television cooking special over the summer, and Anne’s husband, Lord Terrence Reid, is there to enjoy a “Summer of Chefs” week with his wife and baby son. Reid’s parents have also been invited to spend the week and are looking forward to delicious food, although Reid’s father is recovering from a recent heart attack. Each week, a new chef prepares magnificent meals, and the mystery chef that week turns out to be the former lover of Reid’s mother. Theirs is not the only family Gareth Talbot has affected with his sly machinations. He’s there to settle old scores and cash in on decades-old grudges. Although the setting is serene and the food fantastic, Lord Terrence Reid is called upon to uncover a murderer in their midst, and his family members are among the suspects. The menu is the last thing on their minds.

Mary Birk is a former trial lawyer and avid gardener who lives and writes in Colorado. After graduating from law school, she moved from North Dakota with her late husband to Colorado where they raised their children and dogs and together worked to turn two and a half acres into a high-country garden retreat. Ms. Birk has been named a Library Journal SELF-E Select author. Her Terrence Reid/Anne Michaels mystery series combines her love for gardening and passion for all things Scottish. The first book in the series, Mermaids of Bodega Bay, was a finalist for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers’ Colorado Gold award in the mystery/suspense category and was named by Library Journal as a SELF-e Top Book of the Year. The First Cut, the second book in the series, won the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold Award in the mystery/suspense category. A founding member of the Colorado chapter of Sisters in Crime, Ms. Birk served as treasurer from 2016-2023 and is currently Vice President. She also serves as social media director for the Rockky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.

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Shane Peacock, "A Place of Secrets" (Cormorant Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A TRAGIC DOUBLE HOMICIDE, OR A HIDDEN SERIAL KILLER? SERGEANT ALICE MORROW IS DETERMINED TO SOLVE A MYSTERY SPANNING SIXTY YEARS.

When Evelyn Massey is found dead in her home, it seems like an open-and-shut case: Evelyn was one hundred years old — natural causes. But Sergeant Alice Morrow learns that traces of poison were found in Mrs. Massey’s blood. Then the remains of a body some sixty years deceased are discovered in the dead woman’s basement.

Two murders, decades apart. Are they connected?

In the second book in Shane Peacock’s award-winning Northern Gothic Mystery series, Morrow and former nypd homicide detective Hugh Mercer unearth stunning truths about Evelyn Massey’s life and learn of other disappearances over the past sixty years. Was a serial killer quietly at work in this Ontario town? Could the murderer still be among its citizens, hidden in plain sight?

About Shane Peacock:

SHANE PEACOCK has been published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. The first book in the Northern Gothic Mystery series, As We Forgive Others, was published in 2024 to great acclaim and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. He has won the Junior Library Guild of America Selection seven times, the Arthur Ellis Award / cwc Award of Excellence three times, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the td Canadian Children’s Literature Award. His young adult novels include the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Book of Us, and Show. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel.

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Bruce Hunter, "In the Bear's House" (Frontenac House, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews award-winning author Bruce Hunter about his CanLit masterpiece, In the Bear's House (Frontenac House Press, 2025).

So many different worlds emerge and converge in this lyrical, expansive novel from Bruce Hunter that we need two narrators: Trout, the deaf boy from Ogden, whose vivid imagination and wise pragmatism enhance and stimulate his unhearing world, and his young, artistic mother, Clare, a Scottish-Canadian lass from a rambunctious and sometimes unlucky but loving family of resilient pioneers at the cusp of old and new worlds in the Alberta of the early 1960s.

Calgary and its recent subdivision Ogden are glorious places for a childhood. Trout and his one friend, the tragic hero Kenny Dawes, roam the prairies with temerity, and revel in a young city poised for explosive growth. When one of their early adolescent adventures turns sour, Trout faces a looming downfall that could echo the past trajectory of his father, a good but flawed man who loves him deeply.

This is a new edition of the book previously published by Oolichan Books in 2009.

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Philip Graubart, "Here There Is No Why" and Philip Graubart "Here There Is No Why"

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this double interview I talked to Michael Kinnamon, author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem and Philip Graubart author of Here There Is No Why.

A Rooftop In Jerusalem: When Daniel Jacobs decides to spend his junior year abroad in Israel, he never dreams he'll fall in love with both Jerusalem's Old City and an Israeli woman, Shoshana. It's the year religion becomes a part of his identity, from the heights of a simple rooftop. A year he encounters the tragic complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. A year that begins a four-decade-long love affair, as complicated and heartbreaking as the political conflict with which it's intertwined. As Daniel moves through life-through marriage and divorce, career and travel-he returns periodically to Jerusalem, where his heart faithfully remains. A Rooftop in Jerusalem brings the Old City's walls, holy sites, and inhabitants to life, while putting a human face on headlines from the Middle East.

Here There Is No Why: Did Chaim Lerner, acclaimed Israeli author and Holocaust survivor, kill himself in 1983, thirty-eight years after surviving Auschwitz? If so, was it traumatic memories finally catching up to him? Or despair over Holocaust denialism? Or ordinary, difficult health issues-an aching hip, a damaged knee? Or simply a deadly episode of depression? Or was it murder? In 2005, Judah Loeb, Lerner's former student and now a struggling American journalist and single father, travels to Jerusalem to investigate Lerner's death. He drags along his fifteen-year-old daughter, Hannah, and they team up with Charlie, Judah's former Hebrew University roommate, now a Jerusalem homicide detective. Their investigation takes them through the darker corners of the Israeli psyche, where they uncover secrets that threaten to destroy Lerner's reputation and alter Jewish history. While probing the mysteries of Israel's past, they encounter personal betrayal, heartbreak, and the fragile possibilities of forgiveness and redemption.

Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Blusky and IG: @robbyref

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Kasia Jaronczyk, "Voices in the Air" (Palimpsest Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Kasia Jaronczyk about her novel, Voices in the Air (Palimpsest Press, 2025).

What would drive women to risk the lives of their children and innocent people to leave their mother country forever?

On April 30, 1982, two women and their families hijack a Polish passenger plane flying from Breslau to Warsaw in a bold attempt to escape Martial Law in Communist Poland and find safety in West Berlin. Among the hijackers are a cotton spinner whose husband wants to avoid a long prison sentence, a schoolteacher with a sick daughter, a pregnant fourteen-year-old who has visions of the Virgin Mary, and an ambitious young filmmaker. Inspired by real events, Voices in the Air is told from the point of view of these four women and a stewardess in love with the married pilot. Will they find happiness beyond the Iron Curtain or was the hijacking not worth the risk?

Told using traditional narrative and documentary film-style interviews, Voices in the Air follows the main characters' lives before and after the hijacking, and through real-life events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fight for women's rights in modern Poland, the Covid pandemic and the refugee crisis on the Polish-Belarus border. A must-read novel exploring ambiguous moral choice, censorship, emigration, fate and regret.

Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.).

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Aisha Sasha John, "total: poems" (Random House, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aisha Sasha John about her poetry collection, total: poems (McClelland & Stewart, 2025).

"John is brilliant at communicating. She's also really funny. Poems don't get more direct and precise and unforgettable than this." —National Post The highly anticipated new collection from Griffin Poetry Prize finalist Aisha Sasha John. IS THERE A SYNONYM CLOSER TO COMPASSION THAN PATIENCE? A PERSON WHO LOVES BEAUTY MORE THAN THEY FEAR IT THE CLOSEST TO NOTHING YOU CAN DO FOR MONEY TO TOUCH TIME TO ITSELF

About Aisha Sasha John:

AISHA SASHA JOHN is the author of i have to live (2017), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize; THOU (2014), a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and the ReLit Poetry Award; and The Shining Material (2011). She choreographs and performs in the feminist collective WIVES as well as solo performances (The Aisha of Oz, VOLUNTEER). Aisha's video work and text art have been exhibited in galleries (Doris McCarthy, Oakville Galleries) and installed at Union Station in Toronto (Art Metropole). She was born in Montreal.

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Jemimah Wei, "The Original Daughter" (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Genevieve Yang, the protagonist of Jemimah Wei’s debut novel The Original Daughter (Doubleday/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025) works a dead-end job in Singapore, living in the shadow of her adopted younger sister, Arin, a rising movie star. Genevieve’s dying mother asks her to call Arin; Genevieve refuses.

Jemimah’s novel then teases out the history of Gen and Arin’s sibling relationship, from their first meeting in the late 90s, through their shared experience in school, to the final grievance that splits them apart.

Naomi Xu Elegant, journalist and author of Gingko Season, also joins the show today.

Jemimah Wei is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 Honouree, William Van Dyke Short Story Prize winner, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, Jemimah’s writing has appeared in Joyland, Guernica, and Narrative, amongst others. She can be found on social media at @jemmawei on socials, or at jemmawei.com.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Original Daughter. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Taylor Byas, "Resting Bitch Face: Poems" (Catapult, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 8 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The author of the award-winning national bestseller I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times returns with a poetry collection that transforms the Black female speaker from object, artistic muse, and victim to subject, critic, and master of her story.
Resting Bitch Face (Soft Skull Press, 2025) is a book for women, for Black women, for lovers of art and film criticism, and for writers interested in work that finds a middle ground between poetry and prose. Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity.
From the examination of artwork by Picasso, Gauguin, Sally Mann, and Nan Goldin, Byas displays her mastery of the poetic form by engaging in intimate and inventive writing. Fluctuating between watcher and watched, the speaker of these poems uses mirrors and reflections to flip the script and talk back to histories of art, text, photography, relationships, and men. From Polaroids to gesso primer to sculpture, Byas creates a world in which the artist calls out and the muse responds. For not only does she enter the world of the long-revered classic artist, but she also infuses her poems with such iconic pop culture works as The Joker, WandaVision, and Last Tango in Paris.

You can find Taylor on Instagram and Bluesky.

Find host Sullivan Summer online, on Instagram, and over on Substack, where she and Taylor went to continue their conversation.

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Virginia Woolf, "The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories" (Princeton UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 7 Oct 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.
In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.
A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf’s ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton UP, 2025) is first and foremost a delight to read. This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.

Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and a contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books.

YouTube Channel: here

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Barbara Stark-Nemon, "Isabela's Way: A Novel" (She Writes Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In early-seventeenth-century Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany, dangers are plentiful—especially for those of Jewish heritage. Non-Catholics have been expelled from Spain, and the Inquisition has come to Portugal to impose its prohibitions. In Isabela's Way: A Novel (She Writes Press, 2025), fourteen-year-old Isabela, an obedient “New Christian” with a talent for needlework, believes she has nothing to fear from the Inquisition. But when a mysterious woman arrives with a message from Isabela’s traveling father, the girl must leave her home and embroider her way along the clandestine network of sanctuaries created to conduct Conversos, or secret Jews, to safety.
A host of supporters and spirit guides, as well as one special young man, assist Isabela as she escapes the Inquisitors and makes her way across countries and cultures. As she travels, she learns of the danger and importance of her work, with its coded symbols, and is shocked to discover her family’s true origins.
In this enthralling coming-of-age tale of resistance, love, and danger, Isabela employs her talent and fierce determination to find her way despite the powerful forces that buffet her at every turn.

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Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, "Mutual Interest" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Olivia Wolfgang-Smith is the author of the novels Mutual Interest (2025) and Glassworks, which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Apple, and Good Housekeeping. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction and lives in Brooklyn with her partner.

Recommended Books:

Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn Was Queer
Michael Koresky, Sick and Dirty
Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls and Other Writings
Anna North, Bog Queen

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Zilla Jones, "The World So Wide" (Cormorant Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Zilla Jones about her debut novel, The World So Wide (Cormorant Books, 2025).

Felicity Alexander should be charming audiences at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, not under house arrest in Grenada in October 1983, as rumours swirl that United States troops are preparing to invade.Born and raised in Winnipeg, the daughter of a Grenadian woman and an absent white father, Felicity is blessed with enviable beauty and an extraordinary singing voice. Arriving in London to study opera in 1965, she finds early success and joy on stage, as well as a sense of belonging in the arms of the charming Claude Buckingham. Members of the West Indian Students Association, Claude and his friends are law students and activists. They plan to return to Grenada to overthrow the corrupt dictator, “Uncle” Percy Tibbs. Felicity and Claude’s intense affair cannot survive their diverging destinies. Claude brings revolution to Grenada and becomes a minister in the new Black Pearls of Freedom government; Felicity devotes herself to music, conquering the racism and sexism of the opera world to rise to international stardom. The brighter she shines, the more she struggles to find her place and purpose in life.Her career in ascendance, Felicity accepts an invitation to perform in Grenada. The red sky of revolution calls to her almost as much as the hope of Claude’s embrace. But their reunion is interrupted by a coup. Surrounded by soldiers and guns, Felicity’s voice is born anew.

Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian anti-racist educator, lawyer, mother, and singer of Caribbean, Chinese, and European heritage, writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). She was born in the UK and now lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is a winner of the Journey Prize, a finalist for The Writers’ Trust Bronwen Wallace Emerging Writers Award, and a finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals including Event Magazine, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, and Bayou Magazine.

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Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu, "The Creation of Half-Broken People" (House of Anansi, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu about her phenomenal novel, The Creation of Half-Broken People. (House of Anansi Press, 2025).

Stupendous African Gothic, by the winner of Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize

Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, The Creation of Half-Broken People is the extraordinary tale of a nameless woman plagued by visions. She works for the Good Foundation and its museum filled with artifacts from the family’s exploits in Africa, the Good family members all being descendants of Captain John Good, of King Solomon’s Mines fame.
Our heroine is happy with her association with the Good family, until one day she comes across a group of protestors outside the museum. Instigating the group is an ancient woman, who our heroine knows is not real. She knows too that the secrets of her past have returned. After this encounter, the nameless woman finds herself living first in an attic and then in a haunted castle, her life anything but normal as her own intangible inheritance unfolds through the women who inhabit her visions.

With a knowing nod to classics of the Gothic genre, Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu weaves the threads of a complex colonial history into the present through people “half-broken” by the stigmas of race and mental illness, all the while balancing the humanity of her characters against the cruelty of empire in a hypnotic, haunting account of love and magic.

SIPHIWE GLORIA NDLOVU is a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and filmmaker. She is a 2022 recipient of the Windham–Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Theory of Flight, won the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize in 2019. Her second and third novels, The History of Man and The Quality of Mercy, were shortlisted for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize. After almost two decades of living in North America, Ndlovu has returned home to Bulawayo, the City of Kings.

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Lucy Black, "A Quilting of Scars" (Now or Never Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews historical fiction legend Lucy E.M Black about her phenomenal new novel, A Quilting of Scars (Now or Never Publishing, 2025).

Filled with the pleasure of recognizable yet distinctively original characters and a deftly drawn sense of time and place, A Quilting of Scars brings to life a story of forbidden love, abuse and murder. Pulsing with repressed sexuality and guilt, Larkin Beattie reveals the many secrets he has kept hidden throughout his lonely life. The character-driven narrative is a meditation on aging and remorse, offering a rich account of the strictures and rhythms of farming in the not-so-distant past, highlighting the confines of a community where strict moral codes are imposed upon its members and fear of exposure terrifies queer youth. As Larkin reflects upon key events, his recollections include his anger at the hypocrisy of the church, and the deep grief and loneliness that have marked his path. There is a timelessness to this story which transcends the period and resonates with heart-breaking relevance.

About Lucy E.M. Black:

Author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella's Carpet, The Brickworks, and Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth, Lucy E.M. Black's short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in a variety of literary journals and magazines. She lives in Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.

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Karen Smythe, "A Town with No Noise" (Palimpsest Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Guelph, Ontario author Karen Smythe about Karen's novel, A Town With No Noise (Palimpsest Press, 2025).

Samara and J., a struggling young couple, are off to J.’s birthplace, Upton Bay, a small town turned upscale theatre and winery destination. Sam has been hired by an editor friend to write a promotional piece about the place while she and J. stay with his grandfather Otto, a prominent businessman in his day.

But their visit does not go as planned. Sam’s explorations of Upton’s tourist attractions lead her to ugly truths behind the quaint little town’s façade—discoveries that are counterpointed with vignettes of the town’s wealthy, elderly ruling class, painting a different picture than the one Sam’s friend expects her to provide. Tensions between Sam and J. worsen as J.’s true nature emerges and Sam begins to question both his values and his family’s past—especially after Otto tells them stories about his time as a German soldier during WW2.

Back in the city, Sam’s opinions and judgments about what is right and wrong are tested when a shocking truth surfaces about her grandmother’s flight from Norway after the war, profoundly changing Sam’s understanding of who she is and who she wants to become.

In A Town with No Noise, fact and fiction combine to ask difficult questions about the communities we build, questions that are as relevant today as ever: Who stays? Who is chased away? And who decides?

About Karen Smythe:

Karen Smythe is the author of the novel This Side of Sad (Goose Lane Editions, 2017), the story collection Stubborn Bones (Polestar/Raincoast, 2001), and the critical study Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy (McGill-Queen’s U.P., 1992). She lives in Guelph, Ontario.

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Yiming Ma, "These Memories Do Not Belong To Us" (Mariner Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Born in Shanghai, he now lives in Toronto, New York, and Seattle.

Recommended Books;

Rita Bullwinkle, Headshot

Aube Rey Lescure, River East, River West

Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

R.O. Kwon, Exhibit

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Nadia Ragbar, "The Pugilist and the Sailor" (Invisible Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interview debut Toronto author, Nadia Ragbar, about her novel, The Pugilist and the Sailor (Invisible Publishing, 2025).

The Pugilist and the Sailor follows conjoined twins, Bruce and Dougie. Dougie is an ambitious amateur boxer, having dragged his brother into the ring since childhood. Bruce is a bookkeeper who has become smitten with Anka. Unaware of the facts of the twins' physicality an epistolary relationship unfolds between Anka and Bruce, as he wrestles with broaching the topic of separation with Dougie. Dougie's sole focus is the Heavyweight Amateur Boxing title as one half of "The Reuben Beast," though he is trying to ignore his mysterious blackouts and severe headaches. Anka is, specifically, navigating through her grief over her parents' deaths, but also, generally, reconciling her understanding of being a first-generation Canadian without her Guyanese parents as an anchor. A character-driven story with an ensemble cast, told across multiple points of view and time periods, examines the unique relationships between conjoined brothers, parents, crushes, and unexpected mentors. A story about the intertwined nature of longing and belonging, compromise and connection, this is ultimately a consideration of family and finding your unique place in it, and in the world.

Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel.

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Susan Gregg Gilmore, "The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush" (Blair, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Susan Glimore about her wonderful novel, The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush (Blair, 2025).

Young Leonard Bush buries his lost leg and saves his whole East Tennessee town in this winsome and miracle-making novel. When twelve-year-old Leonard Bush loses his leg in a freak accident, he decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic events--upending the lives of Leonard's rigidly God-fearing mother, June; his deeply conflicted father, Emmett; and his best friend, Azalea, and her mother, Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community on the banks of Big Sugar move together toward awakening. Susan Gilmore's love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She's the daughter of a revival preacher's son, brought up on the land and streams that populate this novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a "homespun Pilgrim's Progress."

Susan Gregg Gilmore is the author of the novels The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. She has written for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. Born in Nashville, she lives in Tennessee with her husband.

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Emily Adrian, "Seduction Theory" (Little, Brown, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Emily Adrian is the author of Seduction Theory (Little, Brown, 2025) Daughterhood, The Second Season, and Everything Here Is Under Control, as well as two critically acclaimed novels for young adults. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Point, Joyland, EPOCH, Alta Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. Originally from Portland, Oregon, Emily currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Recommended Books:

Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
Justin Taylor, Reboot
Erin Somers, Ten Year Affair

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Ham’s Heaven with Ori Gersht

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Listen to Ori Gersht speak about his novel Ham’s Heaven (Warbler Press, 2025). Inspired by the true story of the first great ape in space, it explores the friendship of an ape and his trainer to examine what we do with animals in the name of progress. Drawing on careful research and echoing the existential questions of Kafka’s “Report to an Academy,” Ham’s Heaven takes us on a journey that is as thrilling as deeply moving—a testament to the bonds that define us, and the progress that so often divides us.

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Thomas Schlesser, "Mona's Eyes" (Europa Editions, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 9 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Mona’s Eyes (Europa Editions, 2025) is an enchanting debut novel written by art historian Thomas Schlesser. It tells the story of a 10-year-old girl living in Paris who briefly loses her vision. After much testing, the doctor suggests that Mona might benefit from seeing a psychiatrist, and Mona’s grandfather offers to take her to her appointment each week. Instead, every Wednesday afternoon for an entire year, he takes her to visit masterpieces of art from the past five hundred years, now displayed in the great museums of Paris. Henri, Mona’s grandfather, carefully explains each piece, shares the history of its creator, and emphasizes a lesson to be learned from it. He hopes that if her blindness returns, she will have internalized the colors, emotions, and beauty of 52 of the world’s finest and most influential pieces of art.

Thomas Schlesser is the director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation in Antibes, France. He teaches Art History at the École Polytechnique in Paris and is the author of several works of nonfiction about art, artists, and the relationship between art and politics in the 20th century. Thomas received a PhD in History and Civilizations from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and obtained the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), a specific academic qualification in France, authorizing him to supervise doctoral research (as professor at École Polytechnique in Paris). He is the grandson of André Schlesser, known as Dadé, a singer and cabaret performer who founded the Cabaret L’Écluse. Mona’s Eyes is Thomas’s second novel and his American debut. It has been translated into thirty-eight languages, including Braille. Thomas was awarded 2025’s Author of the Year by Livres Hebdo. In his spare time, Thomas loves cooking and organizing aperitifs, dinners, and festive gatherings. He’s also passionate about retro gaming and pop culture, and he enjoys wandering and exploring at a leisurely pace. He constantly reflects on his many flaws and tries to work on them, although it's not easy. He listens to others, and if he has one message to share, it's that life is about patching things together — rigid, overly normative, and definitive frameworks should be approached with caution. He’ll add that the cause of animal welfare and the rights of people with disabilities are very dear to him.

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Maria Dadouch, "I Want Golden Eyes" (U Texas Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 6 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

This interview is with one of the translators, M. Lynx Qualey.

A girl must save herself and her family after discovering her society's secrets in this sci-fi novel in translation.

I Want Golden Eyes (U Texas Press, 2025) is set on the Comoros Islands at the end of this century in a futuristic city called Quartzia, the home of a genetically privileged minority called the Golden Eyes. The rest of the population, the Limiteds, live in a cavity called the Hive beneath the city. Dalia is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in the Hive but works with her family in Quartzia at Professor Adam’s house, where she cleans, her sister grows organic food in the garden, and her deaf father works as the cook.

Because books are forbidden in the Hive, Dalia secretly borrows math texts from the professor’s library and smuggles them to read in the Hive. When Professor Adam, who is famous for engineering embryos with enhanced genes, discovers Dalia’s crime, he enslaves her for two years in his library. Dalia seeks to flee the city with her family after overhearing the professor being ordered to design genetic traits for the president’s expected baby and realizes that Golden Eyes are not privileged by nature’s selection, as she was led to believe, but by authority and money.

Maria Dadouch is a Syrian novelist, screenwriter, and children’s book author. She is the author of The Planet of Uncertainties, I Want Golden Eyes, The Heart is Behind the Rib, and other books, for which she has won several prestigious prizes.

M. Lynx Qualey is a writer, publisher, editor, translator, and speaker. She is the founder of ArabLit. Her translated works include Wild Poppies, Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, and the Thunderbird trilogy.

Sawad Hussain  is a translator from Arabic. She has run translation workshops under the auspices of Shadow Heroes, Africa Writes, Shubbak Festival, the Yiddish Book Center, the British Library, and the National Centre for Writing.

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Meghana V. Nayak, "Tilt: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 5 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Kavya is an Indian-American professor and single mother struggling with debilitating panic attacks. Bombarded by flashbacks of cruelty and violence that disrupt her everyday life, she is left with no choice but to confront the intergenerational trauma tormenting her. At first, Kavya finds some relief in piecing together the legacies of her family's experiences with colonialism, colorism, and casteism. But just as she starts to recover, explosive confessions threaten to bring her world crashing down.

Tilt: A Novel on Intergenerational Trauma (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) is an unflinching feminist novel about the devastating histories that haunt us and the unexpected beauty of facing our pasts.

Meghana V. Nayak is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Women's and Gender Studies at Pace University-NYC.

Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español Communications officer- Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto.

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Jonas Hassen Khemiri, "The Sisters" (FSG, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 3 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jonas Hassen Khemiri is the author of six novels, seven plays, and a collection of short stories and essays. His work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. The Family Clause was a finalist for the National Book Award for translated literature, and Invasion! Won an Obie Award for best script. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and numerous other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his family and teaches creative writing at New York University. In this interview we discuss his latest book, The Sisters (FSG, 2025).

Recommended Books:

Brian Boyd, Nabokov: The American Years
Selma Lagerlöf, The Treasure
Dantiel Moniz, Milk, Blood, Heat
Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

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Jeremy Gordon, "See Friendship: A Novel" (Harper Perennial, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 3 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Ahead of looming layoffs within the ongoing decimation of media, Jacob Goldberg, a culture writer in New York, knows what will save him: a podcast. Not just any podcast, but something that will demonstrate his singular thoughtfulness in an oversaturated, competitive market. When Jacob learns the true, tragic circumstances behind the mysterious death of Seth, one of his best friends from high school, his world is turned completely upside down. But when the dust settles, he realizes he has an idea worth digging into. Of course, it's not so simple. Learning the truth--or at least, the beginning of it--sends Jacob spiraling. His increasing obsession ultimately leads him back home to Chicago, where he tracks down Lee, a once up-and-coming musician who probably knew Seth best at the end of his life. As his investigation deepens, Jacob's drive to find out the truth--and whether there's a deeper story to be told about the fault lines of our memories, life and death on the internet, and the people we never forget--grows into a desperation to discover whether it even matters. If not, can he make it? A poignant and funny novel about grief, loneliness, memory, and the unique existential questions inherent to the digital age, See Friendship: A Novel (Harper Perennial, 2025) introduces a new voice in fiction--a writer known for his pitch-perfect cultural criticism, with a depth of literary talent.

Jeremy Gordon is journalist and senior editor, currently at the Atlantic covering music and culture.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Lynda Williams, "The Beauty and the Hell of It and Other Stories" (Guernica, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 2 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Beauty and the Hell of It and Other Stories (Guernica, 2025) conjures up images of women who struggle through difficult transitions, unpleasant encounters, or ghastly boyfriends and husbands. One woman is a lesbian who sees the man who raped her a decade before, another suffers from bipolar disease, and a third is harassed by her professor. Some of them are grieving and others want vindication but few of them are living the lives they’d imagined. And then there’s Liam, who is devastated by his young son’s death, and who’d always loved the daughter of one of his father’s wives. These are beautifully written, sensitive stories about a range of human reactions to the harsh realities of life and death.

Lynda Williams is a freelance copyeditor and short fiction writer based in Calgary, Alberta. Her stories have appeared in Grain, The Humber Literary Review, and The New Quarterly, among others. Her literary influences include Raymond Carver, Pam Houston, and Lorrie Moore. Born and raised on a dairy farm in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Lynda arrived in Calgary after a 40-hour trip on a Greyhound bus, after which she took the best shower of her life. She has called Alberta home ever since. When she’s not writing, Lynda can be found experimenting with gluten-free baking and bingeing New Girl on one of many streaming services. She has been married to her partner in crime for 12 years, and they share their home (and food) with the world’s most adorable mini–Australian Shepherd, Cooper. She is a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. For more information about Lynda and her work, visit her website here

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Catherine Merridale, "Moscow Underground" (HarperColins, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 1 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Moscow Underground (HarperCollins, 2025) by Dr. Catherine Merridale is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny.

Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital, what holds them in a fatal grip is history: old mud and bones.

Anton Belkin is an Investigator at the Procuracy, a sensitive job at a dangerous moment on the road to the Show Trials. He is also someone who needs to keep his head down. His artist father was once the darling of the revolutionary avant-garde, a painter whose work could inspire devotion and great sacrifice. But now his dreams are out of place, too loud and red in Stalin's world of sterile rules and rubber stamps.

Anton is dragged into a murder case. A prominent archaeologist, working alongside the subway dig, has been killed in a deserted mansion. Though Anton doesn't want the job, his former lover, Vika, who is now a powerful member of the secret police, browbeats him into paying a visit to the site with her. Against his better judgement he is drawn to follow though, embarking on investigations that will almost certainly get him killed.

Deep underground, he finds a priceless secret that could genuinely unlock the future but links him to a vicious internecine fight for power in the young Soviet state. In the process, he is forced to reconsider the history he shares with Vika and the bonds that bind them both.

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Lily Lloyd Burkhalter, "Raffia Memory," The Common Magazine (Spring, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Raffia Memory,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. Lily talks about traveling to the Cameroon Grassfields to research the rituals and production of ndop, a traditional dyed cloth with an important role in both spiritual life and, increasingly, economic life as well. She also discusses the book-length project she’s working on, which explores loss, grief, fabric, sewing, and weaving.

Lily Lloyd Burkhalter is a writer living in Lille, France. She is a Pulitzer Center Reporting Fellow and holds degrees from the University of Virginia and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work can be found in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is represented by Audrey Crooks at Trident Media Group. She learned to sew in Cameroon and learned to weave in Chicago.

Read Lily’s essay “Raffia Memory” in The Common here.

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 here, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford was the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Alina Adams, "Go On Pretending" (History Through Fiction, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025) Rose Janowitz is surprised to get a production job with a radio soap opera and stunned to fall in love with the show’s African American leading man. She’s a pioneer of the 1950s golden age of television, challenged to hide Jonas Cain’s identity and their romance, especially from her boss Irna Phillips, the woman who invented soap operas. Years later in the 1980s, Rose’s daughter, Emma Kagan leaves the USSR where she was born and struggles to survive in America after the Soviet union collapses. Then it’s 2012, and Emma’s daughter Libby joins the women’s revolution in Syria. Rose flies to join her granddaughter and shares secrets she’s buried for a lifetime about her involvement in the Spanish civil war and her dreams of a fair society.

Alina Adams is the NYT best-selling author of soap opera tie-ins, figure skating mysteries, and romance novels. Her 1995 Regency Romance, "The Fictitious Marquis," was named a first #OwnVoices Jewish Historical by the Romance Writers of America. Her Soviet-Jewish historical fiction includes "The Nesting Dolls," "My Mother's Secret: A Novel of the Jewish Autonomous Region" and the May 2025 release, Go On Pretending. She was a Contributing Editor for "Kveller," and has written for "NY Jewish Week," "Interfaith Family Magazine" and "Today Show Parenting," among many others. She is currently a Contributing Writer to "Soap Hub." Alina was born in Odessa, USSR and moved to the US with her family in 1977. She currently lives in New York City with her husband and three children, where her hobbies include musical theater, tracking down classic television episodes on YouTube, and writing about the underachieving American educational system, with a focus on NYC, for "The 74 Million," "The Advance," "The NY Post" and "The NY Daily News." Learn more at her website.

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Alejandro Puyana, "Freedom Is a Feast" (Little, Brown, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In 1964, Stanislavo, a zealous young man devoted to his ideals, turns his back on his privilege to join the leftist movement in the jungles of Venezuela. There, as he trains, he meets Emiliana, a nurse and fellow revolutionary. Though their intense connection seems to be love at first sight, their romance is upended by a decision with consequences that will echo down through the generations.
Almost forty years later, in a poor barrio of Caracas, María, a single mother, ekes out a precarious existence as a housekeeper, pouring her love into Eloy, her young son. Her devotion will not be enough, however, to keep them from disaster. On the eve of the attempted coup against President Chávez, Eloy is wounded by a stray bullet, fracturing her world. Amid the chaos at the hospital, María encounters Stanislavo, now a newspaper editor. Even as the country itself is convulsed by waves of unrest, this twist of fate forces a belated reckoning for Stanislavo, who may yet earn a chance to atone for old missteps before it’s too late.
With its epic scope, gripping narrative, and unflinching intimacy, Freedom Is a Feast announces a major new talent. Alejandro Puyana has delivered a wise and moving debut about sticking to one’s beliefs at the expense of pain and chaos, about the way others can suffer for our misdeeds even when we have the best of intentions, and about the possibility for redemption when love persists across time.

Alejandro Puyana moved to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six. In 2022, he completed his MFA at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His work has appeared in Tin House, American Short Fiction, The American Scholar, New England Review, Idaho Review, among others, and his story “The Hands of Dirty Children” was selected by Curtis Sittenfeld for Best American Short Stories 2020. He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas.

Recommended Books:

John Hickey, Big Chief
Ibrahim Nasrallah, Time of White Horses
Julio Cortázar, Literature Class

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Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.
King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile.

That opening–and the other developments in Lear’s tragic story–hold special resonance for Nan Z. Da, who uses Shakespeare’s play as a way to grapple with China’s history, and her own personal experiences with it. The result is The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)
Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press: 2018)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the stirring autobiography of Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive, detailing her harrowing escape from enslavement, seven years hiding in an attic crawl space, and the racism she faced in freedom.

Forgotten for decades after its original, 19th century publication, Jacobs’ story was so harrowing and so brave it was thought to be fiction. Only through the research of historian Jean Fagan Yellin in the 1980s was it proven, once and for all, to be a brilliant and compelling work of nonfiction. Incidents is routinely cited by historians and fiction writers alike as one of the most influential texts of our time and our history.

In this latest edition published by W.W. Norton (2025), Jacobs’ characters come alive for a new generation of readers, and re-readers, this time contextualized with a new introduction and explanatory notes by Evie Shockley.

Dr. Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is a two-time winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Review Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. You can find her on Instagram.

You can find host Sullivan Summer at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack.

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Nell Stevens, "The Original" (Norton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Nell Stevens is an award-winning author of memoir and fiction. Her work has been awarded the Somerset Maugham Award, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted by the BBC National Short Story Award.

She is the author of two novels, The Original and Briefly, a Delicious Life, and two memoirs: Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me.

Her writing is published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. Nell is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Warwick.

Nell lives in Oxfordshire with her wife and two children.

Recommended Books:

Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Ali Smith, Gliff

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Joyce Hinnefeld, "The Dime Museum" (Unbridled Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Dime Museum (Unbridled Books, 2025) is a novel spanning several generations, told in stories that begin in the early 1900s and end during the 2020 pandemic. Set in Chicago, Reading and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Europe, the linked stories tell an overall tale of how the rich and the poor survive in a challenging modern world. Charlie, who’s interested in the writing of Ezra Pound, appears in most of the stories, and is a wealthy American college graduate living in Venice. Min (Minerva), his Dominican ex-girlfriend is overwhelmed as a nurse even before the pandemic takes hold. Charlie’s great-great grandmother is the source of his wealth, and his great aunt controlled his upbringing. Hinnefeld’s characters strive for happiness, struggle to be connected, heal from heartbreak, seek refuge, and find solace in planting gardens, poetry and art.

JOYCE HINNEFELD is the author of the short story collections Tell Me Everything (winner of the 1997 Bread Loaf Bakeless Prize in Fiction) and The Beauty of Their Youth (2020), the novels In Hovering Flight (2008) and Stranger Here Below (2010), and other short stories and essays. She is Emerita Professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, PA, director of the Moravian Writers' Conference, and a Program Facilitator with Shining Light, an organization that provides reentry-based programming for incarcerated people throughout the U.S. Find her online at joycehinnefeld.com

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Kathleen Waites, "The Faithful Ones" (Invictus, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 7 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Faithful Ones (Invictus Press, 2025) chronicles a rarely explored intersection in World War II history—the entanglement of the U.S. military, conscientious objectors, and state mental institutions. The novel unfolds in 1941, where the working-class in Port Richmond, Philadelphia, debate duty to country versus loyalty to conscience. Despite his pacifist convictions, Edward Hohlfeld complies with Uncle Sam’s call, reporting for duty with a conflicted heart. However, his principled stance on the basic training firing range sets off a chilling chain of events, landing him in a barbaric state asylum. Branded mentally unfit and abandoned by the very institutions meant to protect him, Edward becomes a prisoner within his own country. His mysterious downfall drives his younger sister, Mary, on a decades-long quest to uncover the truth and reclaim her brother’s stolen honor.

Kathleen (Kate) Joyce Waites is a Philadelphia native, former nun, scholar, author, and emerita professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Social injustice and institutional corruption are themes in her scholarly publications and creative work.

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Megan Cummins, "Atomic Hearts" (Ballentine Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 5 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they’re together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.
After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she’s caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she’s writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.
Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.
Written with the feel and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the ways we can be saved by friendship, love, and imagination.

Megan Cummins is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship.

Recommended Books:

Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
Denne Michelle Norris, When the Harvest Comes
Nick Fuller Goggins, The Frequency of Living Things

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Michelle De Kretser, "Theory & Practice" (Catapult, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 4 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia on unceded Gadigal land. She writes fiction but has also published a short book about Shirley Hazzard's work. Theory & Practice, her seventh novel, recently won Australia's Stella Prize for writing by women.

Theory and Practice is set in 1986, when “beautiful, radical ideas” are in the air. Its narrator is a young woman originally from Sri Lankan who arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a “deconstructed relationship.” They become lovers, and the narrator’s feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf’s diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray. What happens when our desires run contrary to our beliefs? What should we do when the failings of revered figures come to light? Who is shamed when the truth is told? Michelle de Kretser’s new novel offers a spellbinding meditation on the moral complexities that arise in the gap between our values and our lives.

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Jan Dost, "Safe Corridor" (DarArab, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 4 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

A bold, unforgettable novel of war, imagination, and survival. Thirteen-year-old Kamiran is fleeing the collapse of Syria when his body begins to harden literally—turning to chalk. As his transformation unfolds, he pours his memories, secrets, and darkly funny confessions into a piece of chalk he stole at school. Through the eyes of this precocious, resilient boy, Safe Corridor explores what it means to survive the unthinkable—with tenderness, fury, and imagination.

Written by acclaimed Kurdish-Syrian novelist Jan Dost and translated by Marilyn Booth—winner of the 2019 International Booker Prize—Safe Corridor is a searing, surreal journey through displacement, coming of age, and the cost of war.

Winner of the 2024 Bait AlGhasham DarArab International Translation Prize.

Jan Dost, born in 1966, is a native of Kobani in the Aleppo region of Syria. A student of natural sciences at the University of Aleppo (1985-89), he embarked on a career in journalism in the roles of reporter and editor, currently for the Kurdistan Chronicle (published in English in Erbil, Iraq) He is editor-in-chief of the Arabic-language magazine Kurdistan.

Marilyn Booth is professor emerita, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Magdalen College, Oxford University.

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Mark Vernon, "Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination" (Hurst & Co., 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 2 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In the 200 years since Blake's death, the visionary artist, poet and writer has become a household name, often beloved. Yet many struggle to comprehend his kaleidoscopic ideas; how they speak to human longings and the challenges of living in anxious times.

Philosopher and psychotherapist Mark Vernon provides a fresh route into Blake, taking him at his word. Exploring this brilliant thinker's passionate writings, arresting artworks and fascinating life, Vernon illuminates Blake's vivid worldview. Like us, he lived in a tumultuous era of war, discontent, rapid technological change, and human estrangement from nature. He exposed the dark sides of political fervour and social moralising, while unashamedly celebrating love and liberty. But he also conversed with prophets and angels, and was powerfully, if unconventionally, religious. If we take this seriously--not easy, in secular times--then Blake can help us to unlock the transformative power of imagination.

Written for both longstanding fans and unfamiliar readers, Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination (Hurst & Co., 2025) reveals Blake as an invigorating and hopeful guide for our modern age.

Mark Vernon is a London-based psychotherapist, writer and former Anglican priest. A keen podcaster and a columnist with The Idler, he speaks regularly at festivals and on the BBC. He has a PhD in Philosophy, and degrees in Theology and Physics.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Therí Alyce Pickens, "What Had Happened Was" (Duke UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí Alyce Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. Addressing topics ranging from Black life, popular culture, and history to individual encounters with emotion, love, and chronic disability, Pickens crafts and questions the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we want to be. Throughout, Pickens mines the formal structures and the play of Black English within the lives and afterlives of Harriet Tubman, Mary J. Blige, Lil' Kim, Breonna Taylor, and figments of our collective imagination. Her singular poetic voice effortlessly flows between what she knows and what she’s heard and between everyday Black conversation and her work in cultural criticism and disability studies. Traveling at the speed of thought, Pickens explores a praxis of storytelling governed by the places where truths and fables kiss.

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Rehearsals for Dying

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Deena stepped out of the shower and opened her towel in the steam. “Does my breast look weird?” These words irrevocably change the lives of writer Ariel Gore and her wife. As they descend into a world of doctors and tests, medications and insurance, sickness and treatments and hope and pain and more, they discover just how little they truly knew—despite the awareness campaigns and hyper-visible pink ribbons—about the reality of breast cancer. Over the four years following Deena’s terminal diagnosis, Ariel Gore does what she always does, no matter how difficult or personal the subject: she writes about it.

Written with keen insights, empathy, and humor, Rehearsals for Dying braids together the story of Deena’s experience, her own role as a caretaker, narratives from others living with breast cancer, literary reflections on illness, and reportage on the history of breast cancer and the $200 billion industry that capitalizes on and profits from breast cancer screenings and treatments. Rehearsals for Dying investigates and challenges everything we think we know about breast cancer. It goes beyond awareness to knowledge, presenting a rich, nuanced, heartbreaking, and hopeful portrait of what it is to be diagnosed with, treat, and live with breast cancer in the twenty-first century.

Our guest is: Ariel Gore, who is the founding editor and publisher of the Alternative Press Award–winning magazine Hip Mama and the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including Rehearsals for Dying. She teaches writing online at Ariel Gore’s School for Wayward Writers at the Literary Kitchen.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who works as a writing coach and developmental editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Memoir playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Aatish Taseer, "A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile" (Catapult, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In 2019, famed journalist and writer Aatish Taseer was thrown out of India. Soon after he wrote a cover article for Time calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the country’s “divider in chief,” New Delhi decided to revoke his residency.

That sent Aatish on a journey across the world–to places like Turkey, Spain, Mexico and Sri Lanka–to explore identity, both his own and of different nations. The result is his latest book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile (Catapult: 2025).

Aatish is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands (Canongate: 2009) and the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were (Pan Macmillan: 2014), a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers (Viking: 2010), short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2011); and the memoir and travelog The Twice-Born (Hurst: 2019).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Return to Self. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Benoit Berthelier and Immanuel Kim, "Hidden Heros: Anthology of North Korean FIction" (Anthem, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Hidden Heroes (Anthem Press, 2025) offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of ordinary North Koreans through a collection of short stories by renowned DPRK authors. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, these works explore the theme of the “hidden hero,” a popular moniker in the DPRK to describe the average citizen who navigates the complexities of daily life with quiet dedication for their work and country.

In this interview, Dr. Kim and Dr. Berthelier discuss the appeal of North Korean literature, their approach to translating the collection, and how sharing stories reminds readers of our shared humanity.

Dr. Benoit Berthelier is a senior lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests include North Korea’s cultural industries and digital technologies. View his university profile here.

Dr. Immanuel Kim is The Korea Foundation and Kim-Renaud Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies at George Washington University. His research focuses on the changes and development, particularly in the representations of women, sexuality, and memory, of North Korean literature from the 1960s to present day. View his university profile here.

Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at leslie.hickman@emory.edu

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Saad Omar Khan, "Drinking the Ocean" (Buckrider Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery chats with the wonderful Saad Omar Khan about his debut novel, Drinking the Ocean (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

The day after his thirty-third birthday, Murad spots a familiar face at a crowded intersection in downtown Toronto. Shocked, he stands silently as Sofi, a woman he’d fallen in love with almost a decade ago, walks by holding the hand of a small child. Murad turns and descends the subway steps to return home to his wife as the past washes over him and he is taken back to the first time they met. Moving between Lahore, London and Toronto, Drinking the Ocean is a story of connections lost and found and of the many kinds of love that shape a life, whether familial, romantic or spiritual. As Murad’s and Sofi’s lives touch and separate, we see them encounter challenges with relationships, family and God, and struggle with the complexities facing Muslims in the West. With compassion and elegance, Saad Omar Khan delicately illuminates the arcs of these two haunted lives, moved by fate and by love, as they absorb the impact of their personal spiritual journeys

Saad Omar Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents and lived in the Philippines, Hong Kong and South Korea before immigrating to Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and has completed a certificate in Creative Writing from the School of Continuing Studies (University of Toronto) where he was a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award (2010 and 2011) and for the Marina Nemat Award (2012). In 2019, he was longlisted for the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025 and other publications.

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Sanjena Sathian, "Goddess Complex" (Penguin Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Sanjana Satyananda, the main character of Sanjena Sathian’s novel, Goddess Complex (Penguin Press, 2025), is a bit of a mess. She’s back in the States after a spell in India, ending her marriage with her actor husband when he wanted kids…and she didn’t. Her friends are starting to settle down–and wondering when Sanjana will do the same. And, distressingly, others in her life swear they’ve seen her back in India, still married to her husband, and happily pregnant.

This question–who is the woman that’s encroaching on Sanjana’s life–motivates Goddess Complex, with the novel eventually returning to India to explore the pressure to have children, the rise of social media and mommy bloggers, and the strange appeal of cults.

Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Goddess Complex and Gold Diggers, both published by Penguin Press. Goddess Complex, released in March of 2025, was named a top anticipated book of the year by TIME and has been named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Gold Diggers was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.

Sanjena can be followed on Substack at: https://sanjena.substack.com/

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Goddess Complex. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The Innermost House: A Memoir (Bright Leaf, 2024) is a stunning account of year-round life on the windswept shores of Cape Cod, threaded with meditations on memory, forgetting, and identity.

About The Innermost House, Publishers Weekly writes, “Salt air and the limits of memory animate this heartrending debut. . . . Readers will be captivated.” Shelf Awareness calls the book “Enthralling” adding that “Blakeley is an evocative writer who captures the lush beauty of a ‘half feral’ childhood spent immersed in the natural world while never losing sight of the precarity and violence that permeated it.” Foreword Reviews calls the book “a distinctive memoir with a keen sense of place and renewal.”

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape—drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown—Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories.

Over-identifying with her unconventional and artistic mother, Blakeley felt certain that the key to understanding her mother’s drinking and distractions, her generosity and easy forgiveness, was the unexplained absence of two of Blakeley’s half-siblings and their connection to her mother’s unhappy first marriage. Blakeley kept her distance, however, from her disciplinarian father. Though he took his daughters sailing and clamming and beachcombing, he was the chill to their mother’s warmth, the maker, not the breaker, of rules. Slipping through these dynamics in that small house and evocative landscape, Blakeley eventually crossed the bridge and left home, only to return later in search of the family stories that would help her decode her present.

Blakeley’s captivating memoir moves fluidly through time, grappling with the question of who owns a memory or secret and how our narrative choices not only describe but also shape and change us. In this insightful and poignant account of tenacious year-rounders on Cape Cod, Blakeley contends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from.

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Mariah Rigg, "Target Island," The Common (Spring, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Mariah Rigg speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Target Island,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. “Target Island” is a story from her short story collection Extinction Capital of the World, out August 5 from Ecco; both focus on the islands of Hawai’i. Mariah talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the collection as a whole, and why reflecting contemporary Hawai’i is important to her work. Mariah also discusses playing with time and narrative flow in her stories, and working on a new project—her first novel.

Mariah Rigg is a Samoan-Haole who was born and raised on the island of O‘ahu. She is the author of the short story collection Extinction Capital of the World, which is forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins on August 5th. Her chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle was published by Bull City Press in 2023. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MASS MoCA, Oregon Literary Arts, VCCA, The Mount, and Lambda Literary, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a PhD from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In fall 2025, she will be a visiting fellow at Mount Holyoke College.

Read Mariah’s story “Target Island” in The Common at thecommononline.org/target-island.

Order her story collection in all formats from Ecco/Harper Collins.

Learn more about Lucas at www.mariahrigg.com.

Follow Mariah on Instagram at @riggstah.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her writing appears in The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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James Cairns, "In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews author and academic James Cairns about his collection of essays, In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

In 2022, the Collins Dictionary announced that its word of the year was “permacrisis,” which it defined as “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.” Have we reached a breaking point, arrived at the moment of truth? If so, what now? If not, why do so many people say we’re living through a period of unprecedented crises? Drawing on social research, pop culture and literature, as well as on his experience as an activist, father and teacher, James Cairns explores the ecological crisis, Trump’s return to power amid the so-called crisis of democracy, his own struggle with addiction and other moments of truth facing us today. In a series of insightful essays that move deftly between personal, theoretical and historical approaches he considers not only what makes something a crisis, but also how to navigate the effect of these destabilizing times on ourselves, on our families and on the world.

James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.

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Greg Rhyno, "Who by Water" (Cormorant Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Greg Rhyno about his new mystery novel, Who By Water (Cormorant Books, 2025).

After barely surviving her last case, Dame Polara trades her part-time detective gig for the safer — though no less chaotic — life of a single, working mother, picking up toys instead of picking locks, chasing after her two-year-old instead of chasing crooks.

But when her ex-husband inexplicably drowns, and Dame becomes the prime suspect in his murder investigation, she must work alongside the woman who ruined her marriage to unravel the mystery of the man they both loved.

Dame’s sleuthing takes her to dive bars, industrial ports, and eventually, Toronto Island, where her ex spent his final days with a community of secretive and temperamental artists.

As she comes closer to the complicated truth, Dame realizes that in order to clear her name and protect her family, she’ll have to re-examine everything she thought she knew about the people she loved and left behind.

About Greg Rhyno:

Greg Rhyno is the author of Who by Fire, first of the Dame Polara Mysteries, and To Me You Seem Giant, which was nominated for a ReLit Award and an Alberta Book Publishing Award. His writing has appeared in a number of journals, including Hobart, Riddle Fence, The Quarantine Review, and PRISM International. He completed an MFA at the University of Guelph and lives with his family in Guelph, Ontario.

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Gabriel Ertsgaard, "A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Superhero violence and graphic action sequences are prevalent on the screen and on the page, but this book takes an alternative route with practical guidance, frameworks, and tools for incorporating the principles of peacebuilding and nonviolence into compelling fiction. By mapping a path less travelled but just as vital in divisive times, in n A Fiction Writer’s Guide to Peace: Crafting Nonviolent Heroism (Bloomsbury, 2025) Dr. Gabriel Ertsgaard shows writers how they can enact nonviolent heroism in their characters, model civil resistance in their stories, and create worlds around a mythos that champions redemptive nonviolence.

With concepts applicable to writing for fiction, drama, the screen, and narrative poetry, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace deconstructs the necessity for violence in popular works, explores key concepts in peace studies, and helps writers establish their own peace poetics. Focused around the narrative craft techniques of character arcs, campaigns, duels, and worldbuilding, the book features numerous creative writing prompts and examples from key works. These include films such as Trading Places, Selma, Lage Raho Munna Bai, and Frozen and literature ranging from Shakespeare's plays to Dickens' A Christmas Carol to Julia Quinn's Bridgerton novels.

A timely and important expansion to any writer's toolkit, A Fiction Writer's Guide to Peace allows storytellers to understand the complex dynamics of, and the damage caused by, violent perspectives and actions, giving them a way into considering nonviolence as powerful and preferable.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Lorna Graham, "Where You Once Belonged: A Novel" (She Writes Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A writer at Dateline NBC tries her hand at a different kind of mystery, perfect for fans of Chandler Baker’s Whisper Network, where a cynical TV news producer sells out her principles to rise to her network’s top job, and comes face-to-face with what appears to be her idealistic teenage self.
Everleigh Page is on the cusp of greatness. Executive producer of an award-winning primetime news magazine, she’s just been offered a role never attained by a woman at her network: president of the news division. It will be her job to shape coverage of world events and mold the journalists of tomorrow.
Too bad in order to get here she’s sold out most of the principles she held as an idealistic young reporter. Too bad she’s just, at the direction of her boss, fired two of her best staffers and killed an important investigative story that could save lives. As a woman, she knows, you have to play ball to get to the top. Even if it means bending your moral code or breaking up with your boyfriend. Sean may be the love of her life, but his large, complicated family has started taking up too much of her time.
Her younger self wouldn’t recognize her. Or will she?
When a college reunion takes a mystical twist, Everleigh finds herself defending her choices to the toughest critic in the world and confronting a crucial question: can she possibly right all the wrongs she was willing to tolerate just an hour ago?

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Wendy Holden, "The Teacher of Auschwitz: A Novel" (Harper, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From the bestselling author of Born Survivors, a novel inspired by the powerful true story of a man who risked everything to protect children in Auschwitz.

Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts . . .

Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those four walls, brightly adorned with hand-painted cartoons, the youngest prisoners were kept vermin-free, received better food, and were even taught to imagine having full stomachs and a day without fear. Their guiding light was a twenty-seven-year-old gay, Jewish athlete: Fredy Hirsch.

Being a teacher in a brutal concentration camp was no mean feat. Forced to beg senior SS officers for better provisions, Fredy risked his life every day to protect his beloved children from mortal danger.

But time was running out for Fredy and the hundreds in his care. Could this kind, compassionate, and brave man find a way to teach them the one lesson they really needed to know: how to survive?

The Teacher of Auschwitz shines a light on a truly remarkable individual and tells the inspiring story of how he fought to protect innocence and hope amid depravity and despair.

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Gary Baum, "In Pursuit of Beauty" (Blackstone, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From the mind of acclaimed reporter Gary Baum comes In Pursuit of Beauty (Blackstone, 2025), a striking debut novel that examines the nature of truth and allure in our modern world. What would you endure to fulfill your dreams? What would you do to have the perfect body? For Dr. Roya Delshad, the answers are anything and everything. A sought-after Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Roya is also the highest example of her craft. She's had every inch of her own body sculpted, one procedure at a time. All to escape a painful and lonely past. But when Roya gives the gift of beauty to those who can't afford the cost, the media labels her "the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive," and she soon finds herself pleading her case from inside a prison cell. Hoping to resurrect her reputation and obscure a trail of unhappy clients, Roya tells her story with the help of the blithely handsome Wes Easton, a journalist and failed screenwriter who agrees to ghostwrite her memoir. In a twistingly tense pas de deux, Wes struggles to tell fact from fiction, and Roya seeks to explode his notions about aspiration and desire, sending their collaboration off the rails. A bold, stylish, and provocative thriller about surfaces and their hidden depths, In Pursuit of Beauty explores what it means to become exactly who you once yearned to be.

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Fadi Zaghmout, "The Man of Middling Height" (Syracuse UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 9 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

What if our society’s deepest prejudices weren’t about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful meditation on discrimination and desire that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity and inclusion.

The Man of Middling Height (Syracuse University Press, 2025) follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything from social status to romantic possibilities. Through their story and those of surrounding characters—including a short person in a polyamorous relationship with two tall partners, and a tall activist who scandalously loves another tall person—Zaghmout deftly reframes contemporary discussions about gender identity and sexuality through the lens of height discrimination.

Fadi Zaghmout is a Jordanian author and sexual freedoms and body rights advocate. He has published five novels, including The Bride of Amman, Heaven on Earth, Laila, and Hope on Earth.

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Alexis Von Konigslow, "The Exclusion Zone" (Buckrider Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alexis von Koniglow about her new novel, The Exclusion Zone (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

About The Exclusion Zone:

She would harness fear. And this terrifying place would help her do it.

Renya, a scientist who studies how people react to fear, flees a troubled marriage to conduct research on the scientists working in the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl. In the eerily silent forests surrounding the research station, she finds more is haunting her than the dangers of radiation exposure. As she gathers data from her colleagues and probes historical records of the Chernobyl disaster, unsettling questions rise to the surface. Who is funding her research? Why are all the scientists’ findings off? And what do those who stalk the ruins of the abandoned city nearby want? In this atmospheric tale, Alexis von Konigslow deftly weaves the struggles of women in science with the impact of politics, both past and present, on people and on the environment. Part ghost story, part literary thriller, The Exclusion Zone is a mesmerizing story that reminds us all to listen to our hearts as well as the earth.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexis von Konigslow is the author of The Capacity for Infinite Happiness. She has degrees in mathematical physics from Queen’s University and creative writing from the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto with her family.

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Lacy Fewer, "Yankeeland" (Koehler Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

It’s the early 1900s and Brigid is restricted by straightlaced Irish society and a difficult stepmother, but her father is loving and supportive. She and her cousin Molly dream of life in Yankeeland, a.k.a. America, but only Brigid gets the chance once she’s married, and a lifetime of correspondence follows. While Molly thrives back in Ireland, Brigid’s dream of having a child leads to unexpected problems in a society that values women for their childbearing capabilities. With little to no help available for the problem of infertility, her mental health suffers. Irish author Lacy Fewer based this moving historical story on the letters she inherited from her great-aunt who emigrated in 1908.

Lacy Fewer is the recipient of the Literary Titan Book Award for her debut novel Yankeeland, a powerful story of family secrets and societal change. Fewer, born and raised in Ireland, has nearly three decades of experience working in the financial services sector. She earned numerous degrees and certifications, including: QFA from Institute of Bankers; CFP master’s degree from them as well; a Master of Science in Financial Planning and Services, and then a professional diploma in Fintech, both from University of College in Dublin. She recently earned a Certificate in ESG Investing from CFA. Fewer enjoys theatre, reading literature, storytelling, travel and studying history. A proud Dubliner, she resides, with her husband, in a small village close to Dublin City, in Co. Meath. They have three children. You can find her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/annmarie-lacy-fewer.

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Alpha Nkuranga, "Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience" (Goose Lane, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 7 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alpha Nkuranga about her deeply powerful and unforgettable memoir, Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience (Goose Lane Editions, 2024).

“My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those three years will not fade in one hundred lifetimes.”

At the age of eight, Alpha Nkuranga made a fateful decision. With war raging around her, she grabbed the hand of her younger brother, Elijah, and ran from her grandparents’ home. When they came to a swamp, they hid until it was safe to escape. Weeks later, they joined a group of refugees, who were fleeing to Tanzania. “If I kept walking,” Alpha remembers thinking, “I could tell my story.”

Nkuranga emigrated to Canada more than a decade later. She now works with women and children who face abuse and homelessness. In Born to Walk, she tells a remarkable story of resistance and survival.

About Alpha Nkuranga:

Alpha Nkuranga fled her village as an eight-year-old during the Rwandan Civil War of 1994 and subsequently lived in refugee camps in Tanzania and Uganda, where she overcame the odds to graduate high school and attend university. She came to Canada as a refugee in 2010 and currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario, where she works for Women’s Crisis Services of Waterloo Region.

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Dennard Dayle, "How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel" (Henry Holt, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 6 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.
How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.
Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler―until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate―until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.
His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.
Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal.

You can find author Dennard Dayle at his newsletter. And I am your host, Sullivan Summer. You can find me online, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Dennard went to talk about Cannonball spoilers.

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Tom Lutz, "1925: A Literary Encyclopedia" (Rare Bird Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 6 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction--detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance--was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention.

This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration--all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and not very far at all.

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Jesse Browner, "Sing to Me" (Little Brown, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 4 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels Sing to Me (Little Brown, 2025) The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here? He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City.

Recommended Books:

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

Dezso Kosztolanyi, Skylark

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Jennifer Kabat, "Nightshining" (Milkweed, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 1 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Nightshining (Milkweed, 2025)

Jennifer Kabat is the author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. She teaches at the school of Visual Arts and the New School. An Apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department.

Recommended Books:

Hélène Bessette, Lily is Crying

Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain

Majula Martin, Last Fire Season

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Libby Buck, "Port Anna" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 1 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

After Gwin Gilmore loses her adjunct teaching job, mother, and boyfriend, she leaves the south and heads for the cottage she’s just inherited on the Maine coast. It’s in the town her family visited every summer, people still remember her, and she has some old friends there, but it’s also filled with terrible memories of her sister’s drowning. And the old houses are slowly giving way to ugly condos and mini mansions. Anna grapples with a teenage runaway, a realtor trying to condemn her cottage, a handsome artist, and the ghosts of previous tenants who make their presence known. This is a beautiful novel about overcoming past failures, finding a community, and moving forward.

Libby Buck earned her BA in English from the University of Virginia, her MA in art history from Columbia University, and PhD. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While her general area of expertise is Nineteenth Century France, her dissertation focused upon the Gustave Moreau museum and its challenge to traditional museology. She taught as a visiting lecturer for over a decade at various institutions, including Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She and her husband raised three daughters in North Carolina, where she still lives with her husband when she is not beside the sea in Downeast Maine.

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Lindsay Zier-Vogel, "The Fun Times Brigade" (Book*hug Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Lindsay Zier-Vogel about her new novel, The Fun Times Brigade (Book*hug Press, 2025).

From acclaimed author Lindsay Zier-Vogel comes an insightful and heart-rending exploration of motherhood, grief, and the search for identity.

Amy is a new mother, navigating the fog of those bewildering early days and struggling with a role she feels ill-prepared for. It’s the first time in a decade that she hasn’t been living the busy life of an acclaimed children’s musician, and her sense of self is unravelling. To make matters worse, her bandmates have seemingly abandoned her.

In flashbacks, we see Amy’s journey to success—her stumblings as a solo singer-songwriter and her eventual rise to fame as a member of the Fun Times Brigade. But as the novel progresses—and Amy grapples with a devastating loss—we come to understand how precarious definitions of artistic success can be.

The Fun Times Brigade examines the enduring challenges of reconciling being an artist with being a mother. It is also a timely reflection on forgiveness and what it really means to have a good life in a world that demands we have—and be—it all, and asserts that amidst the chaos, we can find our way back to our genuine selves.

About Lindsay Zier-Vogel:

LINDSAY ZIER-VOGEL is a Toronto-based author and the creator of the internationally beloved Love Lettering Project. After studying contemporary dance, Zier-Vogel received her MA in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. She is the author of the acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and her first picture book, Dear Street, was a Junior Library Guild pick, a Canadian Children’s Book Centre book of the year, and was nominated for a Forest of Reading Blue Spruce Award in 2024. The Fun Times Brigade is her second novel.

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Bianca Marais, "A Most Puzzling Murder" (Harper Collins, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Bianca Marais about her delightful and highly entertaining new book, A Most Puzzling Murder (Harper Collins, 2025),

How do you solve a murder that hasn't happened yet?
Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!
She decodes the invitation's hidden message with ease, and its promise to reveal her family secrets proves too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for one another.
Their newly arrived guest proves to be just as much an enigma to them as they are to her. While Destiny slowly works to unravel the mysteries hidden throughout the ominous castle, she struggles to interpret disturbing nightly visions of what is to come. In the midst of cryptic ciphers, hidden passages, and the family’s magical line of succession, Destiny is certain of two things: one of the Scruffmores is going to die and she’s running out of time to stop it.
Interspersed with riddles and puzzles that both Destiny and the reader must solve, A Most Puzzling Murder is a one-of-a-kind mystery that will leave you guessing and gasping until the very last page!

About Bianca Marais:

Bianca Marais cohosts the popular podcast The Shit No One Tells You About Writing, which is aimed at helping emerging writers get published. She teaches creative writing through the podcast and was named a winner of the Excellence in Teaching Award for Creative Writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. She lives in Toronto, where she loves playing escape-room games and writing about strong female protagonists.

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Tochi Onyebuchi, "Harmattan Season: A Novel" (Tor Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel Harmattan Season: A Novel (Tor Books, 2025) follows Boubacar, a veteran and private eye living in French occupied West Africa, as he begins a reluctant journey to discover what happened to the bleeding woman who stumbled onto his doorway and vanished soon after. That mystery quickly drags Bouba into exactly the kind of violence and political intrigue he had been working so hard to avoid.

In this interview, Onyebuchi describes finding Boubacar’s voice and the different noir tropes he was most excited about. We discuss fiction as a way to examine colonialism, magic as a tool for social exploration as well as engaging set pieces, and the joy of fast-paced novels. We also talk depictions of violence, world-wise urchin kids, and experimentation and growth throughout a writing career.

Harmattan Season is a compelling and thoughtful adventure and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Jennifer Kabat, "Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods" (Milkweed Editions, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Hello, my name is Eric LeMay, a host on New Books in Literature, a channel on the New Books Network. Today I interview Jennifer Kabat. Kabat is writer I've followed and admired for decades. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Kabat has a mind so sweeping, so generous that no detail escapes it. She writes of history, ecology, art, science, time, place, and epochs with a painter's attention and a poet's heart. Her latest book is called Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods (Milkweed, 2025). She is also the author of The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among many others. Today, she takes us from the first trees to appear on our plant to the aspirations of scientists amid the Cold War to the floods that ravaged her hometown, where she also serves on her local fire department. Enjoy my conversation with Jennifer Kabat.

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John DeVore, "Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway" (Applause, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with John Devore about his phenomenal memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, 2024).

Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands.

In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.
The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.
An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre and the weirdos who bring it to life, Theatre Kids is DeVore’s buoyant, irreverent, and ultimately moving account of outsize ambition and dashed hopes in post-9/11, pre-iPhone New York City. Sharply observed and bursting with hilarious razzle-dazzle, it will resonate with anyone who has ever, perhaps against their better judgment, tried to bring something beautiful into the world without regard for riches or fame.

About John DeVore:

John DeVore is a two-time James Beard Award–winning writer and editor who has worked for The New York Post, SiriusXM, and Conan O’Brien's Team Coco. He's also written for Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Marvel Comics, among many others. John lives in Brooklyn with his partner and their one-eyed mutt.

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Pria Anand "The Elephant's Child" The Common Magazine (Spring, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Pria Anand speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Elephant’s Child,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The piece is a vivid retelling of a Hindu myth, the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Pria talks about the process of writing and revising many versions of this ancient myth, why she felt inspired by it, and how her literary writing intersects with her career as a neurologist. Pria also discusses her debut book, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, out this month from Simon & Schuster. The book explores how story and storytelling can illuminate the rich, complex gray areas within the science of the brain, weaving case study, history, fable, and memoir.

Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric, out from Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Little, Brown in the U.K. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She is now an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center.

Read Prias’s story “The Elephant’s Child” in The Common at thecommononline.org/the-elephants-child.

Order The Mind Electric in all formats via Simon & Schuster at simonandschuster.com/books/The-Mind-Electric/.

Learn more about Pria at www.priaanand.com.

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Naomi Xu Elegant, "Gingko Season: A Novel" (W. W. Norton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season (W. W. Norton: 2025), stars Penelope Lin, a young Chinese woman living in New York in the faraway year of 2018. With difficult parents and a bad break-up, she works for a museum’s exhibition on bound feet, with a gaggle of other, somewhat clueless friends. But a meeting with Hoang, a researcher at a cancer lab, forces Penelope to rethink what she wants with her life.

Naomi joins me today to talk about her book, her choice of characters, how she wanted to approach tropes like the meet-cute—and why 2018 now feels like ancient history, even to young-ish millennials.

Naomi Xu Elegant is a writer and journalist living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Monocle, Fortune, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Kay Sohini, "This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir" (Ten Speed Graphic, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kay Sohini about her graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir (published by Ten Speed Graphic, 2025).
A vibrant graphic memoir of a woman—an immigrant, a survivor, a writer, a foodie, and, ultimately, an optimist—who rebuilds her life in New York City while recovering from the trauma of an abusive relationship. “An intimate portrait of the city not only as a place of dreams, but as a vital source for healing and self-discovery.”—Nick Sousanis, Eisner Award–winning author of Unflattening On her first night in New York City, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK Airport making an inventory of everything she’s left behind in India: her family, friends, home, and gaslighting ex-boyfriend. In the wake of that untethering she realizes two things: she’s finally made it to the city of her literary heroes—Kerouac, Plath, Bechdel—and the trauma she’s endured has created gaping holes in her memory. As Kay begins the work of piecing herself back together she discovers the deep sense of belonging that can only be found on the streets of New York City. In the process she falls beautifully, ridiculously in love with the bustling landscape, and realizes that the places we love do not always love us back but can still somehow save us in weird, unexpected ways. At once heartbreaking and uplifting, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City explores the relationship between trauma and truth, displacement and belonging, and what it means to forge a life of one’s own.

About Kay Sohini:

Kay Sohini is a South Asian researcher, writer, and graphic novelist based in New York. She holds a PhD in English from Stony Brook University and her essays and comics have been featured in The Washington Post, The Nib, and more. Her work focuses on utilizing comics in the scholarly examination of healthcare justice, environmental humanities, resisting disinformation, and creating an equitable future for all. This Beautiful, Ridiculous City is her first book.

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Tie Ning, Annelise Finegan trans., "My Sister's Red Shirt" (Sinoist Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challenging hypocrisy, unlike the older Anjing, whose memories of a turbulent past remind her of the perils of going against the grain.

When Anran is gifted a stylish red shirt that becomes the talk of their sleepy hometown, adolescent delight is construed by her cynical teachers as another act of defiance. As they decide the young firebrand’s future, certain lessons can’t be avoided. Should Anjing shield her sibling from life’s hard truths, or will she let her blaze her own path?

First published in China in 1984, Tie Ning’s bestselling coming-of-age novella My Sister's Red Shirt (Sinoist Books, 2025), translated into English by Dr. Annelise Finegan, depicts the loss of innocence and the challenges of being true to yourself in an era of unpredictable transformation.

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Kathryn Mockler, "Anecdotes" (Book*hug Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kathryn Mocker about her wildy acclaimed award-winning collection of hyrbrid fiction/prose poetry/autofiction, Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023).

With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.

Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.

“We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls.

“This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries, and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.

In “My Dream House,” the past and the future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.

These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.

Anecdotes has been a:

Winner of the 2024 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist for the 2024 VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres Award
Finalist for the 2024 Fred Kerner Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Trillium Book Award
Finalist for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award

KATHRYN MOCKLER is the author of five poetry books and the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and runs the literary newsletter Send My Love to Anyone. She teaches screenwriting and fiction in the Writing Department at the University of Victoria.

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Simon Tolkien, "The Palace at the End of the Sea: A Novel" (Lake Union Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

A young man comes of age and crosses continents in search of an identity--and a cause--at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War in a thrilling, timely, and emotional historical saga.

New York City, 1929. Young Theo Sterling's world begins to unravel as the Great Depression exerts its icy grip. He finds it hard to relate to his parents: His father, a Jewish self-made businessman, refuses to give up on the American dream, and his mother, a refugee from religious persecution in Mexico, holds fast to her Catholic faith. When disaster strikes the family, Theo must learn who he is. A charismatic school friend and a firebrand girl inspire him to believe he can fight Fascism and change the world, but each rebellion comes at a higher price, forcing Theo to question these ideologies too.

From New York's Lower East Side to an English boarding school to an Andalusian village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Theo's harrowing journey from boy to man is set against a backdrop of societies torn apart from within, teetering on the edge of a terrible war to which Theo is compulsively drawn like a moth to a flame.

The Palace at the End of the Sea: A Novel (Lake Union Publishing, 2025)

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Alice Fitzpatrick, "A Dark Death" (Stonehouse Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN interview, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Toronto author Alice Fitzpatrick about new her mystery, A Dark Death (Stonehouse Publishing, 2025). This female-led literary detective novel has been delighting readers.

About A Dark Death:

Kate Galway is looking forward to a quiet summer working on her latest novel at her home on Meredith Island. For a place hardly anyone has heard of, her sleepy Welsh island is attracting a lot of visitors, including a conman posing as a psychic and group of archaeology students who believe they’ve unearthed evidence of a Roman temple. Part-way through the dig, however, the students make an even more startling discovery: a body ritualistically laid out in their trench. While intrigued by the murder, amateur sleuth Kate decides to leave this investigation to the professionals. However, when she learns that both the island mechanic and her university friend’s son are prime suspects, she and artist Siobhan Fitzgerald feel they have no choice but to get involved.

More about Alice:

Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed various short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and has recently retired from teaching in order to devote herself to writing full-time. She is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma. Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of Meredith Island. The traditional mystery appeals to her keen interest in psychology as she is intrigued by what makes seemingly ordinary people commit murder. Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast. To learn more about Alice and her writing, please visit her website at www.alicefitzpatrick.com.

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Christy Climenhage, "The Midnight Project" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Christy Climenhage, the author of the highly-anticipated science fiction thriller, The Midnight Project (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) Julie E. Czerneda, author of To Each This World, calls this novel “an absolute triumph.”

About The Midnight Project:

In this near-future science fiction thriller, Christy Climenhage has created a frighteningly real world on the verge of collapse. As disaster strikes, the two friends need to decide whether to cling to their old life or to let go and embrace a new path for humanity.

When enigmatic billionaire Burton Sykes walks into Re-Gene-eration, a bespoke reproduction assistance clinic run by Raina and Cedric, two disgraced genetic engineers struggling to get by, they know they have a very unusual client. When Sykes asks them to genetically engineer a way for humanity to survive the coming ecological apocalypse, Raina is tempted. Bees are dying, crops are failing, and she knows her research is partly to blame. Could she help in some way? Though troubled, Cedric agrees to take part when it becomes clear their benefactor will do this with or without them. How else can he be sure their work won’t fall into the wrong hands? But can they really trust Mr. Sykes?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christy Climenhage was born in southern Ontario, Canada, and currently lives in a forest north of Ottawa. In between, she has lived on four continents. She holds a PhD from Cambridge University in Political and Social Sciences, and Masters’ degrees from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University (International Political Economy) and the College of Europe (European Politics and Administration). She loves writing science fiction that pushes the boundaries of our current society, politics and technology. When she is not writing, you can find her walking her dogs, hiking or cross-country skiing.

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Kevin Nguyen, "My Documents" (One World, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Kevin Nguyen, My Documents (One World, 2025)

Kevin Nguyen is the author of the novel New Waves, published in 2020. He is the features editor at The Verge, where he publishes award-winning stories about labor, business, and policing, and was previously a senior editor at GQ. He lives in Brooklyn.

Recommended Books:

Annelise Chen, Clam Down

Tash Aw, The South

Ian Penman, Eric Satie Three Piece Suite

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Omneya Ayad, "Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s Understanding of the Divine Word" (Routledge, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Love in Sufi Literature: Ibn ‘Ajiba’s Understanding of the Divine Word (Routledge, 2023) explores the role of divine love in the Quranic commentary of the Moroccan Sufi scholar Aḥmad Ibn ʿAjība (d. 1224/1809). Through close textual analysis of Ibn ʿAjība’s exegesis al-Baḥr al-madīd—The Abundant Ocean—and drawing on his other Sufi writings the book illuminates the scholar’s theory of divine love, drawn from his scholarly antecedents, to elucidate its role and the scholar’s impact on the wider field of Quranic scholarship. This close analysis is supplemented by a comparative approach focusing on several other eminent and influential Sufi commentaries.

What is displayed is that Ibn ʿAjība’s exegesis connected theoretical works on the concept of divine love to their practical application, a breakthrough in Sufi literature. The study situates Ibn ‘Ajība’s thought in theological and historical perspective, engaging with his mystical approach which integrates his theory of divine love with other Sufi doctrines in an accessible manner. As such, the Moroccan scholar’s work left an indelible impact on future generations of Quranic exegetes within North Africa and across the Islamic world.

Love in Sufi Literature makes important contributions to the study of Sufism, Islam in North Africa, and late pre-modern Islamic intellectual history.

Omneya Ayad is Assistant Professor of Sufi Studies at Üsküdar University in Istanbul, Türkiye.

Yaseen Christian Andrewsen is a DPhil Candidate at the University of Oxford specialising in Islamic intellectual history in West Africa, focused on issues in Sufism, theology, and authority. Yaseen is a co-host for the New Books in Islamic Studies podcast.

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Yasmine Motawy, "Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society" (AUC Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Children’s picture books are some of the most transparently ideological materials available to parents and educators, and as cultural objects they are an expression of the zeitgeist of a particular era. They reveal much about the hopes, values, and aspirations of the society that produces them, as well as that society’s vision of its place in the wider world at large.
Children’s Picture Books and Contemporary Egyptian Society (AUC Press, 2025) by Dr. Yasmine Motawy examines a new wave of Egyptian picture books that was published in the current century to see how these books responded to larger societal trends and transformations in Egypt, as well as to explore the ideologies that lie behind them. Dr. Motawy argues that a host of factors, including the growth of gated communities and international schooling, the proliferation of lucrative literary awards, returning Gulf migrants, television dramas, and nationwide reading advocacy initiatives helped give rise to a new kind of children’s picture book in Egypt.
Dr. Motawy focuses on three clusters of selected picture books to investigate the extent to which these books reproduce hegemonic discourses or, alternatively, open up new horizons of childhood agency and societal transformation. The first cluster includes books that directly socialize the child by showing them ‘how things are done,’ in both the domestic sphere and the increasing globalized spaces that children frequent with their families. The second cluster aims at reframing cultural notions around femininity through the retelling of folk and fairy tales, while the third cluster addresses children's abilities to assess the impact of their actions on their environment, and invites them to examine their personal suitability to positions of power and stewardship.

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Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, "Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings" (Harper, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois and The Age of Phillis makes her nonfiction debut with this personal and thought-provoking work that explores the journeys and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads.

Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays and Writings (Harper, 2025), Jeffers explores the emotional and historical tensions in Black women’s public lives and her own private life. She charts voyages of Black girlhood to womanhood and the currents buffeting these journeys, including the difficulties of racially gendered oppression, the challenges of documenting Black women’s ancestry; the adultification of Black girls; the irony of Black female respectability politics; the origins of Womanism/Black feminism; and resistance to White supremacy and patriarchy. As Jeffers shows with empathy and wisdom, naming difficult historical truths represents both Blues and transcendence, a crossroads that speaks.

Necessary and sharply observed, provocative and humane, and full of the insight and brilliance that has characterized her poetry and fiction, Misbehaving at the Crossroads illustrates the life of one extraordinary Black woman—and her extraordinary foremothers.

Find author Honorée Fannone Jeffers at her website, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack.

Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, Instagram, and Substack.

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Helen Sheehy, "Just Willa" (Cave Hollow Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Just Willa (Cave Hollow Press, 2025) is a family chronicle of rare beauty-more than reminiscent of Willa Cather in capturing the regional flavors of America-stretching over a span of decades through an intimate focus on the life of one woman. In it, Helen Sheehy gives us a character of indomitable spirit who fuels and anchors her family with love and bravery.

We meet Willa Hardesty in 1964, while she's burning trash in a barrel and thinking "this is hell." Angry and frustrated, she finds some items she had long forgotten, and remembers that she had once been happy. In the ensuing chapters Willa's life unfolds like a tapestry, beginning in 1927 when she's eleven, about to accompany her mother on a train ride from Oklahoma to Missouri.

Just Willa shows us a world filled with people and struggles both realistic and relatable-a world that is beautiful, despite its hardships.

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Leah Lax, "Not From Here: the Song of America" (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

When Leah Lax was asked to write an opera to celebrate local immigrants, she began by spending a year listening to accounts of upheaval, migration, and arrival told her in confidence by people from around the globe. She felt she had discovered America, found its great beating heart.

In interludes between the astounding and powerful stories in Not From Here: the Song of America (Pegasus Elliot MacKenzie, 2024), Leah uncovers the lost history of her Jewish family and finds a larger context for her own story. "In a way," she writes, "we Americans are all immigrants."

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Ana Hebra Flaster, "Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town" (She Writes Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries themselves but disillusioned by the Castro government’s repressive tactics, they fled to the US. The permanent losses they suffered—of home, country, and loved ones, all within forty-eight hours—haunted her multigenerational family as they reclaimed their lives and freedom in 1967 New Hampshire. There, they fed each other stories of their scrappy barrio—some of which Hebra Flaster has shared on All Things Considered—to resurrect their lost world and fortify themselves for a daunting task: building a new life in a foreign land.
Weaving pivotal events in Cuba–US history with her viejos’—elders’—stories of surviving political upheaval, impossible choices, and “refugeedom,” Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town (She Writes Press, 2025) celebrates the indomitable spirit and wisdom of the women warriors who led the family out of Cuba, shaped its rebirth as Cuban Americans, and helped Ana grow up hopeful, future-facing—American. But what happens when deeply buried childhood memories resurface, demanding an adult’s reckoning?
Here’s how the fiercest love, the most stubborn will, and the power of family put nine new Americans back on their feet.

Ana Hebra Flaster has written about Cuba and the Cuban American experience for national print and online media including The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Boston Globe. Her commentaries and storytelling have aired on NPR and PBS’s Stories from the Stage. Ana writes about the ongoing struggle for freedom and human rights in Cuba in her popular Substack, CubaCurious.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Catherine Bush, "Skin" (Goose Lane Editions, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with one of Canada's most beloved novelists, Catherine Bush, about her debut collection of short fiction, Skin (Goose Lane Editions, 2025).

In Skin, Catherine Bush plunges into the vortex of all that shapes us. Summoning relationships between the human and more-than-human, she explores a world where touch and intimacy are both desirable and fraught.

Ranging from the realistic to the speculative, Bush’s stories tackle the condition of our restless, unruly world amidst the tumult of viruses, climate change, and ecological crises. Here, she brings to life unusual and perplexing intimacies: a man falls in love with the wind; a substitute teacher’s behaviour with a student brings unforeseen risks; a woman becomes fixated on offering foot washes to strangers.

Bold, vital, and unmistakably of the moment, Skin gives a charged and animating voice to the question of how we face the world and how, in the process, we discover tenderness and allow ourselves to be transformed.

Catherine Bush is the author of five novels. Her work has been critically acclaimed, published internationally, and shortlisted for numerous awards. Her most recent novel, Blaze Island, was a Globe and Mail and Writers’ Trust of Canada Best Book of the Year, and the Hamilton Reads 2021 Selection. Her other novels include the Canada Reads longlisted Accusation; the Trillium Award shortlisted Claire's Head; the national bestselling The Rules of Engagement, which was also named a New York Times Notable Book and a L.A. Times Best Book of the Year; and Minus Time, shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. The recipient of numerous fellowships, Bush has been Writer-in-Residence/Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society in Munich and a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the HWK in Delmenhorst, Germany. An Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, she lives in Toronto and in an old schoolhouse in Eastern Ontario.

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Connor Lafortune and Lindsay Mayhew eds., "A Thousand Tiny Awakenings" (Latitude 46, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with co-editors and poets, Connor Lafortune and Lindsay Mayhew about their anthology, A Thousand Tiny Awakenings. A Thousand Tiny Awakenings (Latitude 46, 2025) is a collection of poems and creative non-fiction that explores the creative voice of those eighteen to thirty years of age. A new generation with a desire to dismantle the restrictive systems that define the past, but not their future. A Thousand Tiny Awakenings offers a glimpse into how a new generation perceives the world and how they use their own power to shape the future.

Connor Lafortune is from Dokis First Nation on Robinson Huron Treaty territory of 1850 in Northeastern Ontario. He works primarily in Life Promotion, harm-reduction, mental health, and Indigenous education. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree at Nipissing University with a Double Honors Major in Indigenous Studies and Gender Equality and Social Justice. He is currently in the Masters in Indigenous Relations at Laurentian University. Connor is Anishinaabek, Queer, and Francophone; he uses his understanding of the world to shape his creations as a writer, spoken word poet, and musician. Connor often combines the written word with traditional Indigenous beadwork and sewing to recreate the stories of colonization, showcase resilience, and imagine a new future. He recently released a single in collaboration with Juno Award winner G.R. Gritt titled “Qui crie au loup? ft. Connor Lafortune.” Above all else, Connor is an activist, a shkaabewis (helper), and a compassionate human being.

Lindsay Mayhew (she/her) is a spoken word poet and author from Sudbury, Ontario. She is a recent English Literature Master’s graduate from the University of Guelph. Lindsay is the multi-year champion of Wordstock Sudbury’s poetry slam, a runner up in the 2024 Womxn of the World poetry slam, and she has featured in events across Ontario, including the YWCA, JAYU Canada, Nuit Blanche, and Wordstock Literary Festival. Lindsay’s written work can be found in the Literary Review of Canada, Moria, and multiple editions of Sulphur. Her work combines art and theory to voice feminist futures and human rights advocacy.

About the EditorsConnor LafortuneLindsay Mayhew

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Daryl Sneath, "In the Country in the Dark" (Signature Editions, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews fellow rural Ontario author Daryl Sneath about his 2024 novel, In the Country in the Dark (Signature Editions).

When Landon and Joy meet they feel an instant connection and quickly become inseparable. One day shortly after they've met, they take a trip to view The Hart Farm, an idyllic property located in a remote area. It's perfect, with room for Landon to set up his carpentry shop and Joy to have an art studio. The real estate agent feels complete disclosure of the property's tragic and potentially violent past is necessary but Landon and Joy decide ignorance is bliss and ask to not be told the details. They're in love and smitten with the farm and decide on the spot to buy it.
As they spend their days creating art, reading, cooking for each other, listening to music, and making love, they can barely believe their good fortune. However, when the heat of summer--as well as their initial infatuation--begins to wane, Landon and Joy realize how little they know about each other or the house they now call home. They begin to feel a mounting sense of danger and uncertainty about what they used to delight in--the mysterious and tragic history of The Hart Farm, the wolves that prowl in the dark of night, and the near stranger they share a bed with.
In the Country in the Dark is a thrilling psychological exploration of the secrets we keep and why, the obsessions we live with, the love we all need, the family we sometimes find--and the lengths we might go to keep it.
About Daryl Sneath:

Daryl Sneath is an author and high school English and Philosophy teacher from rural Ontario. He is the author of three novels, In the Country in the Dark, As the Current Pulls the Fallen Under, and All My Sins. Daryl holds an MA in Literature & Creative Writing from The University of Windsor. His poetry and fiction have been published in journals including The Antigonish Review, Prism international, Wascana Review, Nashwaak Review, paperplates, Zouch Magazine, Quilliad, FreeFall, Filling Station, The Dalhousie Review, and The Literary Review of Canada. One of his short stories was longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize.

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Callista Markotich, "Wrap in a Big White Towel" (Frontenac House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kingston, Ontario poet Callista Markotich about her poetry collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel. Callista’s powerful first collection is an imperative: Wrap in a Big White Towel. When the spirit trembles, when imagination shrinks from a torched world, when empathy drowns you, protect yourself, seek solace. Then emerge with ruthless honesty and clarity into the cathartic space you’ve made, speaking the names of the dead. “Unmoored, I swing / into a long black chute, a tunnel rush in / starless night, a schuss, deep, deep, // and something cool upon my lips.” Markotich’s debut is full of restless experimentation and harmony. Her inimitable poetic voice is saturated with kindness and brilliance, sizzle and pop.

About Callista Markotich:

Callista Markotich was a finalist for the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize, and has been nominated for Pushcart and National Magazine Awards. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. She lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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Rob Franklin, "Great Black Hope" (Summit Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025)

Born and raised in Atlanta, Rob Franklin is a writer of fiction, criticism, and poetry, and a cofounder of Art for Black Lives. A Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writer prize, he has published work in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus among others. Franklin holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from NYU’s Creative Writing program. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the School of Visual Arts.

Book Recommendations:

Katie Kitamura, Audition

Josh Duboff, Early Thirties

Alexis Okeowo, Blessings and Disasters

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Amie Souza Reilly, "Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 9 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Amie Souza Reilly bought an old house in the suburbs. She had just gotten remarried and was looking forward to a new start with her new husband and her six-year-old son. But immediately after moving in, the next-door neighbors began a crusade to push them out. The two brothers followed her, peered in her windows, stood in her yard, trapped her inside her car. As they broke boundary after suburban boundary, she found herself implicated in their violence. Human/Animal merges personal narrative and cultural criticism to unleash the complicated relationship between instinct and action, violence and regret. This bestiary-in-essays wrestles American colonialism, horror films, feminism, and gender studies to confront the intrusive neighbors the author could not. Ultimately, this book asks larger questions about proximity, care, and the line between human and animal. Illustrated with the author's own sketches, Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025) grapples not only with Reilly's place in her neighborhood, but with America's past and current political climate.

Amie Souza Reilly is an American writer and artist from Milford, Connecticut. She holds an MA in Literature from Fordham University and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Fairfield University. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Atticus Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches and is the Writer-in-Residence at Sacred Heart University.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

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Jack Wang, "The Riveter" (HarperVia, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 9 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Jack Wang about his novel, The Riveter (HarperVia, 2025).

In the vein of All the Light We Cannot See, a cross-cultural love story set against the dramatic backdrop of the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII.

Vancouver, 1942. Josiah Chang arrives in the bustling city ready to make a new life for himself. The Second World War is in full swing, and Josiah, like so many Canadians, wants to prove his loyalty by serving his country. But Chinese Canadians are barred from joining the army out of fear they might expect citizenship in return. So, Josiah heads to the shipyard where he finds work as a riveter, fastening together the ribs and steel plates of Victory ships.

One night, Josiah spots Poppy singing at a navy club. Despite their different backgrounds, they fall for each other instantly, and soon Josiah is spending his nights at Poppy’s small wartime house. Their starry-eyed romance lasts until Poppy’s father comes to visit and the harsh reality of their situation is made clear. Determined to prove himself to Poppy, her parents, and the world, Josiah travels to Toronto where he’s finally given the chance to enlist. Josiah rises to the occasion, but is the world changing as fast as his dreams…

From the critically acclaimed author of We Two Alone, Jack Wang’s gorgeous debut novel explores what one man must sacrifice to belong in the only home he has ever truly known.

About Jack Wang:

JACK WANG is the author of the story collection WE TWO ALONE (House of Anansi Press, 2020; HarperVia, 2021), shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize and winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award from the Writers’ Union of Canada for best debut collection in English. His fiction has appeared in Brick, PRISM international, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Humber Literary Review, and Joyland and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize. In 2014–15, he held the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and in 2020, he was awarded a residency at Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD from Florida State University, and he is an associate professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. Originally from Vancouver, he lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, novelist Angelina Mirabella, and their two daughters.

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Teri Vlassopoulos, "Living Expenses" (Invisible Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 8 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Toronto author Teri Vlassopoulos, author of Living Expenses—a timely tale of reproductive health in an age of both technological and geographical distance. The novel has roots in Teri’s own struggle with infertility.

More about Living Expenses:
As the children of a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. That is, until Claire moves to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Enter the slow, hopeful, devastating process of fertility treatments. While Laura prepares for IVF, Claire has her own encounter with the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters’ lives, from communication to reproduction.

“Vlassopoulos captures the seemingly endless heartbreak, bone-deep frustration, and often invisible emotional strain of infertility with both a realistic and empathetic eye. Living Expenses takes us on Laura’s complex journey and illuminates a rarely discussed yet all too common grief, doing so with humanity and heart. A thoughtful, compelling read about the challenges and benefits of holding onto hope.”—Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice

About Vlassopoulos:

TERI VLASSOPOULOS has published two books, a collection of short stories, Bats or Swallows (Invisible Publishing), which was nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and a novel, Escape Plans (Invisible Publishing). Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in Room Magazine, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, The Quarantine Review, Open Book, and more. She also publishes a regular Substack newsletter, Bibliographic. She lives in Toronto.

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Melia McClure, "All the World's a Wonder" (Radiant Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 7 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author and actor Melia McClure about her novel, All The World's a Wonder (Radiant Press, 2023).

A playwright possessed by her muses, an actress desperate to succeed, and a doctor haunted by a lost love. Three people cross time and space to meet through the playwright's bizarre creative process: to create, the playwright must become her characters; to tell her tragic story, the actress must speak from the grave; to heal his harrowing past, the doctor must surrender to his patient - the playwright.

About Melia McClure:

Melia McClure is the author of the novel The Delphi Room and continues to delve into the eccentric as a writer, editor, and actor. As an actor, she has traversed a range of realms, from a turn as Juliet in an abridged collage of Shakespeare's classic to the sci-fi universe of Stargate Atlantis. Melia studied writing at The Writer's Studio at Simon Fraser University, and her fiction was shortlisted for a CBC Literary Award. Born in Vancouver, she has since travelled the world in search of the ever-shapeshifting muse

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Lindsay Wong, "Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality: Stories" (Penguin, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 7 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, Hollay Ghadery speaks with Lindsay Wong about her short story collection, Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality (Penguin, 2023).

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BC AND YUKON JIM DEVA PRIZE FOR WRITING THAT PROVOKES
From the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettling ways.
Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.
There’s a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can’t manage to die. Grandmama Wu, who returns from the dead to protect her grandchildren from bullies. Not to mention an Internet-order bride who inadvertently brings the apocalypse to Nebraska City.
From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted—by first loves, troublesome family members, and traumatic memories. Intertwining horror, the supernatural, and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality riotously critiques contemporary life and fearlessly illuminates the ways in which the past can devour us. A collection about transformation and what makes us human, it solidifies Lindsay Wong as one of the most vital and electrifying voices in Canadian literature today.

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Kevin Potter, "Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Since the 1980s, readers and scholars alike have celebrated migrant literature for not only depicting migration, but for inspiring reflections on class, race, gender, nations, and mobility. But, beyond depicting migration, is it possible for migrant literature to be a force of movement itself? Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion calls upon the philosophy of movement and a counter-history of migration to invent a theory and method for analysing migrant literature. The text uncovers patterns of movement that migrant texts enact and create – in other words, a movement-oriented poetics. Poetics of the Migrant understands movement as the defining force of human history; and the migrant is the primary figure of cultural and political transformation. Migrant literature makes it possible to transform how we process and interpret social history through social motion. Perhaps, from here, we can imagine a different world: one where movement and migrancy are legible and thinkable.

About Kevin Potter:

Kevin Potter is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English & American Studies at the University of Vienna. His research and teaching primarily focus on Marxist theory, migrant literature, anarchist thought, dystopian fiction, and Palestine. His first book, Poetics of the Migrant was released in 2023 through Edinburgh University Press, and received honorable mention for the 2024 Hugh J. Silverman Prize from the Association for Philosophy and Literature.

About Pavan Mano:

Pavan Mano is Lecturer in Global Cultures in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities at King's College London (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/p...). He works at the intersections of critical & literary theory, politics and culture. His first monograph, Straight Nation, interrogates postcolonial nationalism and the governance of sexuality in Singapore (https://manchesteruniversitypr...).

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Dave Margoshes, "A Simple Carpenter" (Radiant Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 6 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Dave Margoshes’ novel, A Simple Carpenter (Radiant Press, 2024)—which recently won a Saskatchewan Book Award and the Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction.

Set in the early and mid-‘80s in the Middle East, A Simple Carpenter plays out against a backdrop of strife in Lebanon and ethnic/religious tensions between Jews and Arabs in Israel and Palestine. This historical backdrop serves as an empathetic and thoughtful commentary on our modern political climate.

Part biblical fable, part magic realism, and part thriller, A Simple Carpenter follows the epic journey of a ship’s carpenter stranded on a small Mediterranean island and visited by a frightening mysterious creature. He’s lost his memory but has acquired the ability to speak, write and understand all languages. After his rescue, he spends time in a Lebanese coastal village recuperating with a group of nuns who, observing him perform what appear to be small miracles, take him to be the second coming of Jesus Christ. Later in Beirut he’s hired as a translator for the UN peacekeeping force, and is recruited as a messenger for a group named Black September. On a quest to find his true identity he travels on foot across the hills to the Sea of Galilee, encountering a series of strange and magical communities evoking biblical times along the way.

More about Dave Margoshes:

Dave Margoshes is a Saskatoon-area poet and fiction writer. He began his writing life as a journalist, working as a reporter and editor on a number of daily newspapers in the U.S. and Canada, and has taught journalism and creative writing.
He has published twenty books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. His work has appeared widely in literary magazines and anthologies, in Canada and beyond, including six times in the Best Canadian Stories volumes; he’s been nominated for the Journey Prize several times and was a finalist in 2009. His Bix’s Trumpet and Other Stories won two prizes at the 2007 Saskatchewan Book Awards, including Book of the Year. He also won the Poetry Prize in 2010 for Dimensions of an Orchard. His collection of linked short stories, A Book of Great Worth, was named one of Amazon. CA’s Top Hundred Books of 2012. Other prizes include the City of Regina Writing Award, twice; the Stephen Leacock Prize for Poetry in 1996 and the John V. Hicks Award for fiction in 2001.

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We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 5 Jun 2025 13:32:00 +0000

Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí begin their conversation considering translation as a living process, one that is internal to the novel form. Álvaro, author of the trippy You Dreamed of Empires (Riverhead, 2024), explains how the opening letter to his translator Natasha mirrors the letter to his editor, Teresa, in Spanish, and how both letters become part of the fiction. Fitting for a novel that crosses Nahua and Mayan, Moctezuma and Cortés, Mexican history and the glam rock band T. Rex. The English translation—which Álvaro calls the book of Natasha—is longer, filled with changes and additions and revisions, and so translation becomes “another life for the book.” From the living book to its contents, Maia asks how You Dreamed of Empires blends the gorgeous and the grotesque, slapstick humor and extreme violence, historical detail and mischievous metafictional departures. Álvaro links his work to Season 9’s theme of TECH by pointing out the novel’s longstanding use as a tool to laugh about the powerful, to tell them that what they’re saying is not true, and to articulate politics through contradiction and humor. After discussing the encounter of Moctezuma and Cortés (or really, of their translators, including a very magical bite of cactus) as the moment that changes everything in history, Álvaro makes a surprising historical swerve in his answer to this season’s signature question.

Mentions:
Álvaro Enrigue, Sudden Death, You Dreamed of Empires, Now I Surrender
Nahua
Natasha Wimmer
Teresa Ariño, Anagrama
Sergio Pitol, Enrique Vila-Matas, Javier Marías, Roberto Bolaño
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote; Laurence Sterne; Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Octavio Paz saying New Spain was a kingdom in One Earth, Four or Five Worlds: Reflections on Contemporary History, translated by Helen R. Lane.
Edward Said
Lèse-majesté
T. Rex, “Monolith”
Gonzalo Guerrero
The Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco
José Emilio Pacheco
Michel Foucault
Michelangelo
Saint Paul, Epistle to the Romans
Noam Chomsky
Tlaxcalas

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Anthony Bidulka, "Home Fires Burn" (Stonehouse Publishing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 4 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery has a wonderful conversation with many-time award-winning author, Anthony Bidulka.

Bidulka’s books have been shortlisted for Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, Saskatchewan Book Awards, a ReLit award, and Lambda Literary Awards. Flight of Aquavit was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Best Men’s Mystery, making Bidulka the first Canadian to win in that category. In 2023, in addition to being shortlisted for a Saskatchewan Book Award and Alberta Book Publishing Award, Going to Beautiful won an Independent Publisher Book Award being named Gold Medalist as the 2023 Canada West Best Overall Fiction novel and was awarded the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence as Canada’s Best Crime Novel for 2023.

ABOUT HOME FIRES BURN (June 1, 2025, Stonehouse Publishing):

From the author of Crime Writers of Canada Best Crime Novel, Going to Beautiful, comes the final, standalone book of the Merry Bell trilogy. A celebrated philanthropist is found slumped against his car, frozen to death. Trans private investigator Merry Bell is hired by his son, country music star Evan Whatley, to find out the truth behind what really happened on that desolate stretch of road. As Merry’s investigation uncovers old wounds that never healed, her own are revealed as she confronts her pre-transition past and questions the boundaries of family and friendship.

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Jacob McArthur Mooney, "The Northern: A Novel" (ECW Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jacob McArthur Mooney about his debut novel, The Northern, published by ECW Press in 2025.

“The Northern is both a tender-hearted, contemplative coming-of-age novel and adventure-filled road trip story that brings a unique time in sports history to life.” ― Zoe Whittall, author of The Fake and The Best Kind of People

“W.P. Kinsella has company: Jacob Mooney has written another classic Canadian novel about baseball.” ― Ben Lindbergh, co-host of Effectively Wild and author of The MVP Machine and The Only Rule Is It Has to Work

It is the summer of 1952 and three men ― well, one man and two boys ― are on a spiritual and commercial mission. Dispatched from Minnesota to Western Ontario, they have been hired by an upstart Mormon baseball card company to find licensees for their products among the young men filing out Korean War–era rosters in the Northern League, at the bottom-most rung of professional baseball. What the Northern has for them, and the secrets and deceptions they have for each other, will drive their two weeks in Canada into ever-growing chaos.

With a world shaped by the trauma of World War II and the generations of deflated adults and orphaned children left behind by it, The Northern sets out on a clear-eyed and psychologically precise character study taking on grief, fantasy, adolescence, and family. As the narrator for this story of salesmen and ambitious athletes, 12-year-old Chris is a budding acerbic, able to be carried away by the ― often empty ― hopes of others and put his feet in the ground to stop them.

A novel concerned with sports, labor, growing up, and God, The Northern is a funny and heartbreaking book about the series of disappointments that characterize the progress of growing up.

About Jacob McArthur Mooney:

Jacob McArthur Mooney’s work has been shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Trillium Award in Poetry. An MFA graduate from the University of Guelph, he lives in Toronto with his partner, the novelist Alexis von Konigslow, and their son. The Northern is his fifth book and first novel.

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Andy Oler, "Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature" (LSU Press, 2019)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 2 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In light of recent conversations about the crisis of masculinity, let's revisit Dr. Andy Oler's book Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature. I sat down with Dr. Oler to discuss the persistent anxiety about masculinity, the role of regional literature in American modernism, and the need for an expansive definition of the Midwest. We also talked about literary representation of futuristic equipment such as the cabbage transplanter. And for our scholar friends, Dr. Oler offers tips on how to secure texts that are not available in libraries or archives.

Andy Oler is a professor in the Department of Humanities and Communication at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach.

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Andrew Forbes, "McCurdle's Arm: A Fiction" (Invisible Publishing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 1 Jun 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Andrew Forbes about his phenomenal novella, McCurdle’s Arm: A Fiction (Invisible Publishing, July 16, 2024).

Southern Ontario, 1892. The Ashburnham Pine Groves are a semi-professional baseball club in the South Western Ontario Base-Ball Players’ Association, sponsored by the Grafton Brewery, makers of Ashburnham’s Famous Pine Grove Ale. When sober the Ashburnham players are an impressive group, though coarse and occasionally cretinous, and as with any collection of men, not without their peculiarities. Robert James McCurdle is one of their most formidable pitchers, though he understands that his body won’t let him perform at a high level forever. McCurdle’s Arm is an account of a particular man in his particular time, playing a version of baseball devoid of the comforts of the modern game, rife with violence, his employment always precarious. Against this backdrop McCurdle must choose between his love for the game and his desire to be reunited with the woman who loves him.

About Andrew Forbes:

Andrew Forbes is the author of the novel The Diapause (Invisible, October 1, 2024), the novella McCurdle’s Arm: A Fiction (Invisible Publishing, July 16, 2024), and the essay collection Field Work: On Baseball and Making a Living (Assembly Press, April 15, 2025). He is also the author of two books of short fiction and two earlier collections of baseball writing. His work has appeared in publications such as the Toronto Star, Canadian Notes and Queries, and Maisonneuve Magazine. He was the 2019 Margaret Laurence Fellow at Trent University, and served on the jury of the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Forbes lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health,moir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Me

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Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi, "One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature" (U Arkansas Press, 2010)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 31 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Since 9/11 there has been a cultural and political blossoming among those of the Afghan diaspora, especially in the United States, revealing a vibrant, active, and intellectual Afghan American community. And the success of Khaled Hosseni's The Kite Runner, the first work of fiction written by an Afghan American to become a bestseller, has created interest in the works of other Afghan American writers. One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) (or "Afsanah, Seesaneh," the Afghan equivalent of "once upon a time") collects poetry, fiction, essays, and selections from two blogs from thirty-three men and women--poets, fiction writers, journalists, filmmakers and video artists, photographers, community leaders and organizers, and diplomats. Some are veteran writers, such as Tamim Ansary and Donia Gobar, but others are novices and still learning how to craft their own "story," their unique Afghan American voice. The fifty pieces in this rich anthology reveal journeys in a new land and culture. They show people trying to come to grips with a life in exile, or they trace the migration maps of parents. They navigate the jagged landscape of the Soviet invasion, the civil war of the 1990s and the rise of the Taliban, and the ongoing American occupation

Cholpon Ramizova is a London-based creator and researcher. She holds a Master's in Migration, Mobility and Development from SOAS, University of London. Her thematic interests are in migration, displacement, identity, gender, and nationalism - and more specifically on how and which ways these intersect within the Central Asia context

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Jeff Nania, "River Gold: A Northern Lakes Mystery" (Feet Wet Writing, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 29 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In River Gold (Feed Wet Writing, 2025) Sheriff John Cabrelli is pulled into a murder investigation after a nationally known Great Lakes historian is robbed of his briefcase and shot in the leg. When the only suspect is killed in a hit and run, Cabrelli is hard pressed to pick up the threads of his investigation. Every lead about cryptic journals and lost gold coins goes nowhere because the historian won’t explain anything. Meanwhile, Cabrelli is up for reelection and a rival keeps distracting him from doing his job. This is a small-town mystery about living with nature, appreciating the Wisconsin landscape, enjoying time for fishing, and about stolen gold, hidden evil, and buried secrets in the Northwoods.

Jeff Nania is a former law enforcement officer, writer, conservationist, and biofuel creator. He is the award-winning author of five books in the Northern Lakes Mystery series; Figure Eight, Spider Lake, Bough Cutter, Musky Run, and now River Gold. His narrative non-fiction writing has appeared in Wisconsin Outdoor News, Double Gun Journal, The Outlook, and other publications. Jeff was born and raised in Wisconsin. His family settled in Madison’s storied Greenbush neighborhood. His father often loaded Jeff, his brothers, and a couple of dogs into an old jeep station wagon and set out for outdoor adventures. These experiences were foundational for developing a sense of community, a passion for outdoor traditions, and a love of our natural resources. Jeff has been recognized locally, statewide, and nationally. Outdoor Life Magazine named him as one of the nation’s 25 most influential conservationists, and he received the National Wetlands Award for his wetland restoration work. The Wisconsin Senate commended Jeff with a joint resolution for his work with wetlands, education, and as a non-partisan advisor on natural resource issues. Now a full-time novelist, Jeff spends as much time as possible exploring outdoor Wisconsin with his friends and family, and fishing Spider Lake.

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Emily Everett, "All That Life Can Afford" (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 28 May 2025 13:53:00 +0000

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach.
Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna’s struggle to outrun her past. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?
Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.

Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts. She is managing editor at The Common literary magazine, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

Her short story “Solitária” was selected as a runner-up for the Kenyon Review’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest, and appears in the Jan/Feb 2020 issue. Other short fiction appears in Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review, among others. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2020, and supported by the Vermont Studio Center.

Recommended Books:

Charlotte McConaughy, Migrations

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

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Gina Leola Woolsey, "Fifteen Thousand Pieces" (Guernica Editions, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 27 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Gina Leola Woolsey about her stunning biography, Fifteen Thousand Pieces (Guernica Editions, 2023).

On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through Dr. John Butt's makeshift morgue in Hangar B at the Shearwater military base. The Chief Medical Examiner faced the most challenging and grisly task of his career. Five years prior to the plane crash, John had lost his prestigious job as Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner. After 14 years of marriage, John began to think of himself as gay, but remained closeted professionally. Then, after serving a handful of years as Nova Scotia's Chief Medical Examiner, the devastating crash in Nova Scotia cracked his carefully constructed façade. Fifteen Thousand Pieces explores one man's journey to accept his true nature and find his place in the world. Chapters alternate between the fast-paced story of the crash, and the history of the man in the making. It is both fast-paced and introspective; gruesome and touching. Ultimately, it is the story of how death teaches us to live.

About Gina Leola Woolsey:

CBC Award-winning author Gina Leola Woolsey tugs at your heartstrings with written portraits of people striving to find love, self-acceptance, and belonging in an ever-changing world. She left her corporate career mid-life to pursue an education in creative writing, earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of King’s College. She lives wherever the narrative takes her. Currently, her time is split between small-town Alberta, downtown Montreal, and her hometown of Vancouver.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Lucas Schaefer, "Tuesday" The Common Magazine (Spring, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 26 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Lucas Schaefer speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Tuesday,” which appears in The Common’s brand new spring issue. “Tuesday” is an excerpt from his novel The Slip, out June 3 from Simon & Schuster; both center on a motley cast of characters at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. Lucas talks about the process of writing and revising this story and the novel as a whole, which started over a decade ago as a series of linked short stories. Lucas also discusses how the novel’s central mystery came together, what it was like writing with humor and in so many voices, and how his own experience at an Austin boxing gym inspired the story and its characters.

Lucas Schaefer lives with his family in Austin. The Slip is his debut novel. His work has appeared in One Story, The Baffler, Slate and other publications. He holds an MFA from the New Writers Project at UT-Austin.

Read Lucas’s story “Tuesday” in The Common at thecommononline.org/Tuesday.

Order The Slip in all formats via Simon & Schuster at simonandschuster.com/books/The-Slip/Lucas-Schaefer/9781668030707.

Learn more about Lucas at www.lucasschaefer.com.

Follow Lucas on Instagram at @lucaseschaefer.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her new debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Frank X Walker, "Load in Nine Times: Poems" (Liveright, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 25 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

For decades Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his pathbreaking historical poetry. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers—including his own ancestors—who enlisted in the Union army in exchange for emancipation.
Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Colored Troops with their family members, as well as slave owners and prominent historical figures from Abraham Lincoln to Frederick Douglas and Margaret Garner. Imbued with atmospheric imagery, these persona poems and more “[clarify] not only the inextricable value of Black life and labor to the building of America, but the terrible price they were forced to pay in producing that labor” (Khadijah Queen). “How do you un-orphan a people?” Walker asks. “How do you pick up / shattered black porcelain and make / a new set of dishes fit to eat off?”
While carefully attuned to the heartbreak and horrors of war, Walker’s poems pay equal care to the pride, perseverance, and triumphs of their speakers. Evoking the formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: “I am America’s promise, my mother’s song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream.” Expansive and intimate, Load in Nine Times is a resounding ode to the powerful ties of individual and cultural ancestry by an indelible voice in American poetry.

Winner of the 2025 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.

A native of Danville, Kentucky, Frank X Walker is the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. Walker has published thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded the 2014 NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets Collective, the oldest continuously running predominantly African American writing group in the country. He is a Professor of English, and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program the University of Kentucky.

You can find the host, Sullivan Summer, online, on Instagram, and at Substack, where she and Professor X continue their conversation.

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Stephanie Cesca, "Dotted Lines" (Guernica Editions, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Stephanie Cesca about her acclaimed novel, Dotted Lines (Guernica Editions, 2024) which has been named a finalist for the Rakuten kobo Emerging Writer Prize.

Dotted Lines is a powerful and binary-breaking story that explores the complexities of families, bringing to brilliant light the vital but underrepresented perspective of a non-traditional family where the step-father is the hero, and it’s the person who owes you nothing that gives you everything.

Abandoned as a child, Melanie Forsythe seeks stability and belonging after her mom’s boyfriend is left to raise her. Despite her raw deal, Melanie grows up to have a good head on her shoulders and a strong bond with her stepdad. But her dream of having a family of her own is shattered when she suffers tragedy and betrayal. Still, the relationship with her step-dad—the one that’s illustrated with a dotted line in her family tree—ultimately inspires her to create the life and family she wants.

“As a family dissolves and reunites, Cesca's seamless writing traces the unpredictable ways in which those we love stray and return to us throughout our lives. Clean and understated, Cesca’s novel reveals the complicated layers of an unorthodox childhood through compelling characters willing to open themselves to new truths.”

—Ibi Kaslik, author of Skinny, New York Times Bestseller

About Stephanie Cesca:

Stephanie Cesca was born and raised in Toronto, where she lives with her husband and three children. A former newspaper editor in both Canada and Europe, she holds an English degree from Western University, a journalism degree from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Certificate of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work has been shortlisted for the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction and The Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing. Dotted Lines is her first novel.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health,moir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Reem Gaafar, "A Mouth Full of Salt" (Saqi Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 24 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Reem Gaafar about her Island Prize 2023-winning book, A Mouthful of Salt, published in Canada by Invisible Publishing.

About A Mouthful of Salt:

The Nile brought them life, but the Nile was not their friend.
When a little boy drowns in the treacherous currents of the Nile, the search for his body unearths calamity and disaster, and exposes forgotten secrets buried for generations in a small northern Sudanese village.
Three women try to make their way through a world that wants to keep them back, separated from each other by time but bound together by the same river that weaves its way through their lives, giving little but taking much more.
A Mouth Full of Salt uncovers a country on the brink of seismic change as its women decide for themselves which traditions are fit for purpose – and which prophecies it's time to rewrite.

About Reem Gaafar:

Reem Gaafar is a Sudanese public health physician, researcher, writer and mother of three boys. She is published in both fiction and non-fiction circles, contributing to issues on public health and policy, society, racism and women’s rights. Her work has appeared in African Arguments, 500 Words Magazine, Teakisi Magazine, African Feminism, Andariya Magazine, International Health Policies and Health Systems Global.

Her short story Light of the Desert was published in the anthology I Know Two Sudans (Gipping Press, UK). Her second short short Finding Descartes was published in the anthology Relations: African and Diaspora Voices (HarperVia). Her debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt (Saqi Books, Invisible Books) won The Island Prize in 2023, was listed as one of 100 Notable African Books of 2024 and is the no.1 bestseller in the indie bookshop charts in the UK.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity mental health, was released by Guernica Editions and won a 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award. Her poetry collection, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her short fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network and co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. www.hollayghadery.com.

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Thomas Leduc, "Palpitations" (Latitude 46, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 23 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with former Sudbury Poet Laureate Thomas Leduc about his new collection of poetry, Palpitations (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025).

There are moments that change the course of a day, a year, or even a life.

Palpitations explores the journey through the twists and turns of the human experience. From childhood memories of struggling with dyslexia and what to be when one grows up, reflections on love, to the global disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thomas Leduc delves into the shared experiences that have altered the world’s perception of itself. Full of vivid imagery and deep, thoughtful reflections, Palpitations is a tribute to that which makes us human – moments that palpitate with life, longing and change.

About Thomas L. Leduc:

Thomas Leduc was Poet Laureate of Sudbury, Ontario from 2014-2016 and the President of the Sudbury Writers’ Guild from 2017-2021. His poems and short stories have been published in various magazines and anthologies. In 2019 he released his first collection of poetry, Slagflower Poems Unearthed From A Mining Town (Latitude 46). He lives in Sudbury, Ontario.

About Hollay Ghadery:

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Andrew Porter, "The Imagined Life: A Novel" (Knopf, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 22 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Steven Mills has reached a crossroads. His wife and son have left, and they may not return. Which leaves him determined to find out what happened to his own father, a brilliant, charismatic professor who disappeared in 1984 when Steve was twelve, on a wave of ignominy.
As Steve drives up the coast of California, seeking out his father’s friends, family members, and former colleagues, the novel offers us tantalizing glimpses into Steve’s childhood—his parents’ legendary pool parties, the black-and-white films on the backyard projector, secrets shared with his closest friend. Each conversation in the present reveals another layer of his father’s past, another insight into his disappearance. Yet with every revelation, his father becomes more difficult to recognize. And, with every insight, Steve must confront truths about his own life.
Rich in atmosphere, and with a stunningly sure-footed emotional compass, The Imagined Life: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a probing, nostalgic novel about the impossibility of understanding one’s parents, about first loves and failures, about lost innocence, about the unbreakable bonds between a father and a son.

Andrew Porter is the author of the short story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and a previous novel, In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Narrative, and elsewhere. He currently teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.

Recommended Books:

Paul. Lisicky, Songs So Wild and Blue
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Elita

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 published 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.

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Christine McNair, "Toxemia" (Book*hug Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 21 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with the wonderful Ottawa writer, Christine McNair about her 2024 book of lyric essays and prose poetry, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024).

In this alchemy of anger and love, history and memoir, Christine McNair delves into various forms of toxicity in the body—from the effects of two life-threatening preeclampsia diagnoses to chronic illness, sexism in medicine, and the toll of societal expectations.

With catharsis and humour, Toxemia pieces together the complexities of identity, motherhood, and living in a body to reveal deeply recognizable raw truths. McNair captures the wrenching feeling of loss of control in the face of an overwhelming medical diagnosis and the small, endless moments in life that underscore it: worrying about mortality in the middle of the night, revolving medical appointments, self-doubt, and all the ways in which illness interrupts.

Toxemia unravels the toxicities that haunt the human body from within and without. Combining lyrical essays, prose poetry, photographs, and more, this hybrid work dips between the sacred and profane, exposing—and holding—some of our greatest fears.

ABOUT CHRISTINE MCNAIR:

Christine MCNair is the author of Charm (winner of the 2018 Archibald Lampman Award) and Conflict (finalist for the City of Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award, and the ReLit Award for Poetry). She was also shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. Her chapbook pleasantries and other misdemeanours was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her work has appeared in sundry literary journals and anthologies. McNair lives in Ottawa where she works as a book doctor.

About Hollay Ghadery:

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Maureen Stanton, "The Murmur of Everything Moving: A Memoir" (Columbus State UP, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 20 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. She meets and falls for Steve, an electrician who at 27 is the father of three children going through a divorce. They are deeply in love, now back in Michigan close to Steve’s children, when he’s diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that has metastasized throughout his body. In beautiful prose, Stanton describes the medical challenges, Steve’s physical and psychological pain, and the heartache they face knowing that his time is limited while trying to defy the odds. This is a moving story of human fragility, resilience, and the different forms love can take.

Maureen Stanton is also the author of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, winner of a Maine Literary Award and a People Magazine "Best Books Pick"; and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, winner of a Massachusetts Book Award and a Parade Magazine "12 Great Summer Books" selection. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Longreads, New England Review and elsewhere, and has been recognized with the Iowa Review prize, the Sewanee Review prize, and Pushcart Prizes. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maine Arts Commission, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Maine. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, she enjoys swimming (ponds, tidal rivers, lakes, and the ocean), foraging for wild mushrooms, baking, and haunting flea markets. www.maureenstantonwriter.com.

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Manahil Bandukwala, "Heliotropia" (Brick Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host and poet Hollay Ghadery speaks with Manahil Bandukwala about her second collection, Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024). This book of poems is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Rosa Castellano, "All Is the Telling" (Diode, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 16 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN Poetry podcast, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Rosa Castellano about her gorgeous debut collection, All is the Telling (Diode, 2025).
All is the Telling is a compelling, transformative collection bridging the personal and political with an emotional intensity that lingers long after the final page. With an intimate and expansive voice, this collection speaks to the human condition in all its beauty and complexity, inviting readers to reflect on their own lives as they are drawn into the intricate web of memory, identity, and survival. The speaker’s voice is grounded in the immediacy of lived experience, yet it also reaches outward, echoing the broader struggles of our time. In a world that can often feel fractured, the poems in All Is The Telling offer a space for connection, reflection, and healing. Readers are invited to witness moments of profound emotional truth, where the boundaries between self and other, past and present, blur in disorienting and revelatory ways.
At its core, All is the Telling is a meditation on what it means to be human in a world that often demands silence from those who dare to speak their truths. It is a collection that insists on the importance of voice, of telling and retelling our stories so they are not forgotten. The collection’s emotional landscape is vast, encompassing themes of love, loss, survival, and the enduring power of storytelling itself. These poems remind us that survival is not simply to endure but to carry forward the stories that define us and to give voice to the histories that have shaped our identities, often against the odds.
This is a collection for readers who crave poetry that speaks to the soul—poetry that does not flinch in the face of brutal truths but instead transforms them into something beautiful, something that can be held, examined, and, ultimately, shared. All is the Telling will resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the complexities of identity and sought to make sense of a world that can be both brutal and tender. It is a collection that asks us to listen—to ourselves, to each other, to the world, and in that listening, find the strength to tell our own stories. For anyone who believes in the power of words to shape lives, challenge injustices, and celebrate the human spirit, this collection will not disappoint. All is the Telling is vital, alive, and endlessly resonant.

About the Author:
Rosa Castellano, originally from Tampa, Florida, is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. A finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship, and co-founder of the RVA Poetry Fest, her work can be found or is forth coming from RHINO Poetry, Diode, Passages North, Nimrod, The Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest among others. All Is The Telling is her first collection of poetry.

About Hollay Ghadery:

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Katherine Addison, "The Tomb of Dragons" (Tor Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 13 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Katherine Addison’s novel The Tomb of Dragons (Tor, 2025) is the concluding novel in her Cemeteries of Amalo Trilogy.

The novels follow Thara Celehar, a once-obscure prelate in an industrializing empire who once garnered unwanted attention by uncovering the people behind the assassination of the old emperor. Now he lives in the city of Amalo, on the edge of the empire, serving the residents there and doing his best to stay out of politics. An utter impossibility, given the firmness of his convictions and the fact that, as a Witness for the Dead, he often learns things from the Amalo’s corpses that bring him back into the political sphere and even, appallingly, sometimes attract the attention of journalists.

In this interview, Addison describes the influences of Early Modern England on her work and the process of discovering her characters’ religious lives during the writing process. She discusses depicting characters with depression and what it’s like to disagree with your protagonist. We chat about envisioning different legal systems, avoiding the French Revolution, and the depiction of the working class in fantasy.

The Tomb of Dragons is a thoughtful and energetic conclusion to an intricate set of books and it was a joy discussing it with the author.

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Gary Barwin, "Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984" (Assembly Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 11 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Gary Barwin about his book, Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction, 2024-1984 (Assembly Press, 2024) couples brand new and uncollected stories with selections of the most playful and ambitious of Barwin’s previous collections, including Cruelty to Fabulous Animals, Big Red Baby, Doctor Weep and Other Strange Teeth, and I, Dr. Greenblatt, Orthodontist, 251–1457. Known as a “whiz-bang storyteller” who can deliver magical, dream-like sequences and truisms about the human condition in the same paragraph, Barwin’s trademark brilliance, wit, and originality are on display in this can’t-miss collection of short fiction.

About Gary Barwin:

GARY BARWIN is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of 34 books including Scandal at the Alphorn Factory: New and Selected Short Fiction 2024-1984 and, with Lillian Allen and Gregory Betts, Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates which won the Leacock Medal and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and the Giller Prize and was longlisted for Canada Reads. His last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and was the Hamilton Reads choice for 2023-2024. His last poetry collection, The Most Charming Creatures also won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His most recent novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead will be published by Book*Hug in 2026. His art and media works have been exhibited and presented internationally. Be:longings, a $200,000 permanent public art sculpture created with Simon Frank and Tor Lukasik-Foss was installed in Churchill Park (Hamilton). His poetry installation, The Ambitious Sky was projected on a five-storey wall in Hamilton in February 2025, an interactive multimedia poetry exhibition Located in the Ink (created with Elee Kraljii Gardiner) was exhibited at Massy Arts (Vancouver) in Fall 2024, and Bird Fiction, and an interactive multimedia work (with Sarah Imrisek) was presented at Nuit Blanche 2024 (Toronto) and, in an expanded Hamilton-specific version will be featured in Hamilton Arts Week in June 2025. Recordings of his work are available at https://garybarwin.bandcamp.com He lives in Hamilton.

About Hollay Ghadery:

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Kern Carter, "Boys and Girls Screaming" (Dancing Cat Books, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 10 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kern Carter about his acclaimed YA novel, Boys and Girls Screaming (Dancing Cat Books, 2022).

About the book:

When Ever's father passes away suddenly, she is devastated. Not long after that, her mom has a stroke and Ever's anguish becomes almost too much for her to handle. That's when she gets the idea to form a group she calls Boys and Girls Screaming. Along with her brother, Jericho, and her best friend, Candace, Ever wants to bring together kids from their school who have suffered trauma so they can share their stories and begin to heal. Although the other teens find solace in the group, Ever tumbles further into depression until she reaches a breaking point. As the group learns the true source of Ever's pain, they jump into action to help her find a way out. Boys and Girls Screaming tells the story of a generation of teens finding the support they need to process their trauma in their own ways.

Kern Carter is a full-time freelance writer and author who has written and self-published two novels -- Thoughts of a Fractured Soul (novella) and Beauty Scars. Kern also has writing credits in Forbes, the New York Times, Global Citizen, Elle Magazine and Fatherly.com, along with having ghostwritten several books. When he's not penning novels or ghostwriting, Kern is curating stories through CRY, his online publication that creates space for artists to navigate through the emotions of their creative journey. He lives in downtown Toronto.

About Hollay Ghadery:

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“That In Between Time,” Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary (MAT)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 8 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Fernanda Trías’s Pink Slime (Scribner, 2024) was first published in Spanish in October 2020, several months into a global pandemic that had bent our world into something uncannily similar to the one imagined in the Uruguayan writer’s fourth novel. Here, an environmental disaster that begins as red algae bloom in the oceans has produced a toxic wind that kills most living creatures. As the plague spreads, the protagonist chooses to remain in her coastal city, caring for a boy with a rare genetic disorder. Published in an English translation by Heather Cleary as the pandemic waned, Pink Slime continues to push against the limits of genre categories, balancing on that delicate edge between science fiction and literary realism.

In dialogue with Cleary—a prolific translator of contemporary Latin American fiction who is also a critic and scholar of translation—Trías unfolds the many different ideas explored in Pink Slime, including the ethical complexities of writing about illness and disability, the difficult intimacies of mothers and daughters (and other potentially toxic relationships), how it is that we experience time and memory, and what it means to live with the looming threat of ecological collapse. Pink Slime, like Trías’s other novels, is also interested in the narrative potential of confined spaces, which constrain the movement of plot and allow for new possibilities in building characters’ psychological depth. The conversation also gets into the question of time and narrative tense when it comes to narrating the experience of disaster—a question that was crucial for the novelist as much as the translator. Together, Trías and Cleary also get into the intricacies of translation, including word choice, sound, rhythm, breath, and how to make jokes work across languages.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Translator’s Visibility: Scenes from Contemporary Latin American Fiction

Prader-Wilis syndrome

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

N. Pino Luna

The other pink slime

Trías, El monte de las furias

Plumsock Endowed Residency, Yaddo Artist’s Community (the residency that Trías briefly names toward the end of the conversation)

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Joanna Miller, "The Eights" (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 7 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Joanna Miller’s The Eights (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2025) follows four women attending the University of Oxford in 1920. They are not the first female university students in the United Kingdom, or even the first who can hope to attain a degree, but they are the first class of women who can, if they fulfill all the requirements, attain a university degree from Oxford.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone on the campus regards their presence as a plus. Views of women as lightheaded, emotionally unstable creatures incapable of mastering sophisticated thought or living without male guidance have begun to fade since the Great War of 1914–1918, but they continue to influence popular thinking. Unlike the men, women students live under strict restrictions against partying or even entertaining male visitors who are not blood relatives. Defy the rules, and they risk being “sent down” (suspended, in effect) or even dismissed from the program altogether.

So what brings the four heroines to Oxford? Each has her own story, much of which becomes obvious only later in the book. Beatrice Sparks, the daughter of a suffragette, considers herself unattractive and unlikely to find a husband; Ottoline Wallace-Kerr, known as Otto, is fleeing a family bent on marrying her off to the first man who asks; Theodora (Dora) Greenwood lost her brother, then her fiancé, in France and doesn’t quite know how to go on; Marianne Grey must make her own way in the world. Together, they are known as the Eights, because they live on Corridor Eight.

Although different in character, background, and interests, the four women bond, helping one another cope with the challenges that face them, individually and collectively. These include Oxford, of course, but also the lingering effects of the Great War, their personal situations, and the challenges that face most twenty-somethings as they struggle to define their place in the world. As they do, they draw us in and make us root for them to succeed—and what else would we want from a novel?

Joanna Miller, a poet and former teacher, is a graduate of Oxford University’s Exeter College, as well as the university’s teacher training and creative writing programs. The Eights is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, will be released in June 2025.

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Kyle Flemmer, "Supergiants" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 6 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Calgary poet Kyle Flemmer about his collection of poetry, Supergiants (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).

For millennia humanity has looked upwards and traced stories in the night sky, projecting our human wants and desires outward. In Supergiants, Kyle Flemmer turns his gaze in the other direction. What does our reach for the stars say about us? Working with the technical language of engineering and astrophysics, Flemmer reorients the reader within our galaxy. Families of asteroids expand to contain their physical attributes, the mythic stories of their names and the histories of real people. We see the course of lunar exploration through the fate of the flags planted on each mission. Nebulae, blue giants and black holes enfold us. Interspersed throughout are a series of found/collage poems that visually reconfigure the elements of space exploration and our understanding of it. Through it all, Flemmer shows how we turn to the stars to make sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

About Kyle Flemmer:

Kyle Flemmer is a writer, publisher, and digital media artist from Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. He founded The Blasted Tree Publishing Co. in 2014 and released his first book, Barcode Poetry, in 2021. Flemmer is the author of many chapbooks and his work has appeared in anthologies and exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Supergiants is Kyle's first trade book of poetry, and his next, The Wiki of Babel, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Lauren K. Watel, "Book of Potions" (Sarabande Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 1 May 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Lauren k. Watel's Book of Potions (Sarabande Books, 2025) is the winner of the 2023 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Ilya Kaminsky. Written with tremendous urgency and ferocious candor, the prose poems of Book of Potions captures a woman caught in the middle of life: no longer young, not yet old, trapped between generations, locked in stereotyped roles and stultifying social norms, confined by other people's expectations and their projections of what a woman should be. By turns enraged, funny, frustrated, astute and joyful, these short hybrid pieces (potion = poem + fiction) combine the lyric compression of poetry with the narrative expansiveness of prose. Readers will meander, spellbound, through a wildly imaginative dream world of fairy-tale landscapes, allegorical insights, social satire, thought experiments and vivid surreal imagery, scenes of otherworldly strangeness and haunting beauty. These potions are elixirs in language, some healing, some poisonous, all magical.

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Linda Trinh, "Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non) Buddhist Memoir" (Miroland, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Join NBN host Hollay Ghadery for a thought-provoking conversation with Linda Trihn about her memoir, Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir (Miroland, 2025). Linda Trinh had everything she thought an immigrant woman should want: motherhood, career, and security. Yet, she felt empty. Growing up in Winnipeg, Linda helped her mom make offerings to their ancestors and cleaned her late dad’s altar. These were her mother’s beliefs, but was Buddhism Linda’s belief? In her late-twenties, Linda sought answers in Egypt and China and prayed during corporate downsizing, seeking meaning in contemporary life. Via a collection of essays, she plays with form and structure to show the interconnection of life events, trauma, and spiritual practice, to move from being a passive believer to an active seeker.

About Linda Trinh:

Linda Trinh is a Vietnamese Canadian author who writes nonfiction and fiction for adults and children. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines such as The Fiddlehead, Room, Prairie Fire, and This Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in anthologies such as Black Cat anthology and Alternate Plains: Stories of Prairie Speculative Fiction. She has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards.

Her award-winning early chapter book series, The Nguyen Kids, explores Vietnamese culture and identity with elements of the supernatural, spirituality, and social justice woven in.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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John Copenhaver, "Hall of Mirrors" (Pegasus Crime, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus Crime 2025) was selected as a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year. It opens with a fire – it’s May 1954 and Lionel Kane is watching his apartment go up in flames with his lover and writing partner Roger Raymond trapped inside. The police are sure that it’s a suicide. A couple of months earlier, Judy and Philippa attend a lecture by Ray Kane, one of their favorite mystery authors, and help him when he starts to look unwell. He’s a little off, newly fired from his State Department job because of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s purge of communists and homosexuals. A few months earlier, with hopes that he’d write about it, Judy and Philippa sent Ray Kane an anonymous packet of details about Adrian Bogdan, the spy and serial killer they’d been hunting for years, but they don’t know that Adrian was responsible for Ray Kane’s firing. After the lecture, they learn that “Ray Kane” is the pen name for Roger and Lionel, and Roger is the author’s public face because Lionel is Black. Lionel has two strikes against him; gay and Black, and Judy also has a few challenges; she’s mixed race, also gay, she has a personal connection to the serial killer, and the FBI is trying to stop her from learning the truth.

John Copenhaver’s debut novel, Dodging and Burning, won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, and The Savage Kind earned the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. A passionate advocate for queer voices in crime fiction, Copenhaver is a founding member of Queer Crime Writers and currently serves on the board of International Thriller Writers. He mentors aspiring writers in the Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska and teaches creative writing and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his husband, artist Jeffery Paul Herrity. When he's not writing or teaching, he's watching movies—and listening to them. Copenhaver has a passion for film scores and a collection of rare scores he's been curating since high school.

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Michael Blouin, "Hard Electric" (Anvil Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Michael Blouin about his poetry collection, Hard Electric (Anvil Press, 2024). Hard Electric is Michael Blouin’s third book of poetry, a road-tripping, bridge-burning collection of the author’s hard-won and soft-edged reflections that seem to stutter-step towards resolution while tumbling down a decided slant towards disaster. “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” was Celine Dion’s first North American hit and in it she asks: ‘Where do all the lonely hearts go?’

In Hard Electric Blouin presents a bleakly unsettling but ultimately life-affirming treatise that hints at his fascination with the same question and perhaps shuffles into the neighbourhood of an answer. That neighbourhood is peopled with late-night bars of Key West’s Duval Street, the sharp spice of BBQ joints, sunburned beach motels, and Christmas lights frozen to February trees. And Susan Sarandon’s cousin.

It’s a book not for the faint of heart, but for the lonely-hearted, and for those who know them well.

About Michael Blouin:

Michael Blouin has been a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, the bpNichol Award, and the CBC Literary Award. He has been the recipient of the Lilian I. Found Award, the Diana Brebner Award and the Archibald Lampman Award from ARC Magazine. His novel Chase and Haven won the ReLit Award for Best Novel, an award he received again for his novel Skin House. He is an Instructor at the University of Toronto, a guest lecturer for Carleton University, and has served as an adjudicator for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Two of his novels are now in a permanent archive on the Moon having landed with NASA in 2024. His collected poetry “Hard Electric” is slated to land at the lunar South Pole later in 2025.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Ted Levin, "The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World" (Green Writers Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In The Promise of Sunrise: Finding Solace in a Broken World (Green Writers Press, 2025), a former Bronx Zoo zoologist and award-winning nature writer, Ted Levin, spent Covid rediscovering his valley and the joys of watching the season pass, day by day by day. The book is a chronicle of his rediscovery of the Thetford, Vermont hillside on which he lived and a recounting of the daily joys of observing home ground as Levin (like many of us) was forced by Covid to stay home for nearly two years. In the end, he sold his home and moved to Hurricane Hill in Hartford, Vermont, which ends the narrative, although he continues the same routine.

Ted has been a Naturalist at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park and then was a teaching zoologist at the Bronx Zoo in New York. After studying Ornithology in graduate school, he served as a Naturalist at the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich VT … and also was on the faculty of New England College in Henniker, NH. This book, is the latest in a long list of his books and publications going back to the 1980s. besides his previous natural history books, he has written and illustrated a book for preschoolers, contributed to a photo journal on the Everglades and has provided illustrations for two books on poetry. His many articles can be found in such publications as The New York Times, News Day, The Guardian, Audubon Magazine and even Sports illustrated.

Of particular note, Ted won the prestigious John J. Burroughs Medal, a recognition that hi-lights the best of natural history writing.

Professor Michael Simpson has been the Director of the Resource Management and Administration graduate program at Antioch University New England, in Keene, NH.

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Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set out to find the Venn diagram intersection of tech and fiction—only to realize that Kim Stanley Robinson had staked his claim on the territory decades ago. With influential series on California, on the terraforming of Mars, and on human civilization as reshaped by rising tides, KSR has established a conceptual space as dedicated to sustainability as his own beloved Village Homes in Davis, California.

All of that, though, only prepared the ground for Ministry for the Future (Orbit, 2020), his vision of a sustained governmental and scientific rethinking of humanity’s fossil-burning, earth-warming ways. In only five years, it may have become the most influential work of climate fiction ever—perhaps right up there with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its thoroughly shocking ability to jump into the political fray.

Flanked by Novel Dialogue’s John Plotz, KSR’s friend and ally Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (celebrated eco-critic and UC Davis professor) asks him to reflect on the book’s impact. He brushes aside the doom and gloom of tech bros forecasting the death of our planet and hence the necessity of a flight to Mars: humans are not one of the species doomed to extinction by our reckless combustion of the biosphere. However, survival is not the same as thriving. The way we are headed now, “the crash of civilization is very bad. And ignoring it…is not going to work.”

Mentioned in the Episode:

--Pact for the Future

--COP 26 (2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference)

--COP 30 (where KSR will be a UN rep….)

--Planetary boundaries J. Rockstrom (et. al.)

--Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

--Paris Agreement

--Don’t Look Up

--Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice

--Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

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Chris Bailey, "Forecast: Pretty Bleak" (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with PEI poet and commercial fisherman, Chris Bailey, about his collection, Forecast: Pretty Bleak (McClelland & Stewart, 2025).

Confessional, candid, and insightful, Forecast: Pretty Bleak looks at life in rural PEI. These poems explore climate change, work, family, love, and the idea that sometimes all you’ve got is hope for better weather and favourable winds tomorrow.

About Chris Bailey:

CHRIS BAILEY is a graphic designer and commercial fisherman from Prince Edward Island. He holds a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Chris’ writing has appeared in Grain, Brick, The Fiddlehead, Best Canadian Stories 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2025, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, is available from Nightwood Editions. His piece Fisherman’s Repose was a winner of the 2022 BMO 1st Art! Award. Forecast: Pretty Bleak is his second poetry collection.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Diamond Forde, "Mother Body" (Saturnalia Books, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) is an intersectional exploration of the trauma and agency held within a body defined by its potential to mother. As Mother Body unfolds, it tasks its reader to understand the expected and unexpected manifestations of motherhood, through menstruation and womb work, but also generational, societal, and literary mothering. With a variety of forms and modes, these poems unpack the experiences of a fat, black woman's body while also manifesting joy, resistance, and celebration.

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Alka Joshi, "Six Days in Bombay" (Mira, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Sona Falstaff, a hospital nurse in Bombay, has things more or less where she wants them. Yes, she faces a certain discrimination, positive and negative, because of her mixed heritage, which makes her a “half-half” in the lingo of 1930s India. She lives in a poor section of the city, and she must work to support herself and her aging mother. India itself is a state of flux as the British Raj comes to an end and demands for independence increase in intensity and volume. But all in all, Sona wants nothing more than to cling to the job and the life she knows.

Yet when the painter Mira Novak is admitted to the hospital, she upends Sona’s carefully constructed world. Mira’s vibrancy, passion, and generosity awaken a yearning to explore that Sona didn’t even know she had. But just as she begins to cherish the possibility of friendship, Mira dies, six days after entering the hospital. The job Sona loves is threatened by suspicion that she somehow contributed to the painter’s death.

Sona soon discovers that Mira has left her a set of four paintings with instructions to deliver them to their rightful owners. Now she faces a choice: fight for her job and play it safe at home, or take a chance on finding her true self in the wider world, whatever risk that involves?

The contrast between Sona and Mira, the friendship that develops between them, and the slowly revealed history that lies beneath Sona’s reluctance to take chances are all beautifully laid out in this well-written novel, making Six Days in Bombay (Mira Books, 2025) a delight to read.

Alka Joshi is the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur, and The Perfumist of Paris. Six Days in Bombay is her fourth novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025.

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Erica Stern, "Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story" (Barrelhouse Inc., 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story (Barrelhouse Inc., 2025) is a genre-bending expedition into childbirth. Seamlessly blending memoir, fiction, and research into the fraught history of birth—from midwives to Victorian-era sedation through the Natural Childbirth Movement and modern L&D suites—Frontier lays bare visceral truths that are too often glossed over, and offers an incisive look at the momentous and terrifying transformations of motherhood. As she prepared to give birth to her first child, Erica Stern envisioned the idyllic experience promised by prenatal classes and diaper commercials. But when unexpected complications arose during labor, she found herself at the threshold of life and death, a liminal space that connected her to generations of mothers before her. From the chaos of the delivery room, Frontier opens into a parallel narrative: a Wild West ghost story. There, a mother who didn’t survive the ordeal of childbirth roams her old homestead, tethered to the family she left behind. In this otherworldly hybrid memoir, Stern careens between this haunted past and the present horror of the hospital as she waits for her own son to wake up in the NICU.

Erica Stern’s work has been published in The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received support for her writing from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. A New Orleans native, she lives with her family in Evanston, Illinois.

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Tim Welsh, "Ley Lines" (Guernica Editions, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with debut Toronto author Tim Welsh about his novel, Ley Lines, published by Guernica Editions, 2025.

Set in the waning days of the Klondike Gold Rush, Ley Lines begins in the mythical boom town of Sawdust City, Yukon Territory. Luckless prospector Steve Ladle has accepted an unusual job offer: accompany a local con artist to the unconquered top of a nearby mountain. What he finds there briefly upends the town’s fading fortunes, attracting a crowd of gawkers and acolytes, while inadvertently setting in motion a series of events that brings about the town’s ruin.

In the aftermath, a ragtag group of characters is sent reeling across the Klondike, struggling to come to grips with a world that has been suddenly and unpredictably upturned. As they attempt to carve out a place for themselves, our protagonists reckon with the various personal, historical and supernatural forces that have brought them to this moment.

A wildly inventive, psychedelic odyssey, Ley Lines flips the frontier narrative on its ear, and heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in Canadian fiction.

About Tim Welsh:

Tim Welsh was born in Ithaca, New York and raised in Ottawa, Canada, where he completed an MA in English Language and Literature at Carleton University. He now lives in Toronto. Ley Lines is his first novel.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Nora Gold, "18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages" (Cherry Orchard, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 Karmona, Birte Kont, Michel Fais, Irena Dousková, Mario Levi, and Isaac Babel.

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Farzana Doctor, "The Beauty of Us" (ECW Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 though: the flirty art teacher and a cryptic notebook left behind by her deceased predecessor, Mademoiselle Leblanc.

Zahabiya and her friends — all racialized girls and victims of Leesa’s bullying — uncover Leesa’s secret. But can they help Leesa? Nahla, too, is embroiled in her own mystery, assisted by Mademoiselle Leblanc’s ghost. Each is indelibly changed by what they learn.

Masterfully crafted, The Beauty of Us is a gripping novel about surviving hardship, the power of friendship, and growing up.

More about Farzana Doctor:

Farzana Doctor is a Tkaronto-based author, activist and psychotherapist. She’s written four critically acclaimed lit-fic novels, Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement, All Inclusive, and Seven, a poetry collection, You Still Look The Same and a self- and community care workbook for helpers and activists, 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life. The Beauty of Us, her first YA book, has just come out.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Kayla E.'s "Precious Rubbish" (Fantagraphics Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 04:00:00 +0000

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 exercise that facilitates an intimacy (between the author, the subject, and the reader) that is at once horrifying and hilarious.

Please note that this interview discusses issues of trauma including sexual violence, incest, and addiction.

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Debra Spark, "Discipline" (Four Way Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 Corey, she co-edited Breaking Bread, a book of food essays by Maine writers to raise funds for a hunger nonprofit. Her short work has appeared in Agni, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yankee, and Yale Alumni Quarterly, among other places. In addition to writing book reviews, fiction, articles, and essays, she spent a decade writing about home, art, and design for Maine Home+Design, Decor Maine, Down East, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors Boston, New England Home, and Yankee. She writes a monthly book review column of French books in English translation for Frenchly.us. She has been the recipient of several awards including Maine’s 2017 READ ME series, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. When she’s not working, Spark exercises, studies French, spends time with friends and family, bakes gluten-free, and belongs to a cookbook book club.

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Stedmond Pardy, "Beached Whales" (Mosaic Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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William Cooper and Michael McKinley, "A Quiet Life" (Arcade, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 how once we start fighting back, we cannot stop.

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William Cooper and Michael McKinley, "A Quiet Life" (Arcade, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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Your Devotee in Rags

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 Devotee in Rags is a missive to this age of patriarchal power, its songs and poems are designed to specifically confront that power and hold it to account. Taking such activist inspiration from musicians like Lido Pimienta and Tanya Tagaaq, musically YDIR blends acoustic and electronic genres, waltzes, laments, and Pauls Boutique-era Beastie Boys mash-ups all with the intent of creating a new artistic headspace: sonic poetry. The cultural direction is forward, the earbuds open up the stereo field, listening to YDIR is, in a word, empowering.

More about Your Devotee in Rags:

Your Devotee in Rags is a sonic poetry collaboration between Anne Waldman and Andrew Whiteman; an act of desire and metamorphosis expanding the performative vision of being at the horizon of new experience, stripped down, exploring the turf, through poetry and spiritual yearning.

Anne says: “Wizard Hal Willner would be proud of us companions in the vibrational matrix. Comrades in a studio of subtle suspense, and where were we headed? A magnificent voyage! Tender, rugged, true. I met Andrew Whiteman, genius player, composer, scholar, in one of Hal’s unpredictable alchemical laboratories. We instantly bonded as mavens of poetry and its attendant orality, dedicated to the passion of epic life that is the source of this album, the 1000 plus pages of the feminist canto: Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment; passages plucked to be re-imagined in ambient explosive word-sound. On the Yantzse, in a strip club, a maelstrom of memory honoring precursor male poets, dressed in the rags of Celtic hags, so much more as mendicant, witty siren, compassionate lover, exploding empires of patriarchy and war. A kind of mythic hospitality.”

Andrew says: “It was filmmaker Ron Mann and producer Hal Wilner who showed me the way. Hal was my guiding presence—whip smart, funny, gentle, empathic. This album is dedicated to him.”

More about Anne Waldman:

Anne Waldman is a living legend. Poet, performer, professor, editor, cultural activist, grandmother, and co-founder with Allen Ginsberg of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Former director of the Poetry Project. Tireless author of over 40 books, her trademark energy coils ever outward, always seeking to reveal the four-fold vision that we have largely lost.

More about Andrew Whiteman:

Andrew Whiteman is a musician and mythopoetics scholar from Montreal, Canada. He writes and performs in Broken Social Scene, Apostle of Hustle, AroarA, and Poets’ Workout Sound System. He is a co-founder of Siren Recordings.

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Betsy Lerner, "Shred Sisters" (Grove Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 sisterhood, mental health, loss and love. If anything is true it’s what Amy learns on her road to self-acceptance: No one will love you more or hurt you more than a sister.

Betsy Lerner is the author of The Bridge Ladies, The Forest for the Trees, and Food and Loathing. With Temple Grandin, she is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. She received an MFA from Columbia University in Poetry where she was selected as one of PEN’s Emerging Writers. She also received the Tony Godwin Publishing Prize for Editors. After working as an editor for 15 years, she became an agent and is currently a partner with Dunow, Carlson and Lerner Literary Agency.

Recommended Books:

Suzy Boyt, Loved and Missed
Rufi Thorpe, Margo’s Got Money Troubles
Morning News Tournament of Books (March Madness for Books!)

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 Against World Literature, is published 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.

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Tolu Oloruntoba, "Unravel" (McClelland & Stewart, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Nicholas Jubber, "Monsterland: A Journey Around the World’s Dark Imagination" (Scribe, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 about ourselves — how they bind communities together as much as they cruelly cast away outsiders.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Colum McCann, "Twist" (Random House, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 9 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist (Random House, 2025) is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.

Colum McCann is the author of eight novels, three collections of stories and two works of non-fiction. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honours, including the U.S National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the President and co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organization, Narrative 4. He lives in New York with his wife Allison and their family.

Recommended Books:

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

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Michael Backus, "The Heart Is Meat: An 80s Memoir" (Oil on Water Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 6 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 stories alone, the shit people came up with every day, the insanity of that place.”

It’s also the story of a young couple fresh from the Midwest making a life together. We were college sweethearts, seduced by the glamour and excitement of the East Village, its fashion model roommates, conceptual art openings, and junkies lined up outside bombed out buildings. We tried to live with an intensity that could only lead us to ruin. The Heart is Meat (Oil on Water Press, 2025) is a re-creation of a mythic time and place in New York City that can never exist again, an evocation of a vanished attitude, a pre-networked American Romanticism.

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Elana Wolff, "Faithfully Seeking Franz" (Guernica Editions, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 5 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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.

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Lauren Elkin, "Scaffolding" (FSG, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 3 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the diﬃculty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we’ve loved live on in us.

Lauren Elkin is also the author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse, a New York Times Books Review notable book and a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Le Monde, Frieze, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. A native New Yorker, Elkin lived in Paris for twenty years and now resides in London.

Recommended Books

Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun
Garth Greenwell, Small Rain
Catherine Lacey, Möbius Strip
The novels of Elizabeth Bowen

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Dorothea Heiser and Stuart Taberner, eds., "My Shadow in Dachau: Poems" (Camden House, 2014)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 2 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 by Dorothea Heiser from the original German edition are joined here by a foreword by Stuart Taberner of theUniversity of Leeds. All the poems, having arisen in the experience or memory of extreme human suffering, are testimonies to the persistence of the humanity and creativity of the individual. They are also a warning not to forget the darkest chapter of history and a challenge to the future not to allow it to be repeated.

Dorothea Heiser holds an MA from the University of Freiburg. Stuart Taberner is Professor of Contemporary German Literature, Culture, and Society at the University of Leeds.

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Minrose Gwin, "Beautiful Dreamers" (Hub City Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 1 Apr 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was coeditor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal. She received the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Richard Beale Davis Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters and the Wisdom/Faulkner Books-in-Process Award for Rescue, the novel she’s working on now. Like the characters in her novel Promise, Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was Kenan Eminent Professor of English. She lives in Albuquerque, NM, with her partner, Ruth Salvaggio, cats Ella Fitzgerald and Frida Kahlo and a busy-body Chihuahua named Henry. In her spare time, she volunteers at the city animal shelter taking care of new-born kittens who have lost their mothers. minrosegwin.com

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Vidyan Ravinthiran, "Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir" (Icon Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 published in numerous journals, he is also well known as a poet. His collections explore the tensions that arise between being and becoming in diasporic imaginaries. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here published by Bloodaxe in 2019 was the winner of the Northern Writers Award, awarded Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, Gru-Tu-Molani published in 2014 was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prizeand the 2015 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize.

This interview was hosted by Zana Mody, an English DPhil student at the University of Oxford, who works on postcolonial Indian literature and art.

X: @mody_zana

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Charlie Petch, "Why I Was Late" (Brick Books, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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, premièred 2022. They have been featured on the CBC's Q, were the Writer In Residence for Berton House (2023), were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2021. Their solo show "No one's special at the hot dog cart" debuted at Theatre Passe Muraille in 2024, and their next poetry book "Infinite Audition" is out with Brick Books in Fall 2025.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Michael David Lukas, "More to the Story," The Common Magazine (Fall, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

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 Journal, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He lives in Oakland and teaches at San Francisco State University.

Read “More to the Story” in The Common at thecommononline.org/more-to-the-story.

Learn more about Michael and his work at michaeldavidlukas.com.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming April 1, 2025 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Donna Besel, "The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family" (U Regina Press, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode host Hollay Ghadery talks to bestselling author Donna Besel about her staggering memoir, The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family (University of Regina Press, 2021) which has been hailed as “a shattering story and an essential one, told with consummate honesty and courage.” —Joan Thomas, author of Five Wives

The Unravelling is a brave, riveting telling of the destruction caused by sexual assault within a family, and the physical, psychological, emotional, financial, and legal tolls survivors often shoulder.

Donna Besel offers an honest portrayal of the years-long police process from disclosure to prosecution that offers readers greater insight into the challenges victims face and the remarkable strength and resilience required to obtain some measure of justice.

More about The Unravelling:

It’s the antithesis of why a wedding should be memorable. In 1992, at a sister’s nuptials, Donna Besel’s family members discovered that their father, Jock Tod, had molested their youngest sister. After this disclosure, the other five sisters admitted their father had assaulted them when they were younger and had been doing so for years. Despite there being enough evidence to charge their father, the lengthy prosecution rocked Besel's family and deeply divided their small rural community.

More about Donna Besel:

Donna Besel loves writing of all kinds, and does presentations for schools, libraries, universities, conferences, and retreats. Her work has gained recognition from CBC Literary Awards (three times), won national contests, and appeared in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies. Both of her books, a short story collection and a memoir, have been bestsellers.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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rob mclennan, "On Beauty: Stories" (U Alberta Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

NBN host and CanLit fangirl extraordinaire Hollay Ghadery speaks with rob mclennan about his collection of stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024).

This contains a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.

About rob mclennan:

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025),On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller(2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Ronald Okuaki Lieber, "The Long Journey Out" (Wipf and Stock, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Today I spoke with Ronald Okuaki Lieber about his new book, The Long Journey Out (Resource Publications, 2023)

These poems are arranged in four sections: Setting, The Way Across, Bridge, And Back. Lieber, a practicing psychoanalyst, says that this follows the structure from "psychedelic journey work.”

Throughout the collection, Lieber (who lived in fourteen localities the first fourteen years of his life as an army brat) is a master of mise-en-scène; each poem located somewhere more or less specific. The vicissitudes of the specificity change to meet the reader on the journey out. For me, this is movingly demonstrated in what I interpret as the central poem on the journey, Gare Montparnasse: The Melancholy of Departure, read beautifully by Lieber in the interview. Gare Montparnasse is a specific point of departure. The train, however, will not stop in our small provincial village.” Where is the village? The reader gets to decide.

Lieber considers his poems “as children” and would like to know how they’re doing in the world. “I want an audience for the for these poems. I want to know, oh, 'they did nothing to me’. Or ‘they evoked something’ or whatever. Anything. So, they're not just stillborn in a vacuum. My personal investment is to send my poems into the world and they will fare as they fare. But I want them to run into others.”

He would like to hear from all readers and can be reached through his website.

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Emma Pattee, "Tilt" (Marysue Rucci Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future.

Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

A propulsive debut, Tilt is a primal scream of a novel about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people we love.

Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and a fiction writer living in Portland, Oregon. She’s written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. In 2021, she coined the term “Climate Shadow” to describe an individual’s potential impact on climate change. Her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, New Orleans Review, Carve Magazine, Citron Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review.

Recommended Books:

KJ Charles, A Seditious Affair
Danzy Senna, Colored Television
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection
Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope

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CS Richardson, "All the Colour in the World" (Knopf Canada, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shortlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize, All the Colour in the World by CS Richardson tells the story of the restorative power of art in one man’s life, set against the sweep of the twentieth century—from Toronto in the ’20s and ’30s, through the killing fields of World War II, to 1960s Sicily. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery interviews Richardson about this extraordinary novel.

Henry, born 1916, thin-as-sticks, nearsighted, is an obsessive doodler—copying illustrations from his Boy’s Own magazines. Left in the care of a nurturing, Shakespeare-quoting grandmother, eight-year-old Henry receives as a gift his first set of colouring pencils (and a pocket knife for the sharpening). As he commits these colours to memory—cadmium yellow; burnt ochre; deep scarlet red—a passion for art, colour, and the stories of the great artists takes hold, and becomes Henry’s unique way of seeing the world. It is a passion that will both haunt and sustain him on his journey through the century: from boyhood dreams on a summer beach to the hothouse of art academia and a love cut short by tragedy; from the psychological wounds of war to the redemption of unexpected love.

Projected against a backdrop of iconic masterpieces—from the rich hues of the European masters to the technicolour magic of Hollywood—All the Colour in the World is Henry’s story: part miscellany, part memory palace, exquisitely precise with the emotional sweep of a great modern romance.

About CS Richardson:

CS RICHARDSON’s first novel, The End of the Alphabet, was an international bestseller, published in fourteen countries and ten languages, and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean). His second novel, The Emperor of Paris, was a national bestseller, named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. An award-winning book designer, CS Richardson worked in publishing for forty years. He is a multiple recipient of the Alcuin Award, Canada's highest honour for excellence in book design. He lives and writes in Toronto.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Victoria Christopher Murray, "Harlem Rhapsody" (Berkley, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Most people in North America have probably at least heard the name W. E. B. Dubois. In the early twentieth century, DuBois—the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard—published and spoke extensively about his vision of equality through education. In particular, he edited The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP, while also writing such classics as The Souls of Black Folk.

But if Dubois is well known, the same cannot be said these days of Jessie Redmon Fauset, the central character of Victoria Christopher Murray’s Harlem Rhapsody (Berkley, 2025). In her day, Fauset—who held a degree from Cornell as well as a master’s from Penn and a certificate from the Sorbonne in Paris—worked as the literary editor of The Crisis and its associated children’s magazine, The Brownies Book, while writing the first of what would become four acclaimed novels. She fostered such stars of the Harlem Renaissance as Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. She was also romantically involved with W. E. B. Dubois, a reality that Murray uses to humanize a heroine who is in every other respect truly remarkable. Her story pulled me in and kept me reading to the very last page.

Victoria Christopher Murray is the author of more than thirty novels, including The Personal Librarian and The First Ladies, both historical fiction co-written with Marie Benedict. Harlem Rhapsody is her most recent book.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025.

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Rob Winger, "It Doesn't Matter What We Mean" (McClelland & Stewart, 2021)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery chops it up with poet Rob Winger about his collection, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant by Rob Winger (McClelland & Stewart, 2021). This is an astonishing collection of poems that question perception, meaning, and context.

How does private thinking align with public action? And what might it mean to intend something anyhow? To name our particulars? To translate from the personal to the communal, the pedestrian to the universal? In Rob Winger's new collection of poetry, such questions are less a circulatory system--heart and lungs and blood--than a ribcage, a structure that protects the parts that matter most. "I'd like to think," Winger writes, "it doesn't matter / what we meant." But is that right? Could it ever be?

Partly an investigation of system versus system error, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant asks us to own up to our own inherited contexts, our own luck or misfortune, our own ways of moving through each weekday. From meditations on sleepy wind turbines to Voyager 1's dormant thrusters, from country road culverts to the factory floor's punch clock, from allied English-to-English folkloric translations to the crumbling limestone of misremembered basements, this is poetry that complicates what it means to live within and beyond the languages, lexicons, and locations around us.

About Rob Winger:

ROB WINGER is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Muybridge's Horse, a Globe and Mail Best Book and CBC Literary Award winner shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award, Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and Ottawa Book Award. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Shahd Alshammari, "Confetti and Ashes" (2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Shahd Alshammari’s Confetti and Ashes: Reflections on Wellness (Literary Mentor Words for Wellness, 2025) is a speculative memoir that questions what it means to live a good life. Blending personal experiences with the voices of ghosts and a seductive Qareen, this is a meditative exploration of consciousness and the liminal spaces we exist in.

As a passionate Squash player, the narrator delves into the transformative power of sports. This lyrical narrative is genre-defying, refusing to adhere to conventional ways of narrating stories we carry within our bodies. Multi-layered and in many voices, this is a narrative of memory, disability, and movement.

In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy interviews Shahd Alshammari about her creative process, her personal journey with multiple sclerosis, as well as how her writings explore illness, wellness, and the search for meaning.

Ibrahim Fawzy is a literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature.

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Jehanne Dubrow, "Civilians" (LSU Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

The final volume in Dr. Jehanne Dubrow’s groundbreaking trilogy about the experience of being a modern military spouse, Civilians (LSU Press, 2025) examines a significant moment of transformation in a military marriage: the shift from active-duty service to civilian life. After twenty years in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Dubrow’s husband came to the end of his tenure as an officer. Civilians addresses what it means when someone who has been trained for war returns from the confining, restrictive space of a naval vessel. Set amid America’s seemingly endless conflicts, Dr. Dubrow’s poems confront pressing questions about the process of transitioning to a new reality as a noncombatant: What happens to the sailor removed from a world of uniforms and uniformity? How is his language changed? His geography? And what happens to a wife once physical and emotional distances are erased and she is reunited with her husband, a man made strange and foreign by his contact with war?

Civilians is a book both shadowed by and in conversation with the classics, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’s The Trojan Women, and Sophocles’s Philoctetes. Blending formal and free verse, with materials ranging from the historical to the personal, Dr. Dubrow offers readers a candid look at the experience of watching a loved one adjust to homelife after a career of military service.

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Kirby, "She" (Knife, Fork, Book, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode of NBN host, Hollay Ghadery speaks with the incomparable Toronto poet Kirby in an exclusive sampler of spectacular Kirby poetry.

Kirby and Hollay talk about community and about Kirby’s work including their most recent poetry collection, She (Knife|Fork|Book, 2024) as well as Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021). Kirby also read from some of their new work.

"She is a capacious city of rich human habitation, where elation is every day’s caring infusion. Her cityscapes are painted deftly—in few words, in pauses, in juxtapositions, in fond attentions, in breath and the difficulty of breath, by a poet who knows deeply that life is fragile and that age comes and alters us. She says: the world loves us back when we love it. Flowers, streets, lovers, skies, persons, walks, in/fusions. She is joy’s pronoun!" —ERÍN MOURE, Theophylline A Poetic Migration Via the Modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké (de Castro,

Poetry is Queer is a kaleidoscope of sexual outlaws, gay icons, Sapphic poets, and great lovers—real and imagined—conjured like gateway drugs to a queer world. Claiming the word “queer” for those who self-proclaim the authority of their own bodies in defiance of church and state, Kirby pays tribute to gay touchstones while embodying both their work and joy. From gazing upon street boys with constant companion C.P. Cavafy, to end of day observances with Frank O’Hara, to mowing Walt Whitman’s grass, Poetry Is Queer is a hybrid-genre memoir like no other.

About KIRBY:

KIRBY’s work includes Last Licks (Anstruther Press, 2024) Behold (2023), a stage adaption of Poetry is Queer (Palimpsest Press, 2021), What Do You Want to Be Called? (Anstruther Press, 2020), & This Is Where I Get Off (Permanent Sleep Press, 2019). Their column, “The First Time” is a regular feature at Send My Love To Anyone. They are the publisher at knife | fork | book kirbyshe.com

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Catherine Owen, "Moving to Delilah" (FreeHand Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

From award-winning poet Catherine Owen, a collection of poems about one woman’s journey from BC to a new life in Alberta, where she buys an old house and creates a new meaning of home. NBN host Hollay Ghadery and Catherine enjoy a lively conversation about poetry, community, and this new collection of poems.

In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic form.

About Catherine Owen:

Catherine Owen, from Vancouver, BC, is the author of fifteen collections of poetry and prose. Her work has won and been nominated for awards and has been toured across Canada 12 times. She edits, hosts the series 94th Street Trobairitz, and runs the podcast Ms. Lyric’s Poetry Outlaws from her home in Edmonton, AB.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Su Chang, "The Immortal Woman" (House of Anansi Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. She uses her position as a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai to find books, has one friend she can trust, and is tormented by her older brother. After being involved in the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she loses hope in China and raises Lin, her daughter, to pursue a life in the West. Both Lemai and Lin suffer from unnamed mental anguish at various points in their life and are both haunted by the past. In Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Toronto, they grapple with people from their former lives, and Lin’s attempts at erasing her Chinese identity nearly make her go mad. This is a passionate debut novel about the mother-daughter bond, Chinese cultural identity, and the struggles of being a foreigner in America.

SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer, born and raised in Shanghai. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest. Her plays have been performed in various festivals and theatres across Canada. More essays and fiction are forthcoming in the Toronto Star, Electric Literature, Hamilton Review of Books, Ex-Puritan, Open-Book, 49th Shelf, etc. Su is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Canadian Authors Association. She devotes her interstices of time between writing and a full-time job to reading, playing the piano, nature walks, and wrestling with her children. Connect with her at https://www.instagram.com/suchangwrites/.

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Cristina Leport, "Change of Heart: A Miner & Mulville Medical Thriller" (Bancroft, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 9 Mar 2025 08:00:00 +0000

In the bustling heart of New York City, a young medical student’s life is tragically cut short, though her heart continues to beat, holding the promise of life for another. Detective Kirk Miner is called to the scene and quickly uncovers a chilling conspiracy involving organ donations and high-stakes crime. As the investigation unfolds, Miner realizes the case is far more complex and dangerous than it initially seemed.

Enter FBI Agent Jack Mulville, who steps in to supervise Special Agent Charlotte Bloom as they join forces with Miner. Together, they unravel a web of corruption, revealing that Amy Winter's death is connected to a ruthless organ trafficking ring.

Amy Winter, a promising pre-med student, is found dead under mysterious circumstances. Her death triggers an investigation that pulls Miner, Mulville, and Bloom into a labyrinth of deceit and desperation. As they dig deeper, they discover that Amy's heart is not just a donor's gift but a coveted prize in a deadly game controlled by criminals willing to kill to keep their secrets hidden.

The quest for justice takes Miner, Mulville, and Bloom through the shadowy underbelly of organ trafficking, revealing the lengths to which people will go to secure life-saving transplants. Amidst the danger, they face moral dilemmas and personal risks, pushing them to their limits as they strive to protect innocent lives and dismantle a powerful criminal network.

Change of Heart is a gripping medical thriller that intertwines the intricacies of modern medicine with the relentless pursuit of justice. Cristina LePort, M.D., masterfully combines her medical expertise with edge-of-your-seat storytelling, delivering a novel that will keep you turning pages long into the night.

Dr. LePort is an accomplished physician with a passion for weaving medical knowledge into thrilling narratives. Her extensive background in medicine lends authenticity and depth to her stories, making the Miner & Mulville series a unique blend of fact and fiction.

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George Elliott Clarke, "Canticles II (MMXX)" (Guernica, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 8 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with one of her “favourite poets in the galaxy”, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Elliot Clarke about his Canticles series of books—focusing on Canticles II (MMXX).

Canticles is a lyric-styled epic. Clarke's visions of canonical and apocryphal scriptures are black in ink, but lightning in illumination. Testament II issues re-readings, revisions, rewrites of scriptures crucial to the emergent (Anglophone) African Diaspora in the Americas. Canticles II (MMXIX) and Canticles II (MMXX) follow Testament I (also issued in two parts) whose subject is History, principally, of slavery and imperialism and liberation and independence. Canticles II is properly irreverent where necessary, but never blasphemous. It is scripture become what it always is, really, anyway: Poetry.

About George Elliot Clarke:

Acclaimed for his narrative lyric suites (Whylah Falls and Execution Poems), his lyric “colouring books” (Blue, Black, Red, and Gold), his selected poems (Blues and Bliss), his opera libretti and plays (Beatrice Chancy and Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path), George Elliott Clarke now presents us with his epic-in-progress, Canticles, a work that views History as a web of imperialism, enslavement, and insurrection. A native Africadian, Canada’s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate ranges the atlas and ransacks the library to ink lines unflinching before Atrocity and unquiet before Oppression.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Joseph Earl Thomas, "God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer" (Grand Central Publishing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 7 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.

Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. GOD BLESS YOU, OTIS SPUNKMEYER is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir, longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and shortlisted for the Patrick Saroyan International Writing Prize; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Literary Excellence, winner of the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His prose and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Vanity Fair, The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Dilettante Army. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he earned his PhD in English from The University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Recommended Books:

Nell Irving Painter, Old in Art School
Yoko Towada, Scattered All Over the Earth
Alison Mills Newman, Francisco

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Margaret Nowaczyk, "Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery" (James Street North Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 5 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery is a touching collection of personal essays exploring the impact of genetics, ancestry, and immigration on our lives. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery talks to Margaret, who is best-selling Polish-Canadian author and pediatric clinical geneticist.

In Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery Margaret Nowaczyk explores different facets of her life, from listening to the radio dramas of her childhood in Communist Poland to her work now as a pediatric clinical geneticist. These are beautifully crafted essays, full of hard-won truths and insights, generously shared with the reader. Whether struggling with English as a teenaged refugee or documenting the process of permanent hair dye, Nowaczyk moves seamlessly between scientific and personal writing, bridging the gap between these two areas with elegance and humour. Marrow Memory is an invitation to readers to explore the ways in which our experiences and identities are entangled with our ancestral history.

“Here is a physician who has answered the call to a perilous narrative life in the face of patients’ illnesses and her own. To tell and to write, in the end, is to see, however costly might be that sight. How fortunate are her patients and their families for her insight. How indebted is our field of narrative medicine to receive this moving testimony of the powers of shared creativity in our medicine and in our lives.” – Dr. Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine, Columbia University.

More about Margaret Nowacyk:

Born in Poland, Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatric clinical geneticist and a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Canadian, Polish and American literary magazines and anthologies. She lives in Hamilton, ON, with her husband and two sons.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Paul Lisicky, "Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell" (HarperOne, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. He was inspired by her musicality, her poetry, and her willingness to defy musical conventions. Nearly every one of her songs spoke to him in some way. As a budding songwriter whose music was widely performed in churches around the country, he was motivated by her superb tunings, phrasing, and melodies. Later, he focused more on lyrics and prose, hers and his own, eventually earning a master’s in creative fiction and working in the world of professional writing. He continued to follow Joni’s career and never got tired of her music, which helped him navigate the ups and downs of his life. Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell (HarperOne, 2025) is a beautiful memoir about the struggle of a gay writer intertwined with the life and career of the magnificent Joni Mitchell.

Paul Lisicky grew up in southern New Jersey but has lived most of his adult life in Massachusetts and New York City. He earned bachelor's and master’s degrees in English from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1990). He authored seven books, including Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, The Burning House, Famous Builder, Later, The Narrow Door, and Lawn Boy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently a professor of English in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is the editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and is passionate about music, animals, and travel.

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Jason Pargin, "I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Mar 2025 09:00:00 +0000

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a darkly humorous thriller set in modern America's age of anxiety, by New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jason about his rambunctiously thrilling and thought-provoking novel.

About I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom:

Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC.

But there are rules:

He cannot look inside the box.
He cannot ask questions.
He cannot tell anyone.
They must leave immediately.
He must leave all trackable devices behind.

As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war.

The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world.

About Jason Pargin:

Jason Pargin is a New York Times bestselling author who used to write under the pseudonym David Wong. His first novel, John Dies at the End, became a feature film in 2012. He is also the author of the Zoey Ashe series, currently in development for TV.

Jason was also the Executive Editor at Cracked.com from 2007 until 2020, when he left to become a full time novelist. He has a dog.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Gray Davidson Carroll, "Silent Spring," The Common magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing. Gray also discusses how they started writing poetry, how they approach drafting and revision, and how their work in public health fits with and complements their work in poetry. We also hear a reading of Gray’s first poem in The Common, “November 19, 2022,” about the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs.

Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, ONLY POEMS, Frontiers in Medicine and elsewhere. They have received fellowships from Brooklyn Poets and Columbia University and are currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at NYU.

Read Gray’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/gray-davidson-carroll/

Learn more about Gray and their work at graydavidsoncarroll.com.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming in April 2025 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Lisa F. Rosenberg, "FIne, I'm a Terrible Person" (Sibylline Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Lisa F. Rosenberg about Fine, I'm a Terrible Person (Sibylline Press, 2025).

The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter. Born in the 500-year-old Jewish community of Rhodes, she mixes Judeo-Espanol (Ladino) aphorisms into her speech and thinks she speaks Spanish, but few can understand her. With an expired license and an ancient car, she drives to Los Angeles hoping to find a treasure after the death of her father’s last wife. Aurora’s daughter Leyla is also affected by her father’s abrupt departure and spends her life seeking perfection, trying not to let her mother make her crazy, and striving to fit into their wealthy San Francisco community. When she learns that her husband might be having an affair, she takes her two young sons for a madcap weekend in Los Angeles where she’ll have to bend a few rules, grapple with her mother, sneak into her husband’s conference, and learn a bit about going with the flow. This is a charming mother-daughter novel about immigrants, overcoming family dysfunction, the cuisine of the Jewish community of Rhodes, and learning to overcome obstacles.

Lisa F. Rosenberg earned a B.A. from U.C. Berkeley in Art History, an M.A. in Graduate Humanities, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Dominican University of California. Her early professional career was in the blue-chip retail art world as a Gallerist for several prominent San Francisco art dealers including Crown Point Press and John Berggruen Gallery. She was most recently a public guide at SFMOMA and a Museum Educator on staff at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Her writing up until now has been primarily non-fiction essays for exhibition catalogs, art criticism, tours, and public talks. Her short story, Family Footnotes was recently featured in the summer 2024 edition of Amaranth: a journal of food writing, art, and design, and she was a quarterfinalist in the Driftwood Press in-house short story contest for the Spring of 2024. Her family heritage is “Rhodeslis,” Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews from the island of Rhodes. Her deep affection for her cultural legacy is reflected in the novel’s historical accuracy of language, cultural authenticity, and descriptions of mouthwatering cuisine. When she is not writing, she is reading, hiking, practicing yoga, or traveling with her husband of 35 years.

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Nora Lange, "Us Fools" (Two Dollar Radio, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.

As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.

With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.

Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. An earlier iteration of it was shortlisted for The Novel Prize, a prize to recognize novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form.

Nora’s writing has appeared in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family. And look for Nora’s in The Believer.

Recommended Books:

Miranda July, All Fours
Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time

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Tim Blackett, "Grandview Drive" (Nightwood, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Tim Blacket about his award-winning debut short story collection, Grandview Drive (Nightwood Editions, 2024). Grandview Drive won two Saskatchewan Book Awards—the Fiction Book Award and the First Book Award.

This is a pensive and darkly stunning collection that investigates the strange and unexpected intersections of loneliness and connection.

From his car, a lonely, heartbroken man secretly watches strangers going about their lives in the comfort of their own homes; when caught, he wrecks his car in an attempt to escape. A man hears a car wreck outside his home and has a wild night of romance with a strange woman he meets at the scene. A reclusive old writer starts to believe he is becoming his own characters as he writes. A college student looks to his girlfriend's diary for pointers on how he should act. A mother confronted with her estranged son's death by car wreck organizes a memorial service for a list of attendees she has never met.

This collection of sixteen connected short stories investigates the ways we humans so often feel lonely and alone, yet cannot avoid having our lives be contingent upon others--often in ways we can neither see nor understand. Blackett's characters long for meaningful connection and struggle to find it; they are too often unaware of the connections that are right in front of them.

Grandview Drive is a collection that builds on itself; the stories stand on their own, but they are strengthened by the (sometimes secret) connections they hold with each other. Blackett's debut asks the reader to think about love and loss, loneliness and heartbreak, redemption and starting life anew.

About Tim Blackett:

Tim Blackett is a Canadian writer whose work has appeared in Briarpatch, [spaces], Grain Magazine and a small Saskatchewan journal called Swift, Flowing. He holds a Bachelor of Theology and a BA in English from the University of Regina, as well as a certificate in creative writing from Humber College. His short story collection, Grandview Drive, was shortlisted for two Saskatchewan book awards, and a pre-publication version placed second in the John V. Hicks Long Manuscript Award (2019). The titular story, "Grandview Drive" was longlisted for the Carter v. Cooper Short Fiction Award (2012). Blackett lives in Regina, SK.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Cynthia Weiner, "A Gorgeous Excitement" (Crown, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.

Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. Recently, her story “A Castle in Outerspace” was republished in Coolest American Stories 2024. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City. A Gorgeous Excitement is her debut novel.

Recommended Books:

Beena Kamlani, The English Problem
Margarita Montimore, The Doll House Academy

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Janet Sherfund, "Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me" (Worth, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well.

This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me (Worth, 2024). In her literary debut, Janet Sherlund explores the complex issues so many adoptees and their parents grapple with, including the complicated emotions of rejection, loss, grief, denial, and shame.

Sherlund, who was given up for adoption within days of her birth, shares her journey to fulfill her lifetime longing for connection with her family of origin, her instinctive ache for connection with her birth mother, and what it was like to have a “borrowed identity.” In poignant detail, Sherlund describes her quest to find out who she is, where she came from, and why she was given away. And she reveals the pain and courage required to discover one’s true identity.

With 5 million adoptees in the U.S., many of whom are discovering their biological roots on DNA websites, Abandoned at Birth is the book for our time. The insight Sherlund derived from her journey will encourage and console others on the same path, while examining the inherent need of all of us to belong, and understand our origins, our culture, and our genetic roots.

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Janna Brooke Wallack, "Naked Girl" (2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children. Sienna and her little brother Siddhartha grow up in a Miami Beach mansion without schools, doctors, or attention. It’s the 1980s and their dad uses the mansion, with its dock on the water, as a base for his drug dealing and to house the seekers and lost souls who follow his lackadaisical cult, leaving Sienna and Siddhi to raise themselves. Their dotty grandmother and distant occasionally picks up some slack but won’t take responsibility for her son’s failings as a father. Sienna realizes that she and Siddhi have to raise themselves in this intriguing and unusual story about siblings helping each other survive a dysfunctional family.

Janna Brooke Wallack’s stories have been published by literary publications such as Hobart, Upstreet, Glimmer Train Press, American Literary Review, and more. Her short story "Campaigning" was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. Naked Girl’s prologue "Five Pictures" was a finalist for Glimmer Train Press's Short Story Award for New Writers, and her story "Cat and Rose" received a Pushcart nomination by The MacGuffin. Naked Girl was named a semifinalist for the 2024 Publishers Weekly Book Life Prize in Fiction. In addition to her writing career, Wallack has worked as a grant writer, a substance abuse prevention counselor, a wetlands manual editor, a theatre production assistant and an actress. After spending a couple of years in Hong Kong, she moved to Hoboken, NJ, raised five children and moved to Stone Ridge in the Catskills of New York, where she ran a permaculture gentleman’s farm. For more about Janna, visit https://jannabrookewallack.com/.

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Elyse Durham, "Maya & Natasha" (Mariner Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls, Maya and Natasha, become students at the Vaganova Academy after the Siege of Leningrad is broken.

We meet the twins as they enter their senior year in 1958. At once inseparable and competitive, Maya and Natasha have developed quite different personalities, with Natasha the leader and future star, Maya her loyal follower. But as they turn seventeen, various factors pull them apart: boys; the changing climate of Khrushchev’s USSR; and the approaching end to their schooling, which even in a state-run economy doesn’t guarantee anyone a specific place in the world. But it’s when the state declares that, in response to recent defections by artists to the West, only one member of any given family can join the Kirov Ballet that Maya and Natasha must confront the reality that one sister’s success will come at the cost of the other’s. How each of them responds to that challenge drives the rest of this thoroughly engrossing novel. And although neither girl really recognizes it until near the end of the book, the choices each makes are driven at least in part by their determination to fulfill the goals their mother never had the chance to achieve.

Weaving together such disparate elements as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War competition that drove the exchange between the New York City Ballet’s visit to Moscow and the Kirov’s tour of the United States in 1962, the filming of Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental version of War and Peace, and the difficult yet rewarding training that produces elite dancers, Maya and Natasha (Mariner Books, 2025) explores the eternal bond between sisters while prompting readers to consider just how far they would go to achieve a cherished goal.

Elyse Durham, a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband, who is a Greek Orthodox priest. Maya & Natasha is her debut novel.

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Caroline Topperman, "Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family's Search across History for Belonging" (HCI, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Toronto author Caroline Topperman about her new book, Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family's Search Across History for Belonging (HCI, December 17, 2024).

Your Roots Cast a Shadow explores where personal history intersects with global events to shape a family’s identity. From the bustling markets of Baghdad to the quiet streets of Stockholm, Topperman navigates the murky waters of history as she toggles between present and past, investigating the relationship between migration, politics, identity, and home. Her family stories bring history into the present as her paternal grandmother becomes the first woman allowed to buy groceries at her local Afghan market while her husband is tasked with building the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. Topperman’s Jewish grandfather, a rising star in the Communist Party, flees Poland at the start of WWII one step ahead of the Nazis, returning later only to be another Jew rejected by the Party. Topperman herself struggles with new cultural expectations and reconciling with estranged relatives.

A study in social acceptance, Topperman contends with what one can learn about an adopted culture while trying to retain the familiar, the challenges of learning new languages and traditions even as she examines the responsibilities of migrants to their new culture, as well as that society’s responsibility to them.

More about Caroline Topperman:

Caroline Topperman is a European-Canadian writer, entrepreneur, and world traveller. Born in Sweden, raised in Canada with a recent stint of living in Poland, she holds a BFA in screenwriting. She is a co-founder of Mountain Ash Press and KW Writers Alliance, and currently runs Migrations Review, and Write, They Said. Her book, Tell Me What You See, serves as a toolkit for her writing workshops. She has written articles for Huffington Post Canada, Jane Friedman’s blog, was the Beauty Editor for British MODE Magazine, and served as managing editor for NonBinary Review. Her hybrid memoir, Your Roots Cast a Shadow, explores explosive intergenerational histories that link war zones and foreign shores with questions of identity and belonging. Her next book, The Road to Tang-e Gharu, integrates Afghan folktales and family memories with the story of one of the greatest roads ever built.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Natasha Ramoutar, "Baby Cerberus" (Buckrider Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ethereal, soul-stirring, and playful, Baby Cerberus (Buckrider Books, 2024) by Natasha Ramoutar traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives. Flitting from myths and folklore to video games to imagined futures, each piece asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures, and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in each section with the riddles as two lost souls try to find each other through time. These poems tug on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here.

While Baby Cerberus centers fun and nostalgia with allusions to video games, internet lore, and Tamagotchis, there are still heavy themes throughout which address misogyny, racism, and colonization. The unique integration of literary topics with some of the more pop culture references will distinguish the book in the minds of readers and expand what we can ask of poetry.

More about Natasha Ramoutar:

Natasha Ramoutar is a writer of Indo-Guyanese descent from Toronto. Her debut collection of poetry Bittersweet, published in 2020 by Mawenzi House, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was the editor of FEEL WAYS, an anthology of Scarborough literature. She is a senior editor with Augur Magazine and serves on the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Tova Mirvis, "We Would Never" (Avid Reader Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

After her husband Jonah asks for a divorce, Hailey Gelman’s difficult life in Binghamton turns into six weeks of litigation and custody battles in Tova Mirvis’s new novel, We Would Never (Avid Reader Press 2025). After she files a motion to move with their young daughter to Florida, the tension escalates, and Jonah is suddenly murdered. Hailey is the prime suspect. Hailey’s father, who had to rebuild his life after his academic advisor took credit for his work is dying of Parkinsons; her mother, whose reason for living is to make sure her family is safe, makes reckless decisions, her brother Nate, the troublemaker who managed to graduate from medical school and works in his father’s dermatology practice. tries to protect his sister, and her other brother Adam, can’t stand their mother’s interference, moves to Maine, and refuses to participate in family events of any kind. Based on a true story, We Would Never is about family loyalty, the damage of divorce, and the fierceness of parents’ love for their children.

Tova Mirvis grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and attended Columbia College in New York City, followed by the Columbia School of the Arts where she received an MFA and was a teaching fellow. Her first novel The Ladies Auxiliary, which was set in the Memphis Jewish community, was a national bestseller and an Independent Bookstore bestseller. She is also the author of the novels The Outside World and Visible City. Her memoir The Book of Separation stemmed from an essay she wrote for the New York Times “Private Lives” column and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and excerpted in the New York Times Modern Love Column. She has been a visiting scholar at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute at Brandeis University and a fellow at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center. Her essays have appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, Real Simple, and Psychology Today, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, MA with her family where she is working on a new novel. When she is not writing, she enjoys running, learning to play tennis and talking to her dog.

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Ayelet Tsabari, "Songs for the Brokenhearted" (Random House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 9 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

On this NBN podcast, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed author Ayelet Tsabari about gorgeous debut novel, Songs for the Broken Hearted (Random House, September 10, 2024).

Many people know of Ayelet from her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019.

Songs for the Broken Hearted tells the story of a young Yemeni Israeli woman who learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter. This is a salient exploration of the cost of secrets and the power of women’s voices.

"In her new novel, Ayelet Tsabari’s craft is at its apex. Her characters are alive, the story skillfully structured, and the tragic, hidden history of Yemenite Jews expertly woven into the lives of people you will laugh with and shed tears for. To read this book is also to encounter an Israel and Palestine few of us are familiar with nowadays; when words like “peace” and “hope” were common, and nuance and complexity possible. A love song for a time long past, overflowing with emotional intelligence and psychological insight, Songs for the Brokenhearted will break your heart."

— Jonathan Garfinkel, author of In a Land without Dogs the Cats Learn to Bark and Ambivalence

More about Songs for the Broken Hearted:

1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha'ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren't supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man.

1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida's daughter, has been living in New York City-a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother's Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favoured her was alive. She hasn't looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni's childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket.

Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family-including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future. Songs for the Brokenhearted is a story about voice and voicelessness, traditions lost and found, and the unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

Ayelet Tsabari is the author of The Art of Leaving, finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2019.

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph.

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Emily E K Murdoch on the Governess Bureau Series

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 8 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

When the nobility and gentility of England are at their wits end, they send a discrete note to Miss Vivienne Clarke’s Governess Bureau. Only accepting the very best clients, their governesses are coveted, with every governess following three rules:

1.You must have an impeccable record.

2.You must bring a special skill to the table.

3.You must never fall in love…

In this interview with Dr. Miranda Melcher, Emily E K Murdoch takes listeners behind the scenes to explore the historical research that went into the six-book Governess Bureau series (Dragonblade) published by Dragonblade from 2021 to 2022. They also discuss how the novels bring together the genres of historical fiction, mystery, and romance, how the series is structured and why, and much more. If you’ve ever been interested in how series are created and genres are smashed - this is the conversation for you!

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Adam Ross, "Playworld: A Novel" (Knopf, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse.

Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.

Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.

ADAM ROSS is the author of Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.

Recommended Books:

Edward P Jones, The Known World
Ben Austin, Correction: Parole, Prison, and the Possibility of Change
Melissa Febos, The Dry Season

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Jamie Tennant, "River, Diverted" (Palimpsest Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 5 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

River, Diverted is a wild and wonderfully dark and campy novel by Jamie Tennant, published by Palimpsest Press in 2022.

River Black found cult success writing slasher flicks but has grown increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. When a mysterious book appears in her mailbox, her life is turned upside down. River returns to Nagano, Japan, where the book originated, hoping to pay respects to old friends and revisit her past. Instead, she finds her memory is duplicitous, her reality is porous, and the mysterious book is more alive than she could have believed. River, Diverted is a dark fairy tale that explores the trickery of memory, the delicacy of friendship, the nature of creativity and the deliverance of hope. Filled with pop culture references and a deep love of monster movies, River, Diverted is both a light-hearted and subtly serious read that will captivate readers.

About Jamie Tennant:

Jamie Tennant is a writer and radio program director based in Hamilton, ON. A long-time music enthusiast, James has covered music and pop culture both locally and nationally. He is the Program Director at 93.3 CFMU at McMaster University, hosting two shows. In 2014, he was co-founder of the Hamilton Independent Media Awards. When he is not helping set up the JUNOs, being on the Grand Jury for the Polaris Prize, or blogging for the Fujirock festival in Japan, Tennant continues to write for several magazines and blogs; his 2009 article on rock band Simply Saucer was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He currently lives in Hamilton with his wife and son. The Captain of Kinnoull Hill is his debut novel.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Saad T. Farooqi, "White World" (Cormorant Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 5 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Saad T. Farooqi about his new novel White World (Cormorant Books, 2024).

Allah has burned the sky away. A mysterious snow falls over everything. Is it an endless winter? Is it the result of a nuclear exchange with India? A celestial impact? Now a barren wasteland, what little is left of Pakistan is heavily segregated along religious lines.

For Avaan, a gun in the hand feels as natural as breathing. An apostate pariah living under martial law and religious bigotry, violence has become a way of life. What respite he had from this terrifying world — his brother, his family, and Doua, the love of his life — was snatched away in military raids.

Now broken, Avaan finds himself involved in a civil war that poisons everything he’s ever believed in. The army shadows his every move, a mob boss wants him dead, and a legendary resistance leader has taken a keen interest in him. But there is a ray of hope: Avaan discovers that Doua is alive. Obsessed with finding her, he takes a stand against the army, the mob, and Pakistan itself with the only thing he has ever been able to count on: the gun in his hand.

About Saad T. Farooqi:

Saad T. Farooqi holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Kingston University London and a BA in English Literature from the American University of Sharjah. His short stories and poems have appeared in various international magazines. His shining moment on stage was accidentally setting his poem on fire by standing too close to a candle. When not writing, Saad enjoys boxing, experimenting in the kitchen to varying levels of success, and devouring anything film noir.

Saad spent the majority of his life as a Pakistani expat in Dubai. He immigrated to Canada in 2015 and currently resides in London, Ontario.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Allegra Goodman, "Isola" (The Dial Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Alegra Goodman about her novel Isola (The Dial Press, 2025)

After Marguerite is orphaned as a young girl, her guardian leaves her alone in her family’s enormous home, where servants see to her needs until he hires a mother and daughter to tutor her in the ways of wealthy 16th century lords and ladies. The guardian sells her home and spends her fortune, betting on an expedition to New France (now known as Canada). The guardian insists that she accompany him, only with her old maid. Afraid and lonely, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s secretary and falls in love with him, but the guardian learns of it and abandons her, her maid, and his secretary on a deserted island. Marguerite is forced to learn survival skills in this tale based on a true story.

Allegra Goodman’s novels include Isola (2025), Sam (a Read With Jenna Book Club selection), The Chalk Artist (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Mass.

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Badiucao and Mellissa Chan, "You Must Take Part in Revolution" (Street Noise Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

You Must Take Part In Revolution is a mind-bending graphic novel by award-winning journalist Melissa Chan and acclaimed dissident artist Badiucao. A near-future dystopia in the vein of George Orwell's Animal's Farm, the book explores technology, authoritarian government, and the lengths to which one will go in the fight for freedom. Three idealistic young people, forever changed by the real-life protests in Hong Kong in 2019, develop different beliefs about how best to fight against a techno-authoritarian China. The three characters take different paths toward transformative change, each struggling with how far they will go to fight for freedom and who they will become in the process. A powerful and important book about global totalitarian futures and the costs of resistance.

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Elio Zarmati, "Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile" (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Goodbye, Tahrir Square: Coming of Age as a Jew of the Nile (Cherry Orchard Books, 2025) is a first-person memoir written from the standpoint of a Jewish boy growing up in Egypt during the watershed years that shaped the Middle East into the powder keg it is today.

Described as the “Holden Caulfield of the Nile” for his rebellious attitude, the boy witnessed—between the ages of seven to fourteen—the 1952 revolution that overthrew King Farouk and gave rise to the dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser; the 1956 Suez war that marked the end of the British empire; and in its wake the destruction of the Jewish community that had lived in Egypt since Biblical times.

Though set in times of revolution and war, Goodbye, Tahrir Square is not a political book. It is the story of a boy whose close-knit extended Sephardic family, full of rich traditions and colorful characters, is suddenly torn asunder by the forces of revolution and war. A man-child coming of age like a wild cactus in the rubble of the past, overcoming a hostile environment, forging friendships that transcend ethnic and religious animus, and finding his own identity as he awakens to literature, history, art, archaeology, and the magic of love and sex.

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Gloria Blizzard, "Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas" (Dundurn Press, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 2 Feb 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Black Cake, Turtle Soup, and Other Dilemmas (Dundurn Press, 2025) by Gloria Blizzard is a diasporic collection of essays on music, memory, and motion.

In this powerful and deeply personal essay collection, Gloria Blizzard, in an international diasporic quest, moves up and down an urban subway line; between Canada and Trinidad; to and from a hospital emergency room; back and forth in time — and as a descendent of Africa living in the Americas, negotiates the complexities of culture, geography, race, and language. Through food, music, dance, and family history, Blizzard explores the art of belonging — to a family, a neighbourhood, a group, or a country. Using traditional narrative and the tools of poetry, Blizzard’s essays hover at the crossroads, in the spaces where art, science, and spirit collide. The intimate becomes universal, the questions are all relevant, and the answers of our times require a sleight of hand — the holding of simultaneous and overlapping worlds.

About Gloria Blizzard:

Gloria Blizzard is an award-winning writer and poet, and a Black Canadian woman of multiple heritages. Her work explores spaces where music, dance, spirit, and culture collide. She lives in Toronto.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Julia Sanches, "The Advice," The Common magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Translator Julia Sanches speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about translating “The Advice,” a story by Irene Pujadas, which appears in The Common’s fall issue in a portfolio of writing by contemporary Catalan women. Julia talks about her translation process, and the importance of capturing the tone and style of a piece, like the understated absurdist humor in “The Advice.” Julia also discusses how she approaches collaboration with other translators, how she chooses the books and stories she wants to translate, and how starting her career at a literary agency gave her a crash course in the behind-the-scenes of publishing.

Julia Sanches has translated close to thirty books from Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan into English, including works by Susana Moreira Marques, Munir Hachemi, and Eva Baltasar. She served as a judge for the 2024 National Book Award in Translated Literature, and was recently named an NEA Translation Fellow. Born in São Paulo, Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Read Julia’s translations from Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese in The Common here.

Learn more about Julia and her work at juliasanches.com.

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Rufi Thorpe, "Margo's Got Money Troubles" (William Morrow, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

As the child of a Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo's Got Money Troubles (William Morrow, 2024) is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

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Brian Hioe, "Taipei at Daybreak" (Repeater, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Brian Hioe is a Taipei-based writer, editor, translator, activist, and DJ who is best known for his journalism regarding Taiwan’s social and political landscape. Much of his work appears in New Bloom Magazine, an online magazine that he helped establish in 2014 to cover activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific at large.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Brian about his debut fictional novel, Taipei at Daybreak (Repeater Books, 2025).

Taipei at Daybreak is a work of autofiction that draws heavy inspiration from Brian’s experiences with activist movements including not just Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, but also Occupy Wall Street in the US and post-Fukushima disaster anti-nuclear protests in Japan.

Atop this undercurrent of activism, the novel dives into its protagonist's inner turmoil and coming-of-age, giving readers a highly personal insight into the nature of 2010s-era social movements.

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Andrew Lipstein, "Something Rotten" (FSG, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Andrew’s debut novel Last Resort was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. You can hear our interview about that amazing literary hoax on burned by books at the website or anywhere you find your podcasts. His second novel The Vegan was published in July 2023. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons.

Recommended Books:

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
Marilyn Robinson, Reading Genesis

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Louise Ells, "Lies I Told My Sister" (Latitude 46, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Lies I Told My Sister (Latitude 46, 2024) is Ells’ second novel and is a sensitive, poignant work of fiction. Taking place over just 17 hours and alternating between past and present, the novel takes us into the strained relationship of estranged sisters Rose and Lily, who are meeting at the hospital after Rose’s husband has been injured. Very quickly, issues of their childhood, the death of their older sister, and the inevitable truth of past lies and secrets surface. But while centering around a serious injury, the novel focuses on the cost of secrets, the depth of the bond between sisters, and just how far we will go to protect the ones we love—and ourselves.

More About Lies I Told My Sister

After a nine-month estrangement, sisters Lily and Rose, are reunited in a hospital emergency room when the younger sister’s husband has been badly injured in a car crash. While waiting for updates, they reminisce about their childhood memories in an effort to unearth the family tragedy—the death of their older sister Tansy. Lily and Rose begin to unravel the lies of omission that pulled them even farther apart.

Lies I Told My Sister is an exploration of how our community of loved ones can both buoy us up or tear us down. How innocently kept secrets can cause profound chasms.

About Louise Ells:

Louise Ells was born and raised in Northeastern Ontario. After years of travel, she moved to Cambridge and earned her PhD in Creative Writing. She was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2017, and published her short story collection, Notes Towards Recovery (Latitude 46) in 2019. Louise teaches at universities and colleges in England and Canada and currently lives just north of Toronto, where she can often be found in her library surrounded by books and snuggled up with her cats.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Ben Berman Ghan, "The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits" (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Ben Berman Ghan is the author of the bestselling novel, The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024).

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is a gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction. With elements of science fiction and horror dropped in amongst stunning literary prose, the debut novel spans centuries, covering humanity’s colonization of the moon, a war with alien beings, AI minds governing Canada, and a giant spacefaring whale. The book is centred around Toronto and shows a version of a Canadian future that will amaze and stun readers, while raising important questions about the ethics and power of AI, humanity’s claim to space, and the systematic destruction of our current planet.

More About The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits:

A gorgeously complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a spacefaring whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a recreation of humanity. Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanity’s quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.

More About Ben:

Ben Berman Ghan is a writer and editor from Toronto, Canada, whose prose and poetry have been published in Clarkesworld magazine, Strange Horizons, the Blasted Tree Publishing Co., the /tƐmz/ Review and others. His previous works include the short story collection What We See in the Smoke. He now lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at the University of Calgary.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Rod Carley, "Ruff: A Novel" (Latitude 46, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

RuFF (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024) is Rod Carley’s highly-anticipated fourth novel. This historical fiction transports us to Elizabethan England, where we witness Shakespeare struggling through a midlife crisis while trying to win a national play competition to secure the King’s business. Hilarious hijinks ensue, with whip-smart dialogue and a captivating tale that touches on salient social issues that persist today, including equality, justice, and censorship.

Humour and incisive wit combine to create a compulsively readable and thought-provoking novel from this Leacock Award long-listed author. We know RuFF will be a favourite book of the year for many.

More About RuFF:

Rod Carley is back with another theatrical odyssey packed with an unforgettable cast of Elizabethan eccentrics. It’s a madcap world more modern than tomorrow where gender is what a person makes of it (no matter the story beneath their petticoats or tights). Will Shakespeare is having a very bad year. Suffering from a mid-life crisis, a plague outbreak, and the death of the ancient Queen, Will’s mettle is put to the test when the new King puts his witch-burning hobby aside to announce a national play competition that will determine which theatre company will secure his favour and remain in business. As he struggles to write a Scottish supernatural thriller, Will faces one ruff and puffy obstacle after another including a young rival punk poet and his activist-wife fighting for equality and a woman’s right to tread the boards. Will and his band of misfits must ensure not only their own survival, but that of England as well. The stage is set for an outrageous and compelling tale of ghosts, ghostwriting, writer’s block, and the chopping block. Ruffly based on a true story.

About Rod Carley:

Rod is the award-winning author of three previous works of literary fiction: GRIN REAPING (long listed for the 2023 Leacock Medal for Humour, 2022 Bronze Winner for Humour from Foreword Review INDIES, a Finalist for the 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Humor/Comedy, and long listed for the ReLit Group Awards for Best Short Fiction of 2023); KINMOUNT (long listed for the 2021 Leacock Medal for Humour and Winner of the 2021 Silver Medal for Best Regional Fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards); A Matter of Will (Finalist for the 2018 Northern Lit Award for Fiction).

His short stories and creative non-fiction have appeared in a variety of Canadian literary magazines including Broadview (winner of the 2022 Award of Excellence for Best Seasonal Article from the Associated Church Press), Cloud Lake Literary, Blank Spaces, Exile, HighGrader, and the anthology 150 Years Up North and More. He was a finalist for the 2021 Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Prize.

Rod was the 2009 winner of TVO’s Big Ideas/Best Lecturer Competition for his lecture entitled “Adapting Shakespeare within a Modern Canadian Context. He is a proud alumnus of the Humber School for Writers and is represented by Carolyn Forde, Senior Literary Agent with The Transatlantic Agency. www.rodcarley.ca.

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Roberta Satow, "Our Time Is Up" (Ipbooks, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Roberta Satow about her new book Our Time Is Up (Ipbooks, 2024).

In 1895 Freud noticed that his case histories “read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.” What Dr. Satow has written works in the other direction; a novel that reads like case histories. She has accomplished the difficult task of representing what it feels like on both sides of the couch as her protagonist Rose is first a patient and then an analyst. This allows Satow to introduce multiple patients, each with resonant and recognizable temperaments. As a reader these characters present us with experiences of transference, counter transference, and the intimacy afforded by both. Intimacy is the affect running through the book.

While much of Rose’s story is autobiographical, Satow the writer knew she needed a plot and gave herself license to invent the final chapter of Rose’s relationship with her analyst. This part of the story satisfies a fantasy many patients have in relation to their analyst. It is pure wish fulfilment.

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Glenn Diaz, "Yñiga: A Novel" (Ateneo de Manila UP, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Yniga, the main character of Glenn Diaz’s novel of the same name, returns to her unnamed fishing town after her urban neighborhood burns down in a fire–what many suspect is retaliation for the capture of a wanted army general near her house.

What follows is a story about activist politics, state retaliation and returning home.

Yñiga (Ateneo de Manila University Press: 2022) was the winner of the 2024 Philippine National Book Award for the Best Novel in English. It has also been picked up by Titled Axis for international publication. Glenn Diaz’s books also include The Quiet Ones (Ateneo de Manila University Press: 2017) which also won the Philippine National Book Award, and When the World Ended I Was Thinking about the Forest (Paper Trail Projects: 2022).

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rosa Mercedes, Liminal, The Johannesburg Review of Books, and others. He holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide and currently teaches with the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Yniga. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Tara Dorabji, "Call Her Freedom" (Simon and Schuster, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode, we explore one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and her family amidst the backdrop of a military occupation.

Our book is: Call Her Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2025), by Tara Dorabji, which is set in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the picturesque mountain village of Poshkarbal is home to lush cherry and apple orchards and a thriving community—one divided by a patrolled border. Aisha and her mother Noorjahan live on the outskirts—two women alone in a world dominated by men. As the village midwife, Noorjahan teaches Aisha how to heal using local herbs and remedies. Isolated but content, Aisha is shocked when Noorjahan decides it is time for her to attend the village school as few girls do. Despite the taunting of her classmates and the teacher’s initial resistance to having her in the class, Aisha becomes a star student, destined for college. When Aisha becomes engaged to a local boy, she is forced to abandon her dreams of college. She comforts herself by staying on her ancestral land, creating a nourishing life with her children and husband. But her mother’s secrets haunt her, and the growing military presence in Poshkarbal forces Aisha to make impossible choices. Call Her Freedom is also an investigation of colonialism, militarization, sacrifice, honor, and fighting for your home.

Our guest is: Tara Dorabji, who is the author of Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara’s publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors and All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her family and rabbit.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Listeners may enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by our sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 240+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Maria Zoccola, "Helen of Troy, 1993" (Scribner, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In the hills of Sparta, Tennessee, during the early nineties, Helen decides to break free from the life that stifles her: marriage, motherhood, the monotonous duties of a Southern housewife. But leaving isn't the same thing as staying gone...

Rooted in a lush natural landscape, this stunning poetry collection explores Helen's isolation and rebellion as her expansive personality clashes with the social rigidity of her small town. In richly layered poems with settings that range from football games to Chuck E. Cheese to the bathroom of a Motel 6, Helen enters adulthood as a disaffected homemaker grasping for agency. She marries the wrong man, gives birth to a child she is not ready to parent, and embarks on an affair that throws her life into chaos. But she never surrenders ownership of her story or her choices, insisting to the reader: "if you never owned a bone-sharp biography... / i don't want to hear it. i want you silent. / i want you listening to me."

Blurring the line between mythology and modernity, Helen of Troy, 1993 is an unforgettable collection that shows the Homeric Helen like she's never been seen before.

Maria Zoccola is a queer Southern writer and educator from Memphis, Tennessee. Maria has worked and written for nonprofits both big and small, and from 2017-2021 managed Deep Center’s Young Author Project in Savannah, Georgia, a program embedding creative writing workshops within the Savannah–Chatham County Public School System and serving 400 young people annually.

Maria’s fiction and poetry can be found in such venues as Ploughshares, Fantasy Magazine, the Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated Best Small Fictions and Best New Poets, has been a finalist for Best of the Net, and has received a special mention for the Pushcart Prize.

Recommended Books:

Alice Oswald, Memorial
Rita Dove, Motherlove
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kyrie

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Zeeva Bukai, "The Anatomy of Exile: A Novel" (Delphinium Books, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. Hadas and her brother Salim, were born in and exiled from Syria, and now Salim moves his wife and children to the U.S. When a Palestinian family moves into their Brooklyn building and their teenage daughter falls in love with the teenage son, Tamar fears that history will repeat while Salim finds commonality in the family’s language and culture. Tamar struggles to separate the two teenagers and grapples with her children, her marriage, and her identity outside of Israel in this novel about love, marriage, history, culture, and politics.

Zeeva Bukai was born in Israel and raised in New York City. Her honors include a Fellowship

at the New York Center for Fiction and residencies at Hedgebrook, and Byrdcliffe Artist in Residence program. Her stories are forthcoming in the anthology Smashing the Tablets: A Radical

Retelling of the Hebrew Bible, and have appeared in Carve Magazine, Pithead Chapel, the Lilith anthology, Frankly Feminist: Stories by Jewish Women, December Magazine where her story The

Abandoning (an early version of the first chapter of her novel, “The Anatomy of Exile”) was selected by Lily King for the Curt Johnson Prose Prize, The Master’s Review, where she was the recipient of the Fall Fiction prize selected by Anita Felicelli, Mcsweeny’s Quarterly Concern, Image Journal, Jewishfiction.net, Women’s Quarterly Journal, and the Jewish Quarterly. Her work has been featured on the Stories on Stage Davis podcast. She studied Acting at Tel-Aviv University and holds a BFA in Theater and an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College. She is the Assistant Director of Academic Support at SUNY Empire State University and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

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Mariam Pirbhai, "Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

In Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak and Wynn, 2023), author Mariam Pirbhai looks carefully at the pocket of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home while encouraging others to do reconsider the land on which they live, and how they treat it. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.

About Mariam Pirbhai:

Mariam Pirbhai is an academic and creative writer. Her most recent work titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn 2023), was a 2024 Foreword Indies finalist for nature/nonfiction, and received Honourable Mention for the 2024 Alanna Bondar Memorial Book Prize. Her novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022), won the 2024 IPPY Gold Medal for multicultural fiction and IPPY Silver Medal for Canadian regional fiction, and a debut short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), won the 2018 IPPY Gold Medal for multicultural fiction, and 2019 American Bookfest award for short fiction. Pirbhai is Full Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she teaches and specializes in postcolonial studies and creative writing, and is the author of several academic studies on the literatures of the global South Asian diaspora. Pirbhai has served as President of CAPS (Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies), Canada’s longest-running scholarly association devoted to postcolonial and global anglophone literatures. Pirbhai lived in England, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines, before her family settled in Canada. She lives and works in Waterloo, Ontario.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Jami Nakamura Lin, "The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir" (Mariner Books, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a young woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, much of her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and an array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships suffered as a result, especially as her father's cancer grasped hold of their family. As she grew older and learned to better manage her episodes, Lin grew frustrated with the familiar pattern she found in mental illness and grief narratives, and their focus on recovery. She sought comfort in the stories she'd loved as a child -- tales of ghostly creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other figures from Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legend, she set out to interrogate the very notion of recovery and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.

Featuring stunning illustrations by her sister, Cori Nakamura Lin, and divided into the four acts of a traditional Japanese narrative structure, The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir (Mariner Books, 2023) is a genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, the grieving process, and other haunted topics with storytelling tradition, Jami Nakamura Lin shines a light into dark corners, driven by a question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?

Below, please find links to more information about specific sources Jami and Cori mention in the interview:

1) Risako Sakai on Okinawan corals and marine conservation

2) The Ichiriba Choodee Podcast of Okinawan voices and stories, created by Mariko Middleton, Erica Kunihisa, and Tori Toguchi

3) Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

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Ariel Gordon, "Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Both personal and entertaining, Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) is the highly anticipated second book of a trilogy and shows Winnipeg author Ariel Gordon at her best: interweaving the personal with the easily-overlooked local and natural and local world around her, and passing on her contagious delight for the world at—and under—our feet.

In a diverse range of essays, Gordon showcases her background in biology, taking us deep into the fungal world, exploring mushrooms both edible and not, found and foraged, and the myriad ways in which mushrooms and trees make up our ecosystem and are in fact a reflection of the way we build our own personal communities and connections.

This collection of essays will resonate with anyone who’s ever thought, “can I eat that?” when seeing a mushroom, but also those with larger questions about our place in the natural world.

More About Ariel Gordon:

Ariel Gordon (she/her) is a Winnipeg/Treaty 1 territory-based writer, editor, and enthusiast. She is the ringleader of Writes of Spring, a National Poetry Month project with the Winnipeg International Writers Festival that appears in the Winnipeg Free Press. Gordon’s essay “Red River Mudlark” was 2nd place winner of the 2022 Kloppenberg Hybrid Grain Contest in Grain Magazine and other work appeared recently in FreeFall, Columba Poetry, Canthius, and Canadian Notes & Queries. Gordon's fourth collection of poetry, Siteseeing: Writing nature & climate across the prairies, was written in collaboration with Saskatchewan poet Brenda Schmidt and appeared in fall 2023.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Fiona Davis, "The Stolen Queen" (Dutton, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 9 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Charlotte Cross has built a satisfying career as assistant curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. It’s 1978, the museum has just opened the Temple of Dendur and is preparing to become the last US stop for the King Tutankhamun exhibit, and Charlotte at sixty has almost completed her long-planned article on Hathorkare, one of ancient Egypt’s few female pharaohs. Between that and a steady romantic relationship with the playwright Mark Schrader, life looks pretty good.

But if things stopped there, the story would end before it began. In The Stolen Queen (Dutton, 2025), Fiona Davis nimbly juggles three threads and two narrators: Charlotte in 1978, Charlotte in 1936, and Annie Jenkins in 1978. What connects them, besides a shared interest in Egyptology, is the Cerulean Queen, part of an ancient statue of Hathorkare and the stolen queen of the title.

The theft of the Cerulean Queen and the mystery surrounding it presumably explain the publisher’s decision to describe the book as an Agatha Christie throwback and a heist novel. It is those things, but what drew me in and kept me reading is the rich characterization of both Charlotte and Annie as they struggle, independently and together, to come to terms with their own pasts and plot a sustainable and satisfying future.

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Barbara Nickless, "The Drowning Game" (Thomas and Mercer, 2025)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 1 Jan 2025 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Barbara Nickless about The Drowning Game (Thomas and Mercer, 2025).

Two sisters are heirs to a company that builds yachts for the super wealthy, and both are excited about a commission that will introduce them to the huge Asian market. Shortly after arriving in Singapore, Nadia learns that her sister, Cass has plummeted from a 40th floor balcony. Numb with grief, Nadia takes over Cass’s job of finishing a yacht for a high-level Chinese scientist whose work is important to the repressive Chinese government. In gripping prose, Nickless delves into yacht design, espionage, the world of high-stakes yachting, and China’s repressive regime. Figuring out why Cass died could tear the company apart and might get Nadia killed in this suspenseful intrigue-filled novel about family history, loyalty, and secrets.

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of Play of Shadows, Dark of Night, and At First Light in the Dr. Evan Wilding series, as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, which includes Blood on the Tracks, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop, winner of the Colorado Book Award and nominee for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness. In addition to her career as a technical writer and instructional designer, Barbara worked as a raptor rehabilitator, piano teacher and performer, and a sword fighter. She served as the Director of Education for the country’s largest public astronomical observatory. It was all great fun. But then a wildfire burned down her family’s home. For Barbara, losing everything also meant she had everything to gain. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Writer’s Digest and on Criminal Element, among other markets. She lives in Colorado, where she loves to cave, snowshoe, hike, and drink single malt Scotch―usually not at the same time. Connect with her at www.barbaranickless.com.

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Anna Moschovakis, "An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth" (Soft Skull, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

After a seismic event leaves the world shattered, an unnamed narrator at the end of a mediocre acting career struggles to regain the ability to walk on ground that is in constant motion. When her alluring younger housemate, Tala, disappears, what had begun as an obsession grows into an impulse to kill, forcing the narrator to confront the meaning of the ruptures that have suddenly upended her life. The drive to find and eliminate Tala becomes an existential pursuit, leading back in time and out into a desolate, dust-covered city, where the narrator is targeted by charismatic “healing” ideologues with uncertain motives. Torn between a gnawing desire to reckon with the forces that have made her and an immediate need to find the stability to survive, she is forced to question familiar figurations of light, shadow, authenticity, resistance, and the limits of personal transformation in an alienated, alienating world.

Darkly comic, deeply resonant, and hallucinatory in tone, An Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth (Soft Skull, 2024) will appeal to readers of Annie Ernaux, Dionne Brand, and Sheila Heti.

Anna’s most recent book is Participation. A poet and a translator, Anna has won the James Laughlin Award for her poetry and shared the 2021 International Booker Prize with David Diop for his novel At Night All Blood is Black. A student of plants and herbalism, she is a member of the publishing collective Ugly Duckling Presse and a cofound of Bushel Collective.

Recommended Books:

Poupeh Missaghi, Sound Museum
Renee Gladman, My Lesbian Novel
Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things

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Harman Burns, "Yellow Barks Spider" (Radiant Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Up-and-coming Vancouver trans author Harman Burns joins NBN host Hollay Ghadery to talk about Burns’ novella, Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, 2024).

Yellow Barks Spider takes place in the Canadian prairies, but it seeks to explore this landscape through the intimate lens of a ten-year-old trans kid. Set against the backdrop of the placid countryside, dusty summers and barren winters, it is both a queer coming-of-age novella as well as a deeply psychological character study, reflecting on the nature of memory, trauma, and self-discovery.

More about Yellow Barks Spider:

In the threadbare prairie town where Kid grew up, life moves slowly. For a troubled ten-year-old, the vast landscape of open skies and barren winters is a place of elemental magic and buried secrets. As the summers pass by, Kid explores a world of weed-choked yards, murky lakes, and a traveling carnival. But when Kid finds himself increasingly haunted by strange spider-infested visions of his next door neighbor’s shed, he falls deeper and deeper into his haunted inner world, eventually turning to mind-altering substances to combat his growing torment. Confronted by this psychic pressure, the book itself begins to crumble, splintering into disparate narrative voices as the workings of Kid’s imagination become animate, tactile—and language self-destructs.

Emerging from this crucible, Kid surfaces into adulthood as she moves through love, sex, and self-discovery as a trans woman. But when she returns to her hometown following the death of a family member, she is forced to reckon with all the fears she once left behind. Yellow Barks Spider is an unforgettable portrait of trauma, isolation, and self-compassion. At its heart, it is a deeply-felt exhumation of memory, love, and the human spirit.

About Harman Burns:

Harman Burns is a Saskatchewan-born trans woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer. Her practice is informed by folklore, nature, the occult and bodily transfiguration. Her writing has been published in Untethered Magazine and Metatron Press, and was shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. Burns currently resides on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver).

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at her website.

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Kim Fahner, "The Donoghue Girl" (Latitude 46, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

The Donoghue Girl (Latitude 46, 2024) is heart-wrenching historical fiction from beloved Canadian author, Kim Fahner. .With her incomparable ability to create immersive worlds, Fahner tells the story of an Irish Catholic family in a Northern Ontario mining town almost a hundred years ago.

Willful, headstrong Lizzie is our relatable protagonist and we follow her through an uncertain courtship, a difficult pregnancy, an absent husband, and family expectations that threaten to undo her. The result is a riveting tale that transports us back in time, while also encouraging us to examine patriarchal systems and expectations that continue to shape and subjugate the lives of women today. With an unforgettable cast of characters and a gripping take on Canadian history, Fahner has gifted us a complex and moving tale in The Donoghue Girl.

More About The Donoghue Girl:

Longing for a life bigger than the one she inhabits, Lizzie Donoghue thinks she’s found a simple escape route in Michael Power, but soon discovers that she might have been mistaken…

The Donoghue Girl is the story of Lizzie Donoghue, the spirited daughter of Irish immigrants who desperately wants to not only escape Creighton—the Northern Ontario mining town where her family runs a general store—but also the oppressive confines of twentieth-century patriarchy.

About Kim Fahner:

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. She has published two chapbooks, You Must Imagine the Cold Here (Scrivener, 1997) and Fault Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023), as well as five full books of poetry, including: braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001), The Narcoleptic Madonna (Penumbra Press, 2012), Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019), and Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). Kim is the First Vice-Chair of The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a full member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. She was Poet Laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury from 2016-18.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Steven Mayoff, "The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief" (Radiant Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

PEI author Steven Mayoff's newest book, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief (Radiant Press, 2023) masterfully disrupts the idyllic picture often painted of Prince Edward Island. This is a darkly funny and thrilling story of spiritual dissonance and cultural satire in Canada's most wholesome province.

Samson Grief, a reclusive painter from Prince Edward Island, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin, and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to be the new Promised Land, who also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amid increasingly bizarre obstacles in a new dystopian world.

About Steven Mayoff:

Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born in Montreal and moved to Prince Edward Island in 2001. His books include the story collection Fatted Calf Blues (Turnstone Press, 2009), the novel Our Lady of Steerage (Bunim & Bannigan, 2015), the poetry chapbook Leonard’s Flat (Grey Borders Books, 2018), the poetry collection Swinging Between Water and Stone (Guernica Editions, 2019) and the novel The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief (Radiant Press, 2023). As a lyricist, he has collaborated with composer Ted Dykstra on Dion a Rock Opera, which will receive its world premiere at the Coal Mine Theatre in Toronto in February 2024. His website is www.stevenmayoff.ca

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Rob Osler, "The Case of the Missing Maid" (Kensington, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Set in 1898, Harriet Morrow is 21, supports her 16-year-old brother, and has been accepted as the first female detective at the Prescott Agency. She’s given one week to find Agnes, maid to the wealthy Pearl Bartlett, who lives in one of the Prairie Street mansions on the south side of Chicago. Harriet, who prefers wearing men’s shoes and hats and has no intention of ever getting married, immediately notices that Agnes has been taken, probably by force, from her attic apartment. Harriet visits Agnes’s family and neighborhood and riding her trusty bicycle begins searching for clues across the city while grappling with someone in the agency who is trying to sabotage her. If she doesn’t solve the case, she’ll be booted from the agency, and Harriet Morrow can’t let that happen in Rob Osler’s charming novel, The Case of the Missing Maid (Kensington Books Publishing 2024).

Rob Osler was born and raised in Boise, Idaho and earned a B.A. in Philosophy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA. Soon after, he moved to Chicago and began a decade-long career as an advertising copywriter, creating television campaigns for Kellogg’s and Tropicana, among others. After a transition to brand strategy and returning to school for an MBA at the University of Washington in Seattle, he spent two decades in senior roles at agencies and corporations in Seattle and San Francisco. Writing throughout, his focus was on business communications and brand strategy, with published articles in The Journal of Brand Management. Rob turned to fiction writing in his fifties. His first-ever publication was a short story, ANALOGUE, set in Seattle’s tech industry, published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The story won the 2022 Mystery Writers of America Robert L Fish Award. His debut novel, DEVIL’S CHEW TOY, also set in Seattle and published the following year, was a finalist for the 2023 Anthony, Agatha, Lefty, and Macavity Awards and was A Year’s Best by CrimeReads. His second-ever published short story, MISS DIRECTION, set in Palm Springs, CA, and appearing again in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, was a finalist for the 2024 Edgar Allen Poe Awards. His new historical series “Harriet Morrow* Investigates,” set in Chicago during America’s Progressive Era, launches with THE CASE OF THE MISSING MAID, which earned a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and is an Amazon Editors Pick for Best Mystery, Thriller & Suspense. After living in Boise, Chicago, and Seattle, Rob now resides in California with his husband and a tall gray cat, who, depending on the day, goes by the name Noodles, Mr. Chomps, or Monkey.

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Suzy Krause, "I Think We've Been Here Before" (Radiant Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Suzy Krause’s latest speculative fiction novel, I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024) is a compulsively readable and cosy story.

Marlen and Hilda Jorgensen’s family has received two significant pieces of news: one, Marlen has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Two, a cosmic blast is set to render humanity extinct within a matter of months. It seems the coming Christmas on their Saskatchewan farm will be their last. Preparing for the inevitable, they navigate the time they have left together. Marlen and Hilda have channeled their energy into improbably prophetic works of art. Hilda’s elderly father receives a longed-for visitor from his past, her sister refuses to believe the world is ending, and her teenaged nephew is missing. All the while, her daughter struggles to find her way home from Berlin with the help of an oddly familiar stranger. For everyone, there’s an unsettling feeling that this unprecedented reality is something they remember.

About Suzy Krause:

Suzy Krause is the bestselling author of Sorry I Missed You and Valencia and Valentine. She grew up on a little farm in rural Saskatchewan and now lives in Regina, where she writes novels inspired by crappy jobs, creepy houses, personal metaphorical apocalypses, and favorite songs. Her work has been translated into Russian and Estonian.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Aruni Kashyap, "The Way You Want to Be Loved: Short Stories" (Gaudy Boy, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

At a New Delhi conference, an Assamese writer is interrogated on why he writes about magical folktales instead of the insurgencies. A mother splashes around in the village lake to mask the lovemaking sounds of her son with another man. A newly arrived graduate student in Minnesota navigates living arrangements with his white roommate, Mike, and Mike's Indian girlfriend.

In agile and frank prose, The Way You Want to Be Loved: Short Stories (Gaudy Boy, 2024) tells the stories of queer, displaced lives from India's Northeast, an underrepresented region in English fiction. A hybrid cast of characters represents the common people in these thirteen stories, whether western-trained academic or village sorcerer, army soldier or local politician, homeward-bound son or dutiful daughter-in-law. They wrestle with diasporic melancholia, the social pressures of familial duty, and the search for their own personhood, even as they live in a world where personhood is continually compromised and reshaped under oppressive forces larger than themselves. Aruni Kashyap offers up a powerful critique of the malfunctioning democracies of India and the US, deftly balancing devastation and tragedy with a darkly humorous tone that has readers questioning their laughter.

At its core, The Way You Want to Be Loved explores what it means to love, desire, and long for life under the duress of everyday and state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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Peter Darbyshire, "The Mona Lisa Sacrifice" (Poplar Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

With this dry observance Peter Darbyshire introduces us to Cross, a man who has lived thousands of years, though he’d prefer not to have, and who is now hunting angels in a Barcelona filled with tourists, phone cameras and deep mystery.

The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (Poplar Press, 2024) is a layered supernatural thriller, filled with history, magic and beloved characters. When an angel promises to deliver Judas, a forgotten god of a forgotten people, to Cross for revenge if he can find the real Mona Lisa, a cascading set of mysteries involving a sisterhood of gorgons, Alice from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Morgana le Fay and renegade angels is set in motion. Everything hangs in the balance. Even the fate of the world.

This compulsively readable novel is the first in The Cross series and follows the reluctant hero Cross across time as he battles renegade angels trying to start a new holy war on Earth, hunts down a deadly ghost that is haunting Hamlet productions and assembles a crew of Atlanteans, pirates, vampires and the damned to stop Noah from ending the world. It’s a wild romp through history and literary culture, with a cast of characters that includes a band of very mischievous faerie, literary characters such as Alice from the Wonderland tales and a modern-day Frankenstein’s creature, an enigmatic Christopher Marlowe, gorgons, and much more.

More about Peter Darbyshire:

Often referred to as Canada’s Neil Gaiman, Peter Darbyshire is the author of six books and more stories than he can remember. He lives near Vancouver, British Columbia, where he spends his time writing, raising children and playing D&D with other writers. It’s a good life.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Serkan Görkemli, "Sweet Tooth and Other Stories" (UP of Kentucky, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Queerness, labels, and allyship are central themes in this moving collection of stories set in Turkey, where Middle Eastern and Euro-American expressions of identity collide and naming one's orientation is a fraught endeavor. An eleven-year-old undergoes hand surgery that will allow him to wear a wedding ring in adulthood. Two college roommates reach an erotic understanding as they indulge in dessert. A sex worker travels with an American same-sex marriage activist through the Aegean countryside. A passionate hookup during Istanbul Pride ends in tear gas. Two friends' tempers flare over cold red wine on a hot summer night by the Dardanelles. A father bonds with his son and his son's drag-queen boyfriend over classic Turkish cinema on the Mediterranean coast.

In Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (UP of Kentucky, 2024), Serkan Görkemli weaves together interconnected narratives of four Turkish characters—Hasan, Gökhan, Nazlı, and Cenk—who search for clarity, love, and acceptance amid social change. Set in a rich mixture of urban and rural locales, the stories take place from the 1980s through the 2010s against the backdrop of Turkey's transition from military-backed secularism to the rise of the religious right, local and global media representations of queer individuals and culture, and the emergence of affirming LGBTQ+ identities. Görkemli creates a complex, engaging network of plots about his characters' struggles and triumphs in navigating families, communities, and themselves. Braving discrimination, they strive to embrace their identities and find joy, solace, and approval within a society that marginalizes who they are and how they love.

Serkan Görkemli (he/him) is the author of two books: Sweet Tooth and Other Stories (University Press of Kentucky) and Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press; winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication). His creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Image; his fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Epiphany, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Joyland, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. He was a 2023-24 faculty fellow at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute, a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers Retreat. Originally from Türkiye, he has a PhD in English from Purdue University and is an associate professor of English at UConn Stamford.

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Emily A. Weedon, "Autokrator" (Cormorant Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Born nameless, in a rigid, autocratic society that has relegated all women to non-person status — Unmales — two women fight against their invisibility in Autokrator (Cormorant Books, 2024), the gripping saga by Canadian author and screenwriter Emily Weedon.

The disappearance of yet another Domestic means Cera must take on extra duties and tend the rooms of The Cratorling, the young successor to the autocracy. Face-to-face with him, Cera realizes he is her son, taken from her at birth. She vows to make herself known to him, no matter the cost.

Driven by a Machiavellian mind and ego, Tiresius has successfully hidden her Unmale status in plain sight for years. She rose through the ranks of the autocracy to reach the highest levels of government. She revels in the power she has attained, but her ruse makes her a gender criminal, which is an act punishable by death.

Both Cera and Tiresius are determined to achieve their goals, but, for better or worse, their actions begin to dismantle the framework and foundations of the autocracy itself.

Hopeful and cautionary, Autokrator reimagines gender and power in society against the backdrop of an epic, deeply etched, speculative world.

About Emily Weedon:

Emily A. Weedon is a debut author and an award-winning screenwriter. She co-created the series Chateau Laurier, the most awarded web series in the world in 2023. She and co-writer Kent Staines were awarded Best Writing in a Web Series at the Canadian Screen Awards in 2023. Emily has been a graphic designer, musician, set painter, and art director. She played music professionally and has released 3 EPs. She lives in Toronto, Ontario with her daughter, Ginger.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Booksellers’ Best 2024

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Lisa Swayze has been the General Manager at Buffalo Street Books for 7 years and will transition to becoming the Executive Director of the bookstore’s new literary nonprofit in 2025. Lisa is on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association and the Downtown Ithaca Alliance.

Jessica Stockton-Bagnulo is the owner and co-founder of Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, New York, where she also currently serves as the Events & Marketing Manager (because she loves hosting parties). She has worked in independent bookstores in New York City since 2000, has served on the board of NAIBA and various other book industry boards and committees, and is currently on the board of the American Booksellers Association (along with lovely colleagues Lisa and Jake). She lives with her husband and daughter (both avid readers, thankfully) in Brooklyn.

Lisa's Favorites:

James - Percival Everett
The Sapling Cage - Margaret Killjoy
Not for the Faint of Heart - Lex Croucher (YA)
Swift River - Essie Chambers
American Daughters - Maurice Carlos Ruffin
God of the Woods - Liz Moore
Where They Last Saw Her - Marcie Rendon
Anita de Monte Laughs Last - Xochitil Gonzalez
Blue Light Hours - Bruna Dantas Lobato
Catalina - Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
The Pairing - Casey Mcquiston
Shred Sisters - Betsy Lerner
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy - Nathan Thrall

Jessica's favorites:

The Book of Love by Kelly Link — Best Literary Novel Featuring Complex Magic Systems, Diverse Love Stories, Unexpected Beauty, and Karaoke
Hum by Helen Phillips — Best Near-Future Dystopia that is Also About Parenting
Help Wanted to Adelle Waldman — Best Novel About Capitalism
The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger — Best Science Writing / Best Book About Plant Intelligence and Scientist Drama
The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman — Best Doorstop Literary/Historical Fantasy (With Philosophical Caveats)
In Universes by Emet North — Best Queer Multiverse Novel
Playground by Richard Powers — Best Nature Writing as Fiction
Far Sector by N. K. Jemisin — Best Socially Aware Superhero Graphic Novel
Orbital by Samantha Harvey — Best Sentences About Earth
non-frontlist / rereads:
Space Crone by Ursula LeGuin — Best Essays by Best Essayist
The Privilege of a Happy Ending by Kij Johnson — Best Quest Narrative
Berlin: City of Stones, City of Smoke, City of Light — Best Epic of Quotidian Life Before the Abyss

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Robert G. Penner, "The Dark King Swallows the World" (Radiant Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Robert Penner’s best-selling novel, The Dark King Swallows the World (Radiant Press, October 2024) is a phenomenal genre-bending read.

A coming-of-age, historical fiction, and fantasy novel that simultaneously engages with and dismantles the cliches of its many genres, The Dark King Swallows the World is a totally unique and totally fresh story that is both engaging and emotional. Most of all, given the surreal events south of the border, Robert’s book—which is about a dark king brainwashing adults—feels uncannily portent.

Isolated and friendless in World War II Cornwall, Nora, a precocious American adolescent, loses her younger half-brother in a car crash. Overwhelmed by grief Nora’s mother becomes involved with Olaf Winter, the self-professed necromancer Nora comes to believe is responsible for the accident. Desperate to win back her mother’s love from the nefarious Mr. Winter, Nora is plunged into a world of faeries, giants, and homunculi. Ultimately, she travels to the land of the dead, where she confronts the dark king who rules that realm, all in an attempt to win back her half-brother, and help heal her mother’s broken heart.

More about Robert Penner:

Robert G Penner lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. He was also the founding editor of the online science fiction zine Big Echo.

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 University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Suzanne Allain, "The Wrong Lady Meets Lord Right" (Berkley Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Arabella Grant doesn’t want to deceive London high society. It’s her cousin Lady Isabella, known as Issie, who convinces Arabella to take over so that Issie can nurture her frail health and spend her time reading, which she much prefers to parties. It’s only for three months, after all.

Of course, things don’t go as planned. While Arabella meets the lord of her dreams but can’t tell him who she really is, Issie falls in love with a handsome physician. And all of a sudden, three months seems long enough to get both cousins into trouble. This light-hearted romp is perfect for the winter holidays, so grab some cocoa or egg nog and enjoy!

Suzanne Allain has written several historical romances, one of which, Mr. Malcolm’s List, has been turned into a film. The Wrong Lady Meets Lord Right (Berkley, 2024) is her most recent book.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025.

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Christine Coulson, "One Woman Show" (Avid Reader Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Author Christine Coulson spent twenty-five years writing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her final project was to write wall labels for the museum's new British Galleries. During that time, she dreamt of using The Met's strict label format to describe people as intricate works of art. The result is this "jewel box of a novel" (Kirkus Reviews) that imagines a privileged 20th-century woman as an artifact--an object prized, collected, and critiqued. One Woman Show (Avid Reader Press, 2023) revolves around the life of Kitty Whitaker as she is defined by her potential for display and moved from collection to collection through multiple marriages. Coulson precisely distills each stage of this sprawling life, every brief snapshot in time a wry reflection on womanhood, ownership, value, and power.

"A moving story of privilege, womanhood, and the sweep of the 20th century told through a single American life" (Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind), Kitty is an eccentric heroine who disrupts her porcelain life with both major force and minor transgressions. Described with poignancy and humor, Coulson's playful reversal on our interaction with art ultimately questions who really gets to tell our stories.

Christine Coulson spent 25 years writing for The Metropolitan Museum of Art and left the museum as Senior Writer in 2019. She started at The Met in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department and returned in 1994 to start her first job at the museum after graduate school. During her tenure, she rose through the ranks of the museum, working in the Development Office, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.

In 2017, The Met gave Coulson a yearlong sabbatical to write Metropolitan Stories, her bestselling 2019 novel about the museum.

Recommended Books:

Katheryn Scanlan, Kick the Latch
J.L. Carr, A Month in the Country
Myra Coleman, Women Holding Things

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Wayne Ng, "Johnny Delivers" (Guernica Editions, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Set in 1977, Johnny Delivers (Guernica Editions, 2024) tells the absorbing story of 18-year-old Johnny Wong—the son of Chinese immigrants to Canada—who calls on the spirit of Bruce Lee to help him navigate the still relevant challenges of racism and how it permeates our interiority, our institutions, our relationships, and our livelihood. Toxic masculinity, homophobia, and the struggle for belonging. With the 100th Anniversary of the Enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Canada barely behind us, the themes explored in this book are particularly salient. An exciting and heart-wrenching story combined with the distinctly Canadian setting and universal themes make this book a wonderful book to read.

Wayne Ng was born in downtown Toronto to Chinese immigrants who fed him a steady diet of bitter melon and kung fu movies. Ng is a social worker who lives to write, travel, eat, and play, preferably all at the same time. He is an award-winning author and traveler who continues to push his boundaries from the Arctic to the Antarctic. He lives in Ottawa with his wife and goldfish.

Ng is the author of The Family Code, shortlisted for the Guernica Prize; Letters From Johnny, winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award for Best Crime Novella and a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award; Johnny Delivers; and Finding the Way: A Novel of Lao Tzu.

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

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Recall This Story: Ivan Kreilkamp on Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle" (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 5 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana University English professor and no stranger to Recall This Book, is the author of two books on Victorian literature and one about Jennifer Egan. For this episode of Recall This Story, Ivan reads Sylvia Townsend Warner's "Foxcastle.” It was first published in The New Yorker in 1975 and became the final story in her final book, Kingdoms of Elfin.

Before diving into the story itself, Ivan and John marvel at STW's weird greatness--and great weirdness. Like Hilary Mantel, she is drawn to the deep strangeness of other people. Prompted by John to think about these fairy stories as posthuman, Ivan notes the "dehumanization ceremonies" fairies perform on stolen changelings. John builds on the idea by bringing up the rise (in the 1960's) of alien abduction narratives. Do they form an invisible subtext to the abduction that begins the story?

David Trotter's "Posthuman? Animal Corpses, Aeroplanes and Very High Frequencies in the Work of Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner" explores Warner’s taste for non-human perspectives in e.g. The Cat's Cradle Book. Warner's own line on her stories--"bother the human heart, I’m tired of the human heart"--signals to Ivan her knowledge that the animals we share the world with see things quite differently: his own cat, he suspects, might let him die without too much emotion. John respects Charles Foster's Being a Beast for his decision to live like a badger (worm-eating and all) rather than just imagining it.

Literature cited:

Ivan has a piece in praise of STW’s 1926 Lolly Willowes. John and Ivan also revere Mr Fortune's Maggot (1927), The Corner That Held Them (1948) and The Flint Anchor (1954).
When the two compare STW to Hilary Mantel they are thinking of historical fiction (Wolf Hall especially) as well as her biting novel of the Thatcher era, Beyond Black.
Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) comes up in the posthumanism discussion.
Randall Jarrell, "The Sick Child" ("all that I've never thought of--think of me!")

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Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, "Mirror Me" (Little a, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Lisa Williamson Rosenberg about Mirror Me (Little a, 2024)

Eddie Asher has always lost chunks of time, and the novel opens as he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, fearing that during one of his lapses, he murdered his brother’s fiancée. Eddie would never harm Lucy – he loves her and feels a special bond with her – but he thinks he’s being manipulated by another voice inside him. We meet that other voice, who calls himself Pär, Eddie’s pre-adoption name. Pär feels like it’s always been his job to protect Eddie. At the hospital, Dr. Montgomery helps Eddie unravel the truth of his history and identity.

Lisa Williamson Rosenberg is a former ballet dancer and psychotherapist specializing in depression, developmental trauma, and multiracial identity. She is also the author of Embers on the Wind (2022; Little A). Her essays have appeared in Literary Hub, Longreads, Narratively, Mamalode, and The Common. Her fiction has been published in the Piltdown Review and in Literary Mama, where Lisa received a Pushcart nomination. A born-and-raised New Yorker and mother of two college students, Lisa now lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with her husband and dog. When Lisa isn't reading, writing, or seeing clients, she loves spending time with her family and friends. Though Lisa hasn't been in a ballet studio for years, she loves attending ballet performances almost as much as she enjoys bookstore events. You can visit her online at lisawrosenberg.com.

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Book Chat: Home & Queer Writing – "Ghost Town," with Kevin Chen

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼地方 and its fever worldwide. In our conversation, Kevin shared with us how he first “come out” as a gay writer in Taiwan in the 90s, and how his writings was influenced by key Taiwanese LGBTQ authors and continue to be shaped by his migratory experiences in Berlin. He also told us how he thinks translation and the transability of a literary work can be useful in terms of authors’ impacts on society. If you’re a fan of Kevin’s writing, you certainly can’t miss this episode!

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S. A. McLain, "Blood on the Veld" (Elevin Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 1 Dec 2024 09:00:00 +0000

When seventeen-year-old Christian Bekker killed a poacher, he claimed it was self-defense. But the judge disagreed. He gave Christian a choice: go to prison or leave his home in South Africa and never return.

Following his father’s suicide, conservation director Dr. Christian Bekker uncovers a plea from the grave to find out what really happened on that fateful day more than twenty years ago.

Suddenly, he’s on a plane headed for Johannesburg, leaving behind his life in London in search of answers. Were his father’s suspicions correct or the result of twenty years spent dreaming about what might have been?

All thoughts of staying under the radar disappear as his past plunges him into a murky and profitable world where police officers and government officials conspire with criminals to exploit what remains of South Africa’s wildlife. Soon he finds himself in the criminals’ sights…

Blood on the Veld (Elevin Books, 2024) by S. A. McLain is the first book in the Christian Bekker Wildlife Crime Thriller series, featuring compelling characters, surprising plot twists and a man searching for the truth.

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Vikas Swarup, "The Girl with the Seven Lives" (Simon & Schuster India, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Vikas Swarup’s new novel, The Girl With the Seven Lives (Simon & Schuster India: 2024), opens with its main character Devi locked in a room, forced to retell her life’s story. Or, rather, her life’s stories–starting in the slums of Delhi, Devi reinvents herself time-and-time-again, with a new name and a new backstory, as she tries to carve a niche for herself in Indian society–only to be knocked back down, and be forced to start anew, with a new name.

Vikas joins the show today to talk about his novel, which settings are perhaps ripped from the headlines, and what The Girl with the Seven Lives says about the idea of meritocracy.

Vikas Swarup is a former diplomat, television host and best-selling author who gained global recognition with his debut novel, Q&A (Scribner: 2005). It was filmed as the multiple-Oscar-winning ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. His second book Six Suspects (Random House: 2008) was converted into a nine-part web series titled ‘The Great Indian Murder’, which premiered on Disney+Hotstar and Hulu on the 4th of February, 2022 and became the most watched Hotstar Special ever. His third novel, The Accidental Apprentice (Simon and Schuster UK: 2013), is also being adapted for the screen.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Girl With the Seven Lives. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Chikodili Emelumadu, "Dazzling" (Harry N. Abrams, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Chikodili Emelumadu about Dazzling (Harry N. Abrams, 2023).

Treasure and Ozoemena are young Nigerian girls forced to deal with spirits after losing their fathers. Treasure is forced to beg in the marketplace as her mother lies bedridden and depressed, and a wicked spirit finds her there and tries to make her his wife. He promises to bring her father back to life if she helps him by finding other girls for his friends. Ozoemena’s father has disappeared, leaving the family with questions and responsibilities. She learns from her grandmother that she is descended from a wild, ancient beast, the Leopard from an Igbo legend, which gives her terrible dreams and sometimes takes over her body. Touching on Igbo mythology and African folklore, Emelumadu’s dual-voiced stories focus on family, traditions, growing up, and the forces that conspire to prevent people from overcoming their grief.

Chikodili Emelumadu was born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire and raised in Awka, Nigeria. Her work has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Awards (2015), the Caine Prize for African Literature (2017 & 2020) and has won a Nommo award (2020 & 2024). In 2019, she emerged winner of the inaugural Curtis Brown First Novel prize for her debut novel, Dazzling. Her short fiction is available in many magazines and anthologies such as Isolation: The Horror Anthology (2022), Screams from the Dark (2022), Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (2024) and as part of the Royal Literary Fund’s Writer’s Mosaic. She can be found raving about books and art on Twitter @chemelumadu, or Instagram @chikodiliemelumadu.

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Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, "Prayers of a Heretic: Poems" (Plain View Press, 2015)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In the poetry collection Prayers of a Heretic (Plain View Press, 2015), Yermiyahu Ahron Taub explores the "crime" of heresy and the condition of existential displacement through the language of prayer and prayerful voice/s. In the first section, "Visits and Visitations," the poet imagines a variety of protagonists in situations of supplication. The second section, "In the Gleaning," examines the life, transgressions, and prayers of the title character and the primacy of books, libraries, and reading for refuge and reconfiguration. Eschewing a secular/religious divide, the book offers an expansive interpretation of the enduring power of prayer. Four poems also have a Yiddish version.

Interviewee: Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is a poet, writer, and translator of Yiddish literature. Taub earned a Master of Arts degree in history from Emory University and a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Queens College, City University of New York.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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Sam Sax, "Yr Dead" (McSweeney’s Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Sam Sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of Yr Dead (McSweeney's Books, 2024), longlisted for The National Book Award and PIG named one of the best books of 2023 by New York Magazine and Electric Lit. They're also the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. They're the two time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, Granta and elsewhere. Sam's received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Poetry Foundation, Yaddo, Lambda Lit, MacDowell, and is currently serving as an ITALIC Lecturer at Stanford University.

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All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti (AV)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Imagine growing up between Sacramento, California and Logar, Afghanistan; you hear stories about war, watch coverage of the United States’ War on Terror on television, and then visit your family in the very places that the U.S. army invaded and occupied. These experiences shape the work of novelist Jamil Jan Kochai, author of 99 Nights in Logar and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, which was a finalist for The National Book Award. Jamil joins Northwestern prof. Kalyan Nadiminti and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about narrative form and the cycles of war.

We begin by discussing the second person, a technique Jamil uses throughout Hajji Hotak. He describes it as the most “dangerous perspective” for a fiction writer to take because it brings readers to the edge of the immersive world fiction is supposed to create. The second person in The Haunting of Hajji Hotak, from which Jamil reads, forces readers to grapple with our own complicity in the surveillance of Afghan families in the United States and to consider the paradoxical affection that develops between people on opposing sides of war. From there, Jamil, Kalyan, and Aarthi discuss the relationship between video games as mass media and the novel as literary form. Jamil is a huge fan of Final Fantasy 7 (who isn’t?) and talks about how games like Call of Duty (a game he played more ambivalently) perform a recruitment function for the U.S. army. He rewrites that vision of war in more complex terms in his own story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain." Kalyan reflects on how the category of the post-9/11 writer intersects with the War on Terror, and the three of us consider the symbolic function of 9/11 in contemporary fiction written from inside and outside the United States.

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Emily Dinova, "The Antagonist" (Bruce Scivally, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Today I spoke with Emily Dinova about her new novel The Antagonist (Bruce Scivally, 2024). Dinova, a psychoanalytic candidate working towards a license to practice psychoanalysis, wrote The Antagonist as a way of healing her own trauma. Written as a creative act of revenge, Dinova found herself in a fragmented state while writing the book. “I really feel like a fragmented part of myself wrote this book.” From this fragmented state she created characters who represent several psychoanalytic concepts including repression, negation, the uncanny, and Spotnitzian narcissistic object protection.

The structure of the novel is an enactment of Nachträglichkeit. I found the novel intoxicating and disorienting. It kept me happily off balance throughout. Rooted in the psychological adage that the urge to destroy does not have to be taught, Dinova renders her characters with layers of beguiling complexity. The horrors of this deeply informed psychological thriller unfold gradually. It is a masterful demonstration of unconscious processes.

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Cornelia M. Spelman, "Solace" (Jackleg Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

How do we become the persons we are? Cornelia Maude Spelman's Solace (Jackleg Press, 2024) seeks to answer that question. A portrait of the emotional legacies and psychological landscapes that shaped the author's life, Solace unfurls in a series of vignettes drawn from diaries and personal stories about her relationship to others as daughter, mother, friend, wife, therapist, and grandmother. These are stories of compassion and attention bringing about healing from grief and brokenness and the necessity of our deep and caring connection to others: the comfort offered to us and the comfort we offer to others.

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Monica Chenault-Kilgore, "The Jewel of the Blues" (Graydon House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Life is tough for people of color in the early twentieth century—not only in the Southern states, which have put Reconstruction firmly behind them in favor of Jim Crow laws. Even so, Lucille Love, known as the Little Girl with the Big Voice, dreams of making her name on Broadway and eventually moving to Paris, leaving behind the prejudices that restrict black women in the United States. When Marcus Williams offers to manage Lucille’s singing career, she’s sure that reaching her goal is just a matter of time. Until some old enemies of her father track her down …

This richly developed story intertwines a love of music and musicians, an exploration of color prejudice, and a tense drama of criminals with long memories and no scruples. At its heart stands Lucille—a passionate, determined young woman who doesn’t always make the best choices but whose heart is in the right place. I found it an engrossing read, and I bet you will too.

Monica Chenault-Kilgore is the author of Long Gone, Come Home and, most recently, The Jewel of the Blues (Graydon House, 2024).

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025.

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Megan Tennant, "Little Women," The Common magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Megan Tennant speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Little Women,” which appears in The Common’s brand new fall issue. Megan talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores the complex dynamics between two sisters in a religious family in South Africa after one sister gets engaged. Megan also discusses how she layered the beauty, atmosphere, and complicated history of South Africa’s Wild Coast into the story, and how she worked to balance subtlety and clarity when bringing together the story’s many threads.

Megan Tennant is a writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She holds master’s degrees in creative writing from the University of Cape Town and in London studies from Queen Mary University of London.

Read Megan’s story “Little Women” in The Common at thecommononline.org/little-women/.

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Eric Drooker, "Naked City: A Graphic Novel" (Dark Horse Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Born and raised on Manhattan Island, Eric Drooker began to slap his art on the streets at night as a teenager. Since then, his drawings and posters have become a familiar sight in the global street art movement, and his paintings appear frequently on covers of the New Yorker.

His first book, Flood, won the American Book Award, followed by Blood Song (soon to be a feature film). Naked City is the third volume in Drooker’s City Trilogy. His graphic novels have been translated into numerous languages in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. After designing the animation for the film Howl, he was hired for a project at DreamWorks Animation.

Drooker’s art is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Library of Congress. He is available for speaking engagements and frequently gives slide lectures at colleges and universities. Drooker is represented by the Wylie Agency.

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Ruth Vanita, "A Slight Angle" (India Viking, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

A Slight Angle (India Viking: 2024), the newest novel from Indian writer Ruth Vanita, is a story about love. Difficult love–her six characters are growing up in 1920s India, which takes a dim view of same-sex relationships, and those that transcend religious boundaries. Like Sharad, the jewelry designer who falls in love with his teacher, Abhik–only for the embarrassment to keep them apart for decades.

Ruth Vanita is the author of many books, most recently The Broken Rainbow: Poems and Translations (Copper Coin Publishing: 2023); the novel Memory of Light (Penguin Random House India: 2022); The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics: Debates on Gender, Varna and Species (Oxford University Press: 2022); Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriages in Modern India (Penguin Books India: 2005). She has translated several works from Hindi to English, including Mahadevi Varma’s My Family (Penguin Books India: 2021). She co-edited the path-breaking Same-Sex Love in India, and edited and translated On the Edge: A Hundred Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire (India Viking: 2023).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of A Slight Angle. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Benjamin Resnick, "Next Stop" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Benjamin Resnick about his novel Next Stop (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

A hole opens in the universe and suddenly consumes a building, then a neighborhood, and then the entire country of Israel. Conspiracies and antisemitic paranoia simmer, violence erupts, and life for Jews around the globe becomes even more hate filled. But Ethan and Ella, both Jewish, meet and fall in love in an unnamed American city. Their relationship has its challenges, including those involving Ella’s seven-year-old son, but their biggest struggle is trying to survive. Then thousands of airplanes disappear, borders close, and the world unravels more. Drones and robotic dogs patrol the streets and Jews are forced to live in a single neighborhood, slyly named after the historical Pale of Settlement. Some Jews escape to underground cities and others are join militias and resistance efforts, but Ella and Ethan are trying to find things to smile about in this thought-provoking, dystopian novel about cultural memory, societal crisis, and living in an upside-down world.

Benjamin Resnick is a writer and the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center. Before joining the PJC in 2021, he served as Rav Beit HaSefer at Solomon Schechter Day School of Metropolitan Chicago and as Rabbi and Education Director at Congregation Ahavas Achim in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Resinick majored in Literary Arts at Brown University in 006 and was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 2014. He has written nonfiction for multiple publications, including the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet, Modern Judaism and My Jewish Learning. Benjamin is married to journalist Philissa Cramer, who is currently editor-in-chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. They have two boys, Jonah and Gabriel. In his free time, he enjoys gardening, playing squash, and the Chicago Cubs.

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8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 7 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War.

Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos.

Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist
Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer
Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau
Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”)
Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..)
Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola?
Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence.
Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they?
Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene)
The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat

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Megan Staffel, "The Causative Factor" (Regal House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 5 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class. After a heavenly night together, they go hiking, and he dives off a cliff, disappearing without a trace. Although Rachel graduates with an art degree, moves to New York, and supports her painting as an ESL teacher, she’s scarred for years by the mystery of Rubiat’s disappearance. This is a sweet coming-of-age, but also a suspense-filled novel told in shifting viewpoints, about art, growing up, making choices, and finding love.

Megan Staffel splits her time between a farm in western New York State and an apartment in Brooklyn. She is an avid walker, bird watcher, and gardener. Her new novel, The Causative Factor, was inspired by a hike she took with her husband in a state park in October, 2020 and grew into a story about an artist trying to understand the mysterious disappearance of her lover. Staffel's interest in the arts and in the process of art-making has been a life-long passion. Her first novel, She Wanted Something Else, was a story about an artist as well. Staffel's other book publications include a third novel and three collections of short stories. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and writes a monthly Substack newsletter, "Page and Story."

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Tim Ecott, "Sigmundur and the Golden Ring" (Sprotin, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 3 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be.

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Bonnie Jo Campbell, "The Waters: A Novel" (Norton, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies. Her first two daughters Molly and Prim were foundlings, but Rose Thorn is the product of Hermine’s husband having an affair with Prim before getting kicked off the island. Herself, now nearly eighty, is raising eleven-year-old granddaughter Dorothy “Donkey” Zook. Donkey loves animals and longs for her mother, Rose Thorn, to marry Titus, whom she wants as her father. Donkey is the product of Rose Thorn being raped by Titus’s drunk father in this richly nuanced tale of rural poverty, changing landscapes, corporate control of farmland, religious extremism, childhood naivete, and the shaky balance between nature and humanity.

Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters (Norton, 2024) was a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club selection. Her other novels include Once Upon A River, a National Bestseller that was adapted into an award winning film, and Q Road. Campbell’s short story collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Women and Other Animals, an AWP Grace Paley Prize winner. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Prize and Mark Twain Award. She lives in Kalamazoo with her husband and donkeys.

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Kristopher Jansma, "Our Narrow Hiding Places" (Ecco, 2024), "Revisionaries" (Quirk Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016) and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013). His book of essays on the creative process is REVISIONARIES: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE LOST, UNFINISHED, AND JUST PLAIN BAD WORK OF GREAT WRITERS. And Kristopher is the director of the creative program and SUNY New Paltz.

Recommended Books:

E. Lily Yu Break Blow Burn and Make
Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within.

Mentioned in this episode

By Kaveh Akbar:

Also mentioned:

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Nat Reeve, "Earlyfate" (Cipher Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Pip Property is no stranger to disaster. Typically, they’ve got a plan, but now Dallyangle’s favourite dandy & part-time criminal is locked in the morgue of the crime-fighting Division gone rogue, accused of far more crimes than they’ve actually committed, with (at least) two bucolic burglars out to strangle them with their own cravat. Their lover – the semi-feral Welsh heiress Rosamond Nettleblack – has disappeared into dangerous hands. Enlisting the Division to save Rosamond might be Pip’s only hope, but the cravat designer and the chaotic vigilantes have never seen eye to eye. The Division is looking to prove themselves to a potential new patron – and trusting schemers like Pip is a risk the detectives don’t want to take.

Armed only with a borrowed notebook, threadbare charm, suits without cravat pins, and a swordstick everyone keeps confiscating, Pip must get the Division on-side, convince them that faith is a thing they can still have, and unravel the truth behind Rosamond’s disappearance before it’s too late.

From Dr. Nat Reeve, the author of Nettleblack, Earlyfate (Cipher Press, 2024) throws us back into the same madcap Neo-Victorian world, where queerness is a given and chaos is mandatory.

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S. L. Wisenberg, "The Adventures of Cancer Bitch" (Tortoise Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriousness of her illness. She doesn’t let the fear and discomfort stop her from throwing her left breast a farewell party. Now, fifteen years later, SL Wisenberg’s journey of self-acceptance, Adventures of Cancer Bitch (Tortoise Books, 2024) has been reissued without page numbers, but with additional entries, notes about her life, and updates about cancer.

S. L. Wisenberg was born in Texas and has lived in Chicago, more or less, since she was 18. She is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In; the essay collections Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions and The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home. In 2009 she published a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, about her breast cancer from diagnosis to post-chemo. On October 15, the book is being re-released as a paperback, revised and updated. She is still cancer free, except for a rare chronic blood cancer, so she remains the Cancer Bitch. Wisenberg has received a Pushcart Prize, and awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The former co-director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University, she has taught workshops and read and lectured widely, from San Francisco to Sofia, Bulgaria. Wisenberg edits Another Chicago Magazine, an international online literary journal. In the summer she raises Eastern Black Swallowtail butterflies. Year round she walks through Chicago and hypnotizes wild rabbits. She also pulls weeds in public areas and leaves markers proclaiming, The Mad Weeder Strikes Again.

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Vanessa Kelly, "Murder in Highbury" (Kensington, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

For a woman who published only four novels during her lifetime, with two others appearing shortly after her death and several incomplete or shorter works released into print much later, Jane Austen has had an astonishing and enduring legacy, with spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and remakes galore. Vanessa Kelly’s Murder in Highbury (Kensington Books, 2024), the first in a murder mystery series based on Austen’s Emma, offers one particularly appealing example.

As happens in the best of these adaptations, Kelly’s Emma Woodhouse—now Emma Knightley—shares basic personality traits with her original conception but is not constrained by them. Stumbling into an impossible-to-predict encounter with a dead body in the chancel of the local church, Emma keeps her head even as her companion, Harriet Martin, seems ready to faint at the horrible sight. Emma confirms the victim’s death, settles her friend down, then sends her off to find the local doctor/coroner and George Knightly, Emma’s husband and the local magistrate. Emma herself waits behind in the church in case the vicar should pop in and discover his wife lying on the floor with bruises around her neck and her head bashed in. Hearing a noise, she goes to investigate (chiding herself for impetuousness), and even before her husband arrives, she has discovered evidence of murder.

But whodunnit? The residents of Highbury, not to mention the victim and her relatives, display the usual array of problems, lies, misdirections, and motives. The whole is handled with a light touch and a regard for Regency language and deportment, as well as for Austen’s original, that make it a delightful read.

Vanessa Kelly, a bestselling author of historical mystery and historical romance, has also written contemporary romance and romantic suspense novels with her husband under the pen name of V.K. Sykes. Murder in Highbury is her latest novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due in 2025.

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CK Westbrook, "The Aftermath" (4 Horsemen Publications, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 20 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's been almost five years since a wrathful extraterrestrial called Rex perpetrated a mass shooting that caused hundreds of millions of people to take their own lives. The world has mourned its losses and moved on, trying to adhere to The Pledge to save themselves from more violence. But when a solar storm conceals the dangerous activities being done at the hotel, Tia must figure out who these strangers are and what they are doing before the shooting's anniversary.

Are these strange and beautiful people adhering to The Pledge? Or are they creating their own violent and nefarious rules in order to change the world? Tia has only days to determine whose side they are on-not to mention, whose side she is on-but first, she must stay alive.

CK Westbrook’s books are spellbinding and most enchanting. Just when you think you are reading a sci fi book filled with fantastical stories about extra-terrestrial characters who can control all things earthly, it dawns on you that the author is trying to convey something very important about our planet.

A woman of many talents—a mystery writer, an environment expert on space and space debris and someone with a superb imagination—CK Westbrook knows how to tell a story which is what makes her books come to life.

As she begins introducing new characters in The Aftermath (4 Horsemen, 2024) who were not known to readers previously, I felt as though I knew what Tia was experiencing as she walked down the street with row-houses in a neighborhood that was reminiscent of her childhood, or was it? Where did she grow up and what does growing up mean in Tia’s world? As the story unfolds these questions become very relevant.

Will there be a fifth book? Will readers have an opportunity to learn more about Rex, Kate, Sinclair, Tia and Ian? I hope with great anticipation that there will be other “teachers” CK Westbrook introduces us to so we can learn more about ourselves, space and her fantasy world that is peppered with truth and fiction. Westbrook crafted a world that feels both post-apocalyptic and very real to the present. And oh man, when that big reveal hits... watch out. - P.C. Nottingham, sci-fi author of the Earthquake War series

Westbrook has created an imaginative and surprising post-shooting world with suspenseful twists, while providing fascinating commentary on society through the revelations and choices Tia, the main character, confronts. - Chelsea Henderson, author of Glacial, The Inside Story of Climate Politics

Westbrook’s books are spellbinding and enchanting. - Karyne Messina, Ed.D. author, psychoanalyst, and podcast host for The New Books Network.

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Jennifer Lang, "Landed: A Yogi's Memoir in Pieces & Poses" (Vine Leaves Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In her latest memoir, Landed: A Yogi's Memoir of Places & Poses (2024, Vine Leaves Press), American-born Jennifer traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country (Israel), midlife hormones (merciless), cross-cultural marriage (to a Frenchman) and their imminent empty nest (a mixed blessing), eventually realizing the words her yoga teachers had been offering for the past twenty-three years: root down into the ground and stay true to yourself. Finally, she understands that home is about who you are, not where you live. Written in experimental chapterettes, Landed spans seven years (and then some), each punctuated with chakra wisdom from nationally-acclaimed Rodney Yee, her first teacher.

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Cynthia Reeves, "The Last Whaler" (Regal House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38. She writes about the miscalculations, the terrible weather, the fear of polar bears and freezing to death, the people they’ve met on their journey, Tor’s crew, and her slow disintegration after giving birth to another son, alone in the freezing, dark hut while Tor hunts for food. We know that Tor survived the ordeal, because he is reading Astrid’s journal filled with letters to their dead son. The Last Whaler (Regal House, 2024) is a gorgeous, well-researched historical novel about endurance, isolation, the environment, the Nazi incursion into Norway, the pain of postpartum depression, and the human will to survive.

Cynthia Reeves is the author of two previous books of fiction: the novel in stories Falling Through the New World (2024), winner of Gold Wake Press’s Fiction Award; and the novella Badlands (2007), winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely. Most recently, her short story “The Last Glacier” was included in If the Storm Clears (Blue Cactus Press, 2024), an anthology of speculative literature that concerns the sublime in the natural world. Her lifelong interest in the Arctic began in childhood reading tales of doomed Arctic explorers. But it was her participation in the 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, which sailed Svalbard’s western shores, as well as two subsequent residencies in Longyearbyen, that have inspired her writing since then. In August 2024, she circumnavigated Svalbard aboard the icebreaker MV Ortelius carrying a hundred artists, scientists, and crew. A Hawthornden Fellow, Cynthia has also been awarded residencies to Vermont Studio Center and Art & Science in the Field. She taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr and Rosemont Colleges, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson’s low-residency program. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. Find out more at cynthiareeveswriter.com.

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P. Djèlí Clark on Why He Writes

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

P. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.

We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his acclaimed novella Ring Shout, his new book The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (Tordotcom, 2024), and much more.

For our conversation about the author’s academic work in history, see our previous episode: “Dexter Gabriel: Slavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?”

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V. Domontovych, "On Shaky Ground" (CEU Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode host, Andrea Talabér (CEU Press) sits down with Oksana Rosenblum, the translator of the new addition to our CEU Press Classics series, On Shaky Ground by V. Domontovych. We talk about Domontovych’s background, the process of translation, and about Oksana’s own memories of reading the book for the first time in the early 1990s.

On Shaky Ground is a modernist novel written in the late 1930s and early 1940s and was originally published in Nazi occupied Kharkiv in 1942. The novel is one of the best examples of Ukrainian intellectual fiction of the time.

The translation and publication of this book was supported by the European Union under the House of Europe programme.

You can purchase a paperback copy here.

The book is also available on Kindle

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.

Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified.

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Anna Rasche, "The Stone Witch of Florence" (Park Row, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 13 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Anna Rasche's debut novel A Stone Witch of Florence (2024, Park Row) brings reader on a historical fiction adventure to Florence. As the Black Plague ravages Italy, Ginevra di Gasparo is summoned to Florence after nearly a decade of lonely exile. Ginevra has a gift--harnessing the hidden powers of gemstones, she can heal the sick. But when word spread of her unusual abilities, she was condemned as a witch and banished. Now the same men who expelled Ginevra are begging for her return. Ginevra obliges, assuming the city's leaders are finally ready to accept her unorthodox cures amid a pandemic. But upon arrival, she is tasked with a much different mission: she must use her collection of jewels to track down a ruthless thief who is ransacking Florence's churches for priceless relics--the city's only hope for protection. If she succeeds, she'll be a recognized physician and never accused of witchcraft again. But as her investigation progresses, Ginevra discovers she's merely a pawn in a much larger scheme than the one she's been hired to solve. And the dangerous men behind this conspiracy won't think twice about killing a stone witch to get what they want...

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Ursula Villarreal-Moura, "Like Happiness" (Celadon Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ursula Villarreal-Moura is the author of Math for the Self-Crippling (2022), selected by Zinzi Clemmons as the Gold Line Press fiction contest winner, and Like Happiness (Celadon Books, 2024). A graduate of Middlebury College, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a VONA/Voices fellow. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including Tin House, Catapult, Prairie Schooner, among many others. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart Prize, and longlisted for Best American Short Stories 2015. Like Happiness has been listed as a best books of the year so far by Elle, Bookshop.org, Libby.

Recommended Books:

Raquel Gutierrez, Brown Neon
Mohammed El-Kurd, Rifqa
Catherine Lacey, Pew

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Rohit Manchanda, "The Enclave: A Sharp and Hilarious Portrait of Womanhood in India" (Fourth Estate, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave (Fourth Estate: 2024), should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff.”

Rohit Manchanda is a professor at IIT Bombay where he teaches and researches computational neurophysiology. His first novel won a Betty Trask Award, was published with the title In the Light of the Black Sun and was republished in 2024 titled A Speck of Coal Dust.

The Enclave is Rohit Manchanda’s second novel, coming decades after his first published work. In this episode, Rohit and I talk about his writing career, the themes of The Enclave, and the very real struggle of wanting, but not having the energy, to write.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Enclave. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward (CH)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What does it mean for a novel to think globally? And can a global novel concerned with the macro movements of capital and labor still exist in the form of a bildungsroman? This conversation between Lydia Kiesling and Megan Ward takes up questions of form and political consciousness in the novel, globality and rootedness, capitalism and the yearning for things, optimization and wellness culture, and so much more. Lydia Kiesling’s first novel, The Golden State, was a 2018 National Book Foundation “5 under 35” honoree. Her second novel, Mobility, is the first book in a new imprint with Crooked Media. Lydia and Megan discuss seeing the world from a foreign service perspective, the damage wrought by cultures of individuality, and why more novels aren’t set in Azerbaijan. Lydia talks about how the close reading skills that she gained from an English major provide a way reading the world that is underappreciated by our contemporary culture of utilitarianism. From wet bun hair styles to how we want novels to speak about progressive politics, this wide-ranging conversation wraps up with Lydia’s excellent answer to Season 8’s signature question.

Mentions:

Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
Oil!, Upton Sinclair
Timothy Morton
How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Andreas Malm

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Esinam Bediako, "Blood on the Brain" (Red Hen Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 8 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024).

When Akosua, a 24-year-old grad student in New York, falls and bangs her head, she has too much drama in her life to pay attention to her headaches and exhaustion. She’s just broken up with Wisdom, her boyfriend, she learns that her long-estranged Ghanian father is in New York, and she’s worried that dropping so many graduate classes means that she’ll lose her scholarship and work-study job in the library (where she met Daniel, her new crush). As she grapples with her Ghanian-American identity, her mother’s wishes for her, her troubled relationship with the father who left when she was a child, and her coursework, Akosua’s head injury worsens, and she wakes up in the hospital, forced to confront her own history, memory, dreams, and desires.

Esinam Bediako is a Ghanaian American writer from Detroit. She writes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, including awkward third-person autobiographies. A graduate of University of Southern California (M.A.T. in Secondary English), Sarah Lawrence College (M.F.A. in Fiction), and Columbia University (B.A. in English and Comparative Literature), she has worked as a high school English teacher and administrator, a textbook editor, and, during one nerve-wracking summer, a pharmacy technician. She currently writes and edits for the Spondylitis Association of America. She is the author of the Ann Petry Award-winning novel, Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024), as well as the essay/poetry chapbook, Self-Talk (Porkbelly Press, 2024) and you can find some of her recent work in Porter House Review, Cathexis Northwest press, Great River Review, North American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Esi lives in Claremont, CA with her husband and their two sons, who create stories, videos, and other artwork with enviable speed and imagination.

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Emma Hinds, "The Knowing" (Bedford Square Publishers, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 4 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the slums of 19th-century New York. A tattooed mystic fights for her life. Her survival hangs on the turn of a tarot card.

Powerful, intoxicating and full of suspense. The Knowing (Bedford Square Publishing, 2024) by Emma Hinds is a darkly spellbinding novel about a girl fighting for her survival in the decaying criminal underworlds.

Whilst working as a living canvas for an abusive tattoo artist, Flora meets Minnie, an enigmatic circus performer who offers her love and refuge in an opulent townhouse, home to the menacing Mr Chester Merton. Flora earns her keep reading tarot cards for his guests whilst struggling to harness her gift, the Knowing – an ability to summon the dead. Caught in a dark love triangle between Minnie and Chester, Flora begins to unravel the secrets inside their house.

The Knowing is a stunning debut inspired by real historical characters including Maud Wagner, one of the first known female tattoo artists, New York gang the Dead Rabbits, and characters from PT Barnum’s circus.

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Recall This Story: Part 2 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City, Montana" (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 4 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

You will want to start with Part 1 of episode 135; it can be found right here.

Linda Schlossberg, author of Life in Miniature, who teaches at Harvard, joins RTB to read and explore one of her favorite Alice Munro stories, "Miles City, Montana" in our new series, Recall This Story. The discussion ranges widely.

This story first appeared in The New Yorker (1/6/1985) and was reprinted in The Progress of Love (1986) one Munro's many many short story collections. In 2013 Munro became not just the first Canadian Nobel laureate for literature, but also the only person ever to win the prize for short fiction.

When her name comes up in 2024, most of us don't think first about the Nobel. In a July 8 article in The Toronto Star, Munro's daughter Andrea Robin Skinner revealed that during her childhood she was abused by her stepfather Gerard Fremlin, Munro's second husband. She also reported that Munro herself ignored or minimized the enormity of those crimes. Those facts will inevitably shape how future readers think about Munro's work. Linda and John, though, recorded this conversation in June, 2024, before the news broke.

Mentioned in the episode

Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also of his notion of "the imp of the perverse."
The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him.
Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded.
"When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral)
Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962

Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?

Head on over to Part 1 of episode 135.

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Maaria Sayed, "From Pashas to Pokemon" (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 3 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From Pashas to Pokemon (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024), Maaria Sayed’s first novel, is a coming-of-age story. Aisha grows up in the Muhammad Ali Road neighborhood of Mumbai in the Nineties–a time when India was starting to grapple with liberalization, globalization, and polarization. In Mumbai and London, Aisha tries to learn what it means to grow up, as an Indian, a daughter, a woman, and a Muslim.

In this interview, Maaria and I talk about the Nineties, how filmmaking differs from writing a novel, and her long process in getting From Pashas to Pokemon completed.

Maaria Sayed is a writer and filmmaker based in Mumbai and Northern Italy. She’s worked as a writer for networks such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Fox. Her shorts “Aabida” and “Chudala” screened at film festivals such as Raindance, Izmir Kisa, BFI Flare and Busan.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of From Pashas to Pokemon. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Recall This Story: Part 1 of Linda Schlossberg on Alice Munro's "Miles City Montana" (JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 3 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Mentioned in the episode

Edgar Allen Poe had an account (in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short works) of short stories as compact and singular in their focus; also fo his notion of "the imp of the perverse."
The 19th-century Scottish novelist and short-storyist James Hogg, "The Ettrick Shepherd" is one of Munro's Scottish ancestors: John has written about him.
Munro's Books is the thriving bookstore Alice Munro co-founded.
"When He Cometh" (hymn sung at funeral)
Here's what it meant to look chic like Jackie O in 1962

Want to hear the rest of the story, and the rest of John and Linda's discussion?

Head on over to Part 2 of episode 135.

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Cynthia Swanson, "Anyone But Her" (Columbine York, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 1 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Cynthia Swanson about Anyone But Her (Columbine York, 2024).

In 1979 during her freshman year at Denver East High School in 1979, Suzanne’s mother was murdered by an armed robber while working in her record store. Suzanne has always sensed ghosts, so she’s not surprised when soon after, she hears her dead mother warning her about her father’s new girlfriend. Now it’s 2004, and Suzanne is back in Denver with her husband, a mouthy teenage daughter, and a nine-year-old son with behavioral problems. The old record store space is available, and Suzanne follows her dream of selling women’s art and craft, but she can’t stop feeling like someone is watching her. At the same time, she starts researching her family history to figure out if there’s a genetic component to her son’s behavior. Suzann is strong, but she’s challenged in this suspenseful mystery about relationships, fidelity, and family secrets.

Cynthia Swanson started out in college majoring in Architecture, because she's always loved design, and she thought she needed to pursue a "practical" career. (She can hear all the architects in the room laughing.) But after a few years, she returned to her first love—writing—changing her major to English and becoming a technical and marketing writer. Today, she writes psychological suspense, freelance edits, and occasionally teaches writing classes and seminars. She is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the novels The Bookseller, The Glass Forest, and Anyone But Her, as well as the editor of the Colorado Book Award winning anthology Denver Noir. She lives with her family in Denver, where in addition to writing, editing, and scoping out creepy locales for future books, she raises chickens and grows an extensive vegetable garden. Find Cynthia online and follow her on Facebook (Cynthia Swanson, Author), Instagram (cynswanauthor), and Threads (cynswanauthor).

GPGottlieb.Com

Host, New Books in Literature, New Books Network

Blackbird Writers

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Patrick Hicks, "In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program" (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2020)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2020) spans two very different decades from the Nazi concentration camp of Dora-Mittelbau to the coast of central Florida in the late 1960s; the book tells the story of the real life intersections between the horror of the Third Reich's V-2 rocket program and the wonderment of the Apollo missions. Eli Hessel, a brilliant young Jewish mathematician, finds himself deep beneath a mountain where he is forced to build Nazi rockets. When he is finally freed from this secret underground concentration camp, he immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and is recruited by NASA to help build the largest rocket ever to rise above a launch pad: the Saturn V. To his shock, though, he will be under the command of former Nazi scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, both of who were at Dora. As America turns to the moon and cheers for rockets that lance the sky, Eli is swallowed up by the past and must cope with memories he thought were safely buried. This is a novel that asks questions about memory, morality, technology, and how the past influences the present. If we clamp down images of horror, will they always ignite and rise up on us?

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Kevin Dean, "Patron Saints" The Common Magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Kevin Dean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Patron Saints,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Kevin talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which follows a young American trying to find his place in Cairo, while the city roils with political uncertainty after the Arab Spring uprising. Kevin also discusses how it feels to write from memory, what he tries to capture when writing about place, and what projects he’s working on now.

Kevin Dean is a writer currently based in Seattle, Washington. Previously, he lived in Cairo, Egypt, where he worked as an editor and studied Arabic. His writing has been published in The Common and The Rumpus. He co-authored a theatrical adaptation of the novel Taxi, by Khaled Al-Khamissi, which was performed live in Cairo in 2013 and published in Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution. He is at work on his first novel.

Read Kevin’s story “Patron Saints” in The Common at thecommononline.org/patron-saints.

Follow Kevin on Instagram @KevinWilliamDean, and check out more at kevinwilliamdean.com.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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Christina Dodd, "A Daughter of Fair Verona" (John Scognamiglio, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It takes a certain gall to update one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring and most beloved tragedies. Anyone who has survived an English literature class at a US high school or college knows that neither Romeo nor Juliet lives to old age; and those few who have not read the play, for pleasure or under duress, have probably seen one of the screen versions.

All the more kudos, then, to Christina Dodd for pulling off this updated and reimagined version of that classic play. This first book in a new series called Daughter of Montague features Rosaline, nicknamed Rosie—the eldest daughter of Verona’s most famous and still passionate couple. Rosie has at best a jaundiced eye toward love and marriage, having spent her entire life observing life on an emotional seesaw. Yet this is fifteenth-century Europe, and “wife” is the only acceptable destiny for a woman. When her famous parents finally make a match for her, Rosie’s fate seems to be sealed. Then things go wrong in ways even Rosie could not have anticipated.

The story is fun, the mystery satisfying, the author’s obvious delight in manipulating Shakespeare’s famous tale infectious, but what really grabs the reader is Rosie’s voice. At once irreverent and responsible, she sounds more like a modern teenager than anyone from the fifteenth century, but that’s exactly why she draws us into her world.

Christina Dodd has written more than sixty novels ranging from historical romance to contemporary suspense. A Daughter of Fair Verona (John Scognamiglio, 2024) is her most recent work.

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Ari Gautier, "Nocturne Pondicherry" (Hachette India, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A postman struggles to deliver the last letter on his last day of work. A prostitute elopes with the auto rickshaw driver who arranged clients for her. An inspector discovers the dead body of the boy he had an altercation with the previous evening.

In Nocturne Pondicherry (Hachette India, 2024), Ari Gautier peels back the layers of human emotions until glimpses of greed, anger and lust can finally reveal themselves. Unsettling and irresistible, Nocturne Pondicherry is an all too realistic collection where mundane situations - featuring common people, ill-fated street dwellers and hapless immigrants - pull readers in and fling them into the abyss.

Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University.

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Sara Johnson Allen, "Down Here We Come Up" (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina. Jackie Jessup is a con-artist, always working a scheme, always taking what she wanted, and she taught Kate to do the same. Now she’s dying, and Kate is estranged and living far away in Boston. Kate, her mother, and a third woman, Maribel, have either alienated, given away, or otherwise lost their children. It’s 2006, and Jackie has hatched a dubious plan for Kat to drive down to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, pretend she’s the mother of Maribel’s children, and sneak them back over the border into the states. Kate needs to figure out what’s in it for her mother, because with Jackie Jessup, there’s always a price to pay. This is a novel about class, inheritance, and flawed people making mistakes, taking risks, or trying to survive.

Sara Johnson Allen was raised (mostly) in North Carolina. A recipient of the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers by the Key West Literary Seminar, the Stockholm Writers Festival First Pages Prize, an artistic grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and MacDowell fellowships, her work has appeared in PANK Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and Reckon Review, among others. She is finishing a second novel and starting a work of creative nonfiction, which is an exploration of cultural and political history through personal narrative, centering on her 17th century home in coastal Massachusetts. When she is not teaching or shuttling her three kids around, she writes about place and how it shapes us.

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S J. Naudé, "Fathers and Fugitives" (Europa, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Daniel is a worldly and urbane journalist living in London. His relationships appear to be sexually fulfilling but sentimentally meager. A young gay man with no relationships outside of sexual ones, he can seem at once callow and, at times, cold to the point of cruel with his lovers. Emotionally distant from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Following his father's death, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man's will: he will only inherit his half of his father's considerable estate once he has spent time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn't seen since they were boys, who lives on the old family farm in the Free State. Once there, Daniel discovers that the young son of the woman Theon lives with is seriously ill. With the conditions bearing on Daniel's inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel with the boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever.

S.J. Naudé's masterful Fathers and Fugitives (Europa, 2024) is many things at once: a literary page-turner full of vivid, unexpected characters and surprising twists; a loving and at times shockingly raw portrayal of its protagonist's complex psyche; and a devastatingly subtle look into South Africa's fraught recent history.

S.J. Naudé is the author of two collections of short stories and two novels. He is the winner of the Nadine Gordimer Short Story Award, the University of Johannesburg Prize, and the kykNet-Rapport prize, and is the only writer to win the Hertzog Prize twice consecutively in its 100-year history. His first novel, The Third Reel, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times prize. His work has been published in Granta and other journals in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and Italy. He spent half his life as a corporate lawyer in London and now is a full-time writer in South Africa.

Book Recommendations:

John Ransom, The Whale Tattoo
Brandon Taylor, Filthy Animals
JM Coetzee, The Pole

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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F. J. Watson, "Lies of the Flesh" (Polygon, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When evil stalks the land, who can you trust? Autumn 1314. In the aftermath of the Scottish victory at the Battle of Bannockburn, the villagers of Warcop wait desperately for the return of loved ones. When brothers Wat and Rob Dickinson bring news of the death of their companion, Adam Fothergill, as they fled home, there is no one to mourn him. But when a monstrous figure is seen in the hills nearby, it seems Adam has returned from the dead to wreak revenge. But for what?

Three miles away, young Fran Hilton is mourning the death of his father and wrestling with the responsibilities of becoming lord of the manor. When he catches sight of the Revenant, he is terrified, but the mystery of Adam’s death fascinates him. With a motley band of Hilton’s young people, Fran sets out to confront Adam. As terror turns to murder, Fran realises the truth has been buried deep within a pack of lies – and he, too, harbours a secret of his own, the revelation of which could mean losing everything and everyone he loves most.

Lies of the Flesh (Polygon, 2024) by FJ Watson is a gripping exploration of what happens when identities – gender, social position or nationality – are challenged within the crucible of war.

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Francis Stevens, "The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories" (MIT Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024), introduced by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17.

Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett's work has anticipated everything from the work of Philip K. Dick to Superman comics to The Hunger Games, making it as relevant now as it ever was.

Francis Stevens (Gertrude Barrows Bennett, 1884-1948) was the first American woman to publish widely in fantasy and science fiction. Her five short stories and seven longer works of fiction, all of which appeared in pulp magazines such as Argosy, All-Story Weekly, and Weird Tales, would influence everyone from H.P Lovecraft to C.L. Moore.

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Etherized: Anne Enright in a Novel Dialogue Conversation (Paige Reynolds, JP)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.”

Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to engage in contemporary conversation. Students should aim for writing that mixes authority with carelessness. However, “to get to that state of carefree expression is very hard.”

Although tempted by Lewis Carroll and Kenneth Grahame, Anne has a clear winner when it comes to Novel Dialogue's traditional "signature question": A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six.

Mentioned in this Episode:

By Anne Enright:

The Gathering (2007; Booker Prize)
The Forgotten Waltz (2011)
The Green Road (2015)
The Portable Virgin
Taking Pictures
Yesterday’s Weather
Granta Book of the Irish Short Story
Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood
No Authority

Also mentioned:

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking about This

Sally Rooney on the social life of the young on the internet, e.g. Conversations with Friends

Christopher Hitchens, “Booze and Fags:”

Transcript.

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Scott Nadelson, "Trust Me" (Forest Avenue Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Scott Nadelson's novel Trust Me (Forest Avenue Press, 2024).

After his divorce, Lewis moves into the cabin he bought as a vacation home towards the end of his marriage. It’s in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, a forty-five-minute drive from his twelve-year-old daughter’s school and his tedious government job in Salem, Oregon. In fifty-two short stories that alternate between Skye and her father’s viewpoint, we learn about a challenging, sometimes difficult year of hiking, fishing, reading, foraging for mushrooms, and cooking meals without television, computers, or cellphones to distract them from nature or each other. Their relationship changes over the months, but the love between father and daughter pulls them through the tragedy that changes everything.

Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me and the short story collection While It Lasts. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Harvard Review, and The Best American Short Stories, and he teaches a range of creative writing classes, including introductory multi-genre, fiction, and creative nonfiction at Willamette University and in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. He earned a BA in English from the University of North Carolina, an MA from Oregon State University, and an MFA in creative writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. When he isn't reading, writing, or teaching, he spends much of his time foraging for wild mushrooms in the foothills of Oregon's Cascade Mountains and cheering on his child's roller derby team.

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Rachel Kushner, "Creation Lake" (Scribner, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024) is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.

"Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"--making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and is now three times a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Recommended Books:

Cormac McCarthy, Child of God
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Nicholas Molbert, "Altars of Spine and Fraction" (Curbstone Press/Northwestern UP, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 15 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Nicholas Molbert's Altars of Spine and Fraction (Curbstone Press/Northwestern UP, 2024) follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it.

Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by the boys raised in the Deep South.

Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction: Poems (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (2024). You can find his work in places like The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, and Missouri Review among others. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. You can find him on Instagram @nicholasmolbert and online at nicholasmolbert.com.

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Marguerite Young, "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode I'm joined by Dalkey Archive's editorial director, Chad W. Post. We discuss the republication of the late Marguerite Young's cult-classic work of fiction, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (Dalkey Archive Press, 2024). A colossal novel of over 1,000 pages, a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, permanent opium-induced hallucinations, a sprawling sense of scope, and a truly distinct and lyrical prose style--it's a doozy. I haven't finished yet myself, having stopped and restarted multiple times over the years, but that's the beauty of it; it's challenging, wandering, dense, at times utterly absurd, but always rewarding. Chad painstakingly walks us through the book's editorial legacy, and the gargantuan task of excavating this text and introducing it to new generations.

Chad W. Post is the publisher of Open Letter Books and Editorial Director for the Dalkey Archive Press. He also writes a Substack called "Mining the Dalkey Archive."

Marguerite Young, a descendant of Brigham Young, was born in Indiana in 1909 and spent most of her life in Greenwich Village, where she associated with writers like Richard Wright, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein. In addition to Miss MacIntosh, My Darling she published two works of poetry, a work of nonfiction (Angel in the Forest), a collection of essays and stories (Inviting the Muses), and Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs, which was published posthumously.

Tyler Thier, your host, is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos.

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Before and After the Book Deal

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask.

Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (Catapult, 2020) by Courtney Maum is a funny, candid guide about breaking into the marketplace. Cutting through the noise, dispelling rumors and remaining positive, Before and After the Book Deal answers questions like: are MFA programs worth the time and money, and how do people actually sit down and finish a novel? Should you expect a good advance, and why aren’t your friends saying anything about your book? Before and After the Book Deal has over 150 contributors from all walks of the industry, including international bestselling authors, agents, editors, film scouts, translators, disability and minority activists, offering advice and sharing anecdotes about even the most taboo topics in the industry. Their wisdom will help aspiring authors find a foothold in the publishing world and navigate the challenges of life before and after publication with sanity and grace. Covering questions ranging from the logistical to the existential, Before and After the Book Deal is the definitive guide for anyone who has ever wanted to know what it’s really like to be an author.

Our guest is: Courtney Maum, who is the author of five books, including Before and After the Book Deal, which Vanity Fair named one of the ten best books for writers, and The Year of the Horses, chosen by The Today Show as the best read for mental health awareness. A writing coach, director of the writing workshop “Turning Points,” and educator, her mission is to help people hold on to the joy of art-making in a culture obsessed with turning artists into brands. Passionate about literary citizenship, she sits on the advisory councils of The Authors Guild and The Rumpus.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy this playlist:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 200+ Academic Life episodes? Find them all here.

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Peter Rose, "The Good War of Consul Reeves" (Blacksmith Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China.

Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China.

Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of Consul Reeves (Blacksmith Books, 2024). Using Reeves’ own unpublished memoir and research in the national archives, Peter tells a tale of how Reeves—a largely unremarkable man—managed to hold things together in the Portuguese colony until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Peter Rose is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Yale Law School. He first practiced law in Washington DC. It was during a posting in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs as its Asian Head of Public Affairs that he started to visit Macau and became fascinated with the story of this incongruous piece of Portugal on the edge of China.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Good War of Consul Reeves. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon.

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Ayelet Tsabari, "Songs for the Brokenhearted: A Novel" (Random House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Zohara flies from New York to Israel for her mother’s funeral. She’d already been through a tough year; a divorce from her American husband and trouble getting started on her doctoral dissertation at NYU. As she clears out the house where she grew up, Zohara finds tapes of her mother singing Yemenite songs in Arabic, and evidence of a secret romance. During her first thirty days of mourning, Zohara has conversations with her mother’s longtime friends, joins her mother’s Yemenite women’s choir, and rekindles old friendships.

Songs for the Brokenhearted (Random House, 2024) is a beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.

Ayelet Tsabari is an Israeli Canadian writer born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. Her book of stories, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has been published internationally. Her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for memoir, was finalist for the Writer’s Trust Hilary Weston Prize and The Vine Awards. She’s the co-editor of the award-winning anthology Tongues: On Longing and Belonging Through Language. Ayelet teaches creative writing at The University of King’s College MFA and at Guelph MFA in Creative Writing. She lives in Tel Aviv with her family, and when she’s not writing or teaching, she loves to cook, do yoga, sing with her neighbourhood choir, and spend time at her favourite place in the world, the beach. These days, more than anything, she wishes for peace.

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Madeline Martin, "The Booklover's Library" (Hanover Square Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Booklover's Library (Hanover Square Press, 2024) has one of the most dramatic openings I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of novels. It’s 1931 in Nottingham, England, and seventeen-year-old Emma, ensconced in her father’s bookshop, is engrossed in her favorite novel, Jane Austen’s Emma, when she realizes the building around her has caught fire. With her father’s help, she stumbles into the street, only to watch him collapse and die as the bookstore implodes. In just a few pages, Emma has lost her sole family member, her home, and her source of income.

By the time we meet her again, eight years later, she has married, too young and unhappily, lost her husband to a car crash, and struggles to support herself and their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, on her widow’s pension. In 1930s Britain, companies were legally barred from hiring married women or widows with children, so although Emma has barely passed twenty-five and would gladly work, she can’t apply for a job because of the marriage ban. But nor can she pay the rent, no matter how hard she squeezes every shilling. When a chance encounter leads to an opportunity for work at a lending library, Emma takes the plunge and identifies herself as Miss Taylor. Fortunately for her, the person hiring is also a woman, so even when the truth comes out during that first interview, the manager agrees to cover for her.

End of story, one might think, but readers who’ve done the math will already have realized that Emma’s problems have just begun. Three weeks after she starts her training, Hitler invades Poland, and Britain declares war. Nottingham, although not London, has enough factories to make it a likely target, and the city puts pressure on all parents to evacuate their children to the countryside. It’s Emma’s struggles to balance her own need to earn money to support her daughter while ensuring the survival of both her child and herself that make this novel memorable.

Madeline Martin is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of historical fiction and historical romance. The Booklover’s Library is her latest novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her next book, Song of the Steadfast, is due early in 2025.

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Mary Jones, "The Goodbye Process" (Zibby Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In her stunning debut short story collection, The Goodbye Process (Zibby Books, 2024), Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and sometimes surreal ways we say goodbye.

The stories--which range from tender and heartbreaking to unsettling and darkly funny--will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a Los Angeles real estate agent falls for a woman who helps him detach from years of dramatic plastic surgery; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife's funeral is a success. Again and again, Jones's characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, and innocence.

Arresting, original, and beautifully rendered, this story collection packs a punch, just the way grief does―knocking us off our feet.

Mary Jones’s work has appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommend Reading, Subtropics, EPOCH, and The Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. The Goodbye Process is a national bestseller. Originally from Upstate New York, she lives in Los Angeles.

Recommended Books:

Miranda July, All Fours
Taylor Koekkoek, Thrillville USA
Ling Ma, Bliss Montage
Claire Keagan, Small Things Like These

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Kaliane Bradley, "The Ministry of Time" (Avid Reader Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 6 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she'll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible--for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a "bridge" living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as "washing machines," "Spotify," and "the collapse of the British Empire." But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry's project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how--and whether she believes--what she does next can change the future.

An exquisitely original and feverishly fun fusion of genres and ideas, The Ministry of Time (Avid Reader Press, 2024) asks: What does it mean to defy history, when history is living in your house? Kaliane Bradley's answer is a blazing, unforgettable testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.

Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Here short fiction has appeared in Somesuch Stories, The Willowherb Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, and Extra Teeth, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize.

Recommended Books:

Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr
Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Chelsea Bieker, "Madwoman" (Little, Brown, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 3 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Chelsea Biker about her novel Madwoman (Little, Brown, 2024).

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation.

But when she receives a letter from a women's prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

Chelsea Bieker is the author of the debut novel GODSHOT which was longlisted for The Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, named a Barnes and Noble Pick of the Month, and was a national indie bestseller. Her story collection, HEARTBROKE won the California Book Award and was a New York Times “Best California Book of 2022” and an NPR Best Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The Cut, Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, and others. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award, as well as residencies from MacDowell and Tin House. Raised in Hawai’i and California, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

Recommended Books:

Kimberly King Parsons, We Were the Universe
Lindsay Hunter, Hot Springs Drive
Gina Maria Balibrera, Volcano Daughters

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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C. Michelle Lindley, "The Nude" (Atria Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

1999: An island off the southern coast of Greece. Art historian Elizabeth Clarke arrives with the intent to acquire a rare female sculpture. But what begins as a quest for a highly valued cultural artifact evolves into a trip that will force Elizabeth to contend with her career, her ambition, and her troubling history.

Disoriented by jet lag, debilitating migraines, and a dependence on prescription pills, Elizabeth turns to her charming and guileless translator to guide her around the labyrinthine island. Soon, the island's lushness--its heat and light, its textures and tastes--take hold of Elizabeth. And when she's introduced to her translator's inscrutable wife--a subversive artist whose work seeks to deconstruct the female form--she becomes unexpectedly enthralled by her. But once the nude's acquisition proves to be riskier than Elizabeth could have ever imagined, Elizabeth's and the statue's fate are called into question. To find a way out, Elizabeth must grapple with her past, the role she's played in the global art trade, and the ethical fallouts her decisions could leave behind.

The Nude (Atria Books, 2024) is an evocative and intense exploration of art, cultural theft, and what it means to be a woman helming morally complicated negotiations in a male-directed world.

C. Michelle Lindley’s work can be found in Conjunctions, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2024 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a BA in English and Art History from the University of California at Berkeley. And most recently she is the recipient of the Freund Prize for exceptional creative writing.

Recommended Books:

JoAnna Novak, Domestirexia
Ariana Harwicz, Die My Love
Rose Boyt, Naked Portrait

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Jake Lamar, "Viper's Dream" (Crooked Lane Books, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Jake Lamar's novel Viper's Dream (Crooked Lane Books, 2023) is a gritty, daring look at the vibrant jazz scene of mid-century Harlem, and one man’s dreams of making it big and finding love in a world that wants to keep him down.

Harlem, 1936. Clyde “The Viper” Morton boards a train from Alabama to Harlem to chase his dreams of being a jazz musician. When his talent fails him, he becomes caught up in the dangerous underbelly of Harlem’s drug trade. In this heartbreaking novel, one man must decide what he is willing to give up and what he wants to fight for.

Viper's Dream is a fast-paced story that is charged with suspense. A snappy, provocative voice and a stark look at Viper’s Black American experience weave with endless plot twists to offer readers a stunningly original, achingly beautiful read.

Jake Lamar was born in 1961 and grew up in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from Harvard University, he spent six years writing for Time magazine. He has lived in Paris since 1993 and teaches creative writing at one of France's top universities, Sciences Po.

Kishauna Soljour is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University. Her most recent writing appears in the edited collection: From Rights to Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle.

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Maria de Caldas Antão, "My Freedom," The Common Magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Maria de Caldas Antão speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “

My Freedom,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Maria talks about how a casual comment inspired this poem, which explores the idea of freedom, and what it might mean to be free: personally, politically, physically, philosophically. Maria also discusses how she hears a sort of music when writing new poetry, and then chooses words, sounds, rhythms, and line breaks to put that musicality on the page.

Maria de Caldas Antão lives in Lisbon, Portugal. She holds an MA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, and a degree in acting from Mountview Academy in London. She has participated in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and received fellowships to attend the SLS and DISQUIET literary programs. She also has a translation from the Portuguese of a poem by Alberto de Lacerda forthcoming in The Common.

Read Maria’s poem “My Freedom” in The Common at thecommononline.org/my-freedom.

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Marga Ortigas, "God's Ashes: Apocrypha" (Penguin, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Climate change. The refugee crisis. The rise of social media.

These big social questions—and others—inspired journalist Marga Ortigas in the creation of her new novel God’s Ashes (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2024) , a piece of speculative fiction set in a very different 2023. A transnational crime unites the book’s characters, rich and poor, on a journey throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, all coming together in a book that investigates human connection, the plight of stateless people, and environmental contamination.

In this interview, Marga and I talk about what inspired her book and its major themes, and whether being a journalist helped her with her worldbuilding and weaving the threads of her novel together.

Marga Ortigas has traveled the world as a journalist for three decades, with a career spanning five continents and two of the largest global news networks. After getting her start in the Philippines, she joined CNN in London, working across Europe and covering the war in Iraq from its inception. In 2006, she returned to Manila and the Asia Pacific region, reporting from the frontlines of armed conflict and climate change as senior correspondent for Al Jazeera.

She is the editor of I, Migrant, an online platform which showcases writing from the diaspora, advocating a universal humanity beneath people’s differences.

Follow Marga on Twitter and Instagram.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of God’s Ashes. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Terena Elizabeth Bell, "Tell Me What You See" (Whiskey Tit, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Terena Elizabeth Bell's Tell Me What You See (Whisk(e)y Tit, 2022), is a collection of ten experimental short stories about coronavirus quarantines, climate change, the January 6th invasion on the US Capitol, and other events from 2020-2021. Written in both word and image, pieces from the collection have been called "inventive and topical and fresh, emotional, chaotic, and important" by The McNeese Review and "timely, relevant, and interesting" by The Missouri Review. Title story "Tell Me What You See" is a 2021 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) City Artist Corps winner.

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Sara Farrington, "A Trojan Woman Adapted from Euripides" (Broadway Play Publishing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In a flash of modern warfare (Ukraine? Afghanistan? Vietnam? Poland? Hiroshima? Israel? Gaza?), a mother loses her child. She becomes "A Trojan Woman," compelled to embody every iconic character in Euripides’ classic play.

Sara Farrington (Playwright) NYC & NJ based playwright, screenwriter, co-founder of Foxy Films, her theater company w/ Reid Farrington.

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"The Threepenny Review": A Discussion with Wendy Lesser

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today’s spotlight is on the literary magazine The Threepenny Review. I’m joined by the magazine’s founding and current Editor, Wendy Lesser.

Wendy Lesser is the author of twelve nonfiction books and one novel; her latest book, entitled Scandinavian Noir: In Pursuit of a Mystery, came out from Farrar Straus & Giroux in May 2020. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and many other institutions, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her journalistic writing about literature, dance, film, and music has appeared in a number of periodicals in America and abroad. Born in California and educated at Harvard, Cambridge, and UC Berkeley, Lesser now divides her time between Berkeley and New York.

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Charles Holdefer, "Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic" (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Charles Holdefer's new short story collection, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) weaves together ten stories that connect through America's pastime. Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth’s cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein’s secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven? From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination. Holdefer sends readers into extra innings with this satirical and heartfelt collection.

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Stephen Schottenfeld, "This Room Is Made of Noise" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Stephen Schottenfeld about his new novel This Room Is Made of Noise (U Wisconsin Press, 2023).

Don Lank is a newly divorced handyman who spots an imitation Tiffany lamp in the front window of a house and offers the elderly owner $800 for it. He’s shocked by the price he gets and returns to give 95-year-old Millie most of the money. While he’s there, he offers to do a couple of repairs in her deteriorating house, and over the course of the next few weeks and months, spends more and more time with her fixing her house, taking her to doctors’ appointments, buying her grocers, and slowly beginning to oversee her care. He’s also trying to repair his relationships with his father, his ex-wife, and his stepchildren. He’s not sure why he’s helping Millie, but struggles to focus on being altruistic and not merely greedy.

Stephen Schottenfeld is the author of two Bluff City Pawn (Bloomsbury USA, 2014). His short stories have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Iowa Review, and other journals, and have received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was awarded a Michener/Copernicus Society of America grant, a Halls Fiction Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Shane Stevens Fellowship in the Novel from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His narratives often trace the work lives of his characters—pawnbrokers, postal carriers, telephone repair people, home inspectors, police detectives, clothing manufacturers, trailer-park owners, to name a few—and explore how these professions bring an individual into a unique set of experiences and conflicts and expressions. He is a professor of English at the University of Rochester, where he teaches courses in fiction writing, screenwriting, and literature. When he is not writing or reading or teaching, he likes to walk the parks of Rochester, NY.

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Heather Redmond, "Death and the Visitors" (Kensington, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Heather Redmond about her new novel Death and the Visitors (Kensington, 2024).

In this second Regency-era mystery featuring Mary Godwin Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the sixteen-year-old heroine (still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin at this point in her life) and her stepsister and close lifetime companion, Jane Clairmont, are facing even greater penury and discomfort than in the first book, Death and the Sisters (2023), as a result of their parents’ profligacy and the absence of Mary’s older half-sister, banished to Wales because of her excessive attachment to the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and thus unable to help Jane and Mary with their chores.

The girls live in a run-down house in a disreputable London neighborhood not far from Newgate Prison and the Smithfield meat market, where they spend their days watching their parents’ bookshop. Their father, an illustrious political thinker and writer, doesn’t earn enough to support five children and a wife. As a result, he has fallen into the grip of moneylenders, and creditors show up on his doorstep with some regularity, embarrassing him and his family.

When a group of rich Russians arrives, determined to meet the daughter of the renowned Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary’s father persuades one of them to support the Godwin publishing enterprise with a gift of diamonds. But the day after their scheduled meeting, a body identified as the Russian donor is pulled out of the Thames River. Mary sets out with her sister and Shelley to solve the mystery of the Russian’s murder, hoping to retrieve the diamonds and buy herself and her family some time.

This is the Regency as we have come to know it from the novels of C.S. Harris and Andrea Penrose, among others: opulent on the surface but full of grit and poverty behind the glittering façade. How closely Shelley, Jane, and Mary resemble their historical selves is uncertain, but it’s a rollicking good tale and deserves to be enjoyed on its own terms.

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"New Letters" Magazine: A Discussion with Christie Hodgen

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Christie Hodgen is the author of four books of fiction, most recently the novel Boy Meets Girl, which won the 2020 AWP Award for the Novel. Her short fiction and essays have been included in dozens of literary journals and have won two Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and is the editor of New Letters.

A sense of place looms large in the first essay discussed in this episode, “Disintegration” by Karen Fisher. Her job in the hinterlands of east New Orleans involves recycling, hogs that wander around and a boss who is equally beastly as he threatens to fire her. Wrestling for control of her circumstances is tough for the author, in a place that writes “off neglect as charm.” In “On Emptiness” by Joyde Dehli, a poetic sensibility shines. Fear is in the air, as Dehli notes that in response one can flee, fight, freeze or faint, to which might be added a fifth option: fawning, which the author does beautifully over a world that defies definition. In “Right Now, I’m a Chauffeur” by Bud Jennings get ready for sharp-tongued discourse. The narrator’s mom drops line like “Dullards like that should only be allowed cockroaches as pets,” and the essay goes from there in exploring what it’s like to come home to care for your mom versus the lively, coming-out life you led in New York City. Finally, in “A Little Slice of the Moon” by Summer Hammond we encounter a young girl from a Jehovah’s Witnesses family that finds a door into a wider world through, of all things, a job at McDonalds. You’ll find yourself rooting for her to find romance and more.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Jessica Anthony, "The Most" (Little, Brown, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's November 3, 1957. As Sputnik 2 launches into space, carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, a couple begin their day. Virgil Beckett, an insurance salesman, isn't particularly happy in his job but he fulfills the role. Kathleen Beckett, once a promising tennis champion with a key shot up her sleeve, is now a mother and homemaker. On this unseasonably warm Sunday, Kathleen decides not to join her family at church. Instead, she unearths her old, red bathing suit and descends into the deserted swimming pool of their apartment complex in Newark, Delaware. And then she won't come out.

A riveting, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most (Little, Brown, 2024) masterly breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath.

Jessica Anthony is the author of three previous books of fiction, most recently the novel Enter the Aardvark, a finalist for the New England Book Award in Fiction. A recipient of the Creative Capital Award in Literature, Anthony wrote The Most while guarding the Mária Valéria Bridge in Štúrovo, Slovakia. She Lives in Portland, Maine.

Recommended Books:

Patricia Highsmith, Price of Salt
Stories of Shirley Jackson (the tooth and the renegade)
Carson McCullers, Member of the Wedding
Alice Childress, Trouble in Mind
Andre Breton, Mad Love
Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Gretel and the Great War

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Juli Min, "Shanghailanders" (Spiegel & Grau, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau: 2024), the debut novel from Juli Min, starts at the end: Leo, a wealthy Shanghai businessman, sees his wife and daughters off at the airport as they travel to Boston. Everyone, it seems, is unhappy.

The novel then travels backwards through time, giving answers to questions revealed in later chapters, jumping from person to person: Leo, Eko, their daughters Yumi, Yoko and Kiko, and other peripheral members of the household, as we come to learn why Shanghailanders’ core family is just so dysfunctional.

In this interview, Juli and I talk about Shanghai, her decision to write the book in reverse chronological order, and what we gain when those from a non-white perspective write about expatriates.

Juli Min is a writer and editor based in Shanghai. She studied Russian and comparative literature at Harvard University, and she holds an MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson. She was the founding editor of The Shanghai Literary Review and served as its fiction editor from 2016 to 2023.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghailanders. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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Zoë Bossiere, "Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir" (Abrams Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today, I interview Zoë Bossiere about Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir (Abrams Press, 2024). Bossiere is writer from Tucson, Arizona. They are the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, as well as the coeditor of two anthologies: The Best of Brevity and The Lyric Essay as Resistance. Today, we talk about their debut memoir, in which Bossiere captures their experience growing up as a trans boy in a Tucson, Arizona trailer park. It's a world that the young Bossiere both loves and longs to escape and it's one brought to life through utterly keen and compelling storytelling. Cactus Country is a book I love, a book I've shared countless times, a book full of hard-won wisdom. It's shown me what it means to be more fully and beautifully human. Enjoy my conversation with Zoë Bossiere.

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Casey Plett, "On Community" (Biblioasis, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 11 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I interview Casey Plett. Plett is the author of multiple works of fiction, including the story collection A Dream of a Woman, the novel Little Fish, which was a winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Amazon First Novel Award in Canada, and and the story-collection A Safe Girl to Love, also a winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Today, we talk about her new book, On Community (Biblioasis, 2023), which explores the idea of community as a word, a symbol, and a very messy, very human experience of which we're all, in one way or another, a part. Enjoy my conversation with Casey Plett.

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Cally Fiedorek, "Atta Boy" (U Iowa Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 9 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In December 2018, we meet Rudy Coyle, a bar owner's son from Flushing, Queens, in the throes of a major quarter-life crisis. Cut out of the family business, he gets a Hail Mary job as a night doorman in a storied Park Avenue apartment building, where he comes under the wing of the family in 4E, the Cohens.

Jacob "Jake" Cohen, the fast-talking patriarch, is one of a generation of financiers who made hundreds of millions of dollars in the cutthroat taxi medallion industry in the early 2000s, largely by preying on the hopes and dreams of impoverished immigrant drivers. As Jake tries to stop the bleed from the debt crisis now plaguing his company, clawing back his assets from an increasingly dangerous coterie of Russian American associates, Rudy gets promoted from doorman to errand boy to bodyguard to something like Jake's right-hand man.

By turns a gripping portrait of corruption and a tender family dramedy, Atta Boy (U Iowa Press, 2024) combines the urban cool of Richard Price with the glossy, uptown charm of Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Here is a novel richly attuned to its time and place, but with something for everyone--high-wire prose and a story wedding ripped from the headlines, social realism with the warmth, angst, and humor of its indelible voices.

Cally Fiedorek is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and an alumna of The Center for Fiction / Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellowship. Atta Boy is her debut novel. She lives in her native New York City with her family.

Recommended Books:

Kevin Berry, The Heart in Winter
Paul Murray, Beesting
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Na'ou Liu, "Urban Scenes" (Cambria Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 7 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

"In this tango palace everything was swaying rhythmically to and fro, bodies of men and women, beams of colored light, brilliant wine glasses, red and green liquids, slender fingers, pomegranate-colored lips, and feverish eyes. Tables and chairs, together with the crowd of people, cast their reflections on the center of the shiny floor. Everyone was under a powerful magical spell and lost in this enchanted palace."

Enigmatic, mesmerizing, and frenetic, Urban Scenes (Cambria, 2023) takes readers into the dazzling world of Shanghai in the 1920s. This collection of short fiction by Liu Na’ou (1905–1940) — a Taiwanese-born modernist writer — contains stories that take place in cinemas, art studios, and nightclubs. Touching on issues of modernity, social change, and shifting ideas of love, romance, and beauty, these tantalizing stories are accompanied by a thoughtful Introduction and helpful notes by the translators, Yaohua Shi and Judith Amory.

This collection is sure to appeal to those interested in modernist literature and Sinophone fiction, as well as anyone who is looking for stories that feature perplexing narrators to analyze with their students. Interested readers should also check out the other titles in the Cambria Sinophone Translation Series.

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Edward Shanks, "The People of the Ruins" (MIT Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 6 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In The People of the Ruins (originally published in 1920), Edward Shanks imagines England in the not-so-distant future as a neo mediaeval society whose inhabitants have forgotten how to build or operate machinery. Jeremy Tuft is a physics instructor and former artillery officer who is cryogenically frozen in his laboratory only to emerge after a century and a half to a disquieting new era. Though at first Tuft is disconcerted by the failure of his own era's smug doctrine of Progress, he eventually decides that he prefers the post civilised life. But, when the northern English and Welsh tribes invade, Tuft must set about reinventing weapons of mass destruction.

One of the most critically acclaimed and popular postwar stories of its day, The People of the Ruins captured a feeling that was common among those who had fought and survived the Great War: haunted by trauma and guilt, its protagonist feels out of time and out of place, unsure of what is real or unreal. Shanks implies in this seminal work, as Dr. Paul March-Russell explains in the book's introduction, that the political system was already corrupt before the story began, and that Bolshevism and anarchism—and the resulting civil wars—merely accelerated the world's inevitable decline.

A satire of Wellsian techno-utopian novels, The People of the Ruins is a bold, entertaining, and moving postapocalyptic novel contemporary readers won't soon forget.

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Megan Nolan, "Ordinary Human Failings" (Little, Brown, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 6 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" -- ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples" the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Today I talked to Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings (Little, Brown, 2024). Nolan was born in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, the White Review, The Guardian, and Frieze, among others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award and was short-listed for the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Recommended Books:

Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Ann Enright, Actress
José Saramago, Blindness

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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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Rochelle Potkar, "Coins in Rivers: Poems" (Hachette India, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 3 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Fierce and unflinching, Rochelle Potkar's poetry springs from the deeply personal and ripples out to the world, capturing lovers' whispers and reverberations of explosions with equal ease. Vividly depicting love, grief, anger, and defiance, these poems glimmer like coins beneath the water surface, tethered with the weight of wishes clinging to them. As sensuous as it is articulate, Coins in Rivers (Hachette India, 2024) is a deep meditation on womanhood, motherhood, and citizenship.

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Kate Brandes, "Stone Creek" (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 3 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Kate Brandes' new novel, Stone Creek (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2024) introduces readers to Tilly and Frank Stone. Seventeen years ago, after living as a fugitive, Tilly Stone (then, age 13) is left to fend for herself in remote Pennsylvania when her infamous eco-terrorist father disappears under mysterious circumstances. She tries to forget the dams they blew up together and forge a new life until her father’s return threatens to upend her small-town world and her friendship with the dogged FBI agent still pursuing him. Ultimately, as the past and present detonate and blow up with more than one kind of casualty, Tilly must choose between the father she loves, the truth, and her home.

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Laura van den Berg, "State of Paradise" (FSG, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 2 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

It's another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother's home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she's contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.

Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother's lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg's State of Paradise (FSG, 2024) is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of five works of fiction, including The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), which was one of Time Magazine’s 10 Best Fiction Books of 2020. She is the recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next novel, Ring of Night, is forthcoming from FSG in 2026.

Recommended Books:

Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night
Octavia Butler, Bloodchild

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Premee Mohamed, "The Siege of Burning Grass" (Solaris, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 2 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Premee Mohamed’s novel The Siege of Burning Grass (Solaris, 2024) is set during an ongoing war between two empires: Varkal and Med’ariz and follows Alefret, a founder of Varkal’s pacifist resistance who has been arrested and imprisoned by his own country. When the opportunity for freedom presents itself, Alefret must decide how willing he is to collaborate with his government’s war effort and how much he is willing to sacrifice to remain committed to his own ideals.

In this interview, Mohamed describes the long history of violent responses to pacifist movements and some of the influences that went into writing a war novel. She discusses the relationship between education and war, the role of community in forming political movements, and the strengths of speculative fiction as a genre. We also chat about medical experimentation, wartime propaganda and cool science fiction technology.

The Siege of Burning Grass is a grounded and empathetic novel about the cruelties of war. It was a great joy to discuss it with the author.

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"Catamaran" Magazine: A Discussion with Catherine Segurson

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 1 Aug 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Catherine Segurson is the founding editor of Catamaran. She’s a painter, videographer and creative writer who graduated from the Master of Fine Arts program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Prior to founding Catamaran 12 years ago, she worked at both Zeotrope and ZYZZYVA literary magazines.

California-based Catamaran focuses often on the life of the artist, and even more frequently on nature and the environment. The first of the essays discussed in this episode is “What Would Odysseus Do?” by Melanie Faranello. Her psychiatrist father, a Greek man, was always urging his patients to be bold and take on risks. His daughter, the author, does likewise by daring to write her dad imaginative letters as a girl, supposedly seeking his clinical advice. In “Ten Charms Against the Future” by Steve Wing, the first five vignettes offer examples of what each of the five senses offer in appreciating nature. Sight and sound remain vital as this sensual essay ends with the author’s whispering the word “shelter” repeatedly. In “Deserts” by Charles Hood, the honesty and obstinacy of harsh, open landscapes the world over gain the spotlight. What other essay will take you from Islam to atomic bombs and space aliens so adroitly? In “In the Beginning Was the Tree,” Patricia Canright Smith goes from confessing, “I was never a fan of trees,” to “I wish I spoke Tree” based on visiting the world’s tallest, largest, as well as oldest tree, all three of them located in California.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Aysegül Savas, "The Anthropologists" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family?

As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park."

Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release?

Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas' distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor.

Aysegül Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris.

Recommended Books:

Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities
Alisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self

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.

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Ruchama Feuerman, "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist" (Open Road Media, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Ruchama Feuerman's novel In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (Open Road Media 2024), Isaac, a lonely, heartbroken New York haberdasher, moves to Jerusalem after he’s jilted by his bride-to-be and his mother dies. He stumbles into a job as the assistant to a famous kabbalist and spends his days helping the elderly man and his wife dispense wisdom and soup to the troubled souls who come into their courtyard. Isaac crosses paths with Tamar, a newly religious young American woman desperate to find a spiritually connected husband, and Mustafa, a physically deformed Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount. Isaac doesn’t realize that simply being kind to the janitor will change both their lives. Because of that kindness, Mustafa gifts Isaac with an ancient, discarded piece of pottery that he found in the garbage pile on the Temple Mount. His gift lands Isaac in jail and puts Mustafa in danger. Tamar is the only person Isaac knows who can help avert a disaster. First published in 2014, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist has just been reissued with an intriguing afterward.

Ruchama Feuerman is the author of Seven Blessings (St. Martin's Press), and several books for children and young adults. She is grateful to the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Fellowship which allowed her the time and means to devote herself entirely to her writing. Her prize-winning stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Lilith, Tablet, and other publications. She has written and ghostwritten books for children, young adults, and adults, and helps people create their own novels, memoirs, stories and books of non-fiction. Her dream is to return to Israel, the setting for both her novels, where she lived and taught Torah for ten years. It's a place, she finds, where extraordinary stories are handed to you daily. Researching her latest novel led Ruchama to kabbalists, Israeli ex-convicts, Arab laborers, archeologists, Temple Mount police men, connoisseurs of Israeli prison slang, and soup kitchens, among other places. One of the most transformative experiences was her time spent at a Jewish funeral home in New Jersey where she observed a ritual purification for a scene she was writing. Afterward, she volunteered at the Hevra Kadisha burial society for three years and wrote about the experience for the New York Times.

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Naomi Westerman, "Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures" (404 Inklings, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something deeply personal. She became fascinated by the concept of loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art.

Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures (404 Inklings, 2024) is part memoir, part meditation on the many faces of death – from sprinkling ashes across the globe, to the power of horror movies, the complexities of engaging in true crime entertainment, and the vital communities of peer support groups – Happy Death Club is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person’s journey through grief, and what lies beyond.

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A. J. Rodriguez, "Papel Picado," The Common Magazine (2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A. J. Rodriguez speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Papel Picado,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. A.J. talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores a fraught moment in the life of a Latino high schooler struggling under the pressures of family, friendship, and expectation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A.J. also discusses how his writing has changed over time, and why he’s always writing toward not just a specific character’s experience but also the complex community of a place.

A. J. Rodriguez is a Chicano fiction writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Kerouac Project. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades, judged by Jonathan Escoffery. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. He is the forty-third annual Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C.

Read A.J.’s story “Papel Picado” in The Common at thecommononline.org/papel-picado.

Follow A.J. on Instagram and Twitter @soyajrodriguez.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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"Alaska Quarterly Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Ronald Spatz

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ronald Spatz is the editor-in-chief and co-founding editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. A formal National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Mr. Spatz has been recognized with Alaska State Governor’s Awards in Humanities and the Arts. He is currently a full professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he also served as the founding Dean of the University Honors College and Undergraduate Research & Scholarship and as the Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.

Ronald Spatz’s abiding goal for Alaska Quarterly Review is to be innovative, risk-taking, and truth-seeking, all virtues born out during this interview and by the four essays discussed here. In “Hungry Ghost” by May-lee Chaie, a cascading series of misogynistic and racist acts within the family have contributed to a devastating degree of low self-esteem. The essay confronts the emotional abyss that plagues all concerned. In “Once” by Michael Bogan, the fairy-tale like qualities of a teenage romance become exposed to the harsh realities of mutual betrayal, and a marriage that ultimately crumbles. In “Mother Matter” by Meil Sloan the point of view shifts between the first- and second-person as the author deals with a suicidal, autistic son whose tribulations cause his mother to dip into her inner resources while at the same time seeking answers from physics as to how the world works. Finally, in “The Cave” by Debbie Urbanski an intrusive narrator transforms a short story into a hybrid piece, with meta-commentary about the act of writing and the search for what really was going on beneath the surface during a family outing gone wrong.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Christian J. Collier, "Greater Ghost" (Four Way Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Christian Collier's debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir--a poem like "Beloved," whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy.

Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal.

Instagram: @ichristian3030

Twitter: @ichristian3030

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Kendra Sullivan, "Reps" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Kendra Sullivan's latest book of poetry, Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds.

Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and coleads the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Kendra makes public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, ecology, and engagement widely. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, a collective of artists, activists, and boatbuilders. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos.

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"Prairie Schooner" Magazine: A Discussion with John Kuligowski and Zainab Omaki

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

John Kuligowski is a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at Prairie Schooner and also currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He worked as an assistant editor for volumes 392 and 394 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography and has published in a number of venues both online and in print. Zainab Omaki is likewise a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at the magazine and has writings in Callaloo, The Rumpus, LA Review and elsewhere. Her novel-in-progress has funding both abroad and from the Nebraska Arts Council. Like John, she’s a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Prairie Schooner has a long legacy, stretching back to 1928, making it arguably the country’s longest continuous literary magazine. In this episode, the focus is on essays from two recent issues, beginning with “Summer Blues” by Hantian Zhang. For anyone who ever read William Gass’s medication, On Being Blue, this will serve as an interesting sequel. The theme or mood is signaled by the Portuguese word “saudale,” a desire for something absent, for the essay is set in Lisbon. In “Holden Caulfield Builds a House” by Andrew Erkkila, the setting jumps to Jersey City and the renovation of a house whose previous owner was a Viet Nam vet who painted the names of fallen colleagues in blood and excrement. Suffice to say, it’s a monumental tasks that nearly undoes the couple funding the upgrade. In “On grief, sex, and kidneys,” Afton Montgomery explores surgery’s impact on one’s psyche and even more identity. Finally, in “On the Move, or Looking to Settle Down,” Maya Marshall makes a road trip as an African-American woman traveling the South, knowing that danger can always lurk and yet mustn’t become an excuse for limiting oneself. Still, it’s not easy when, for instance, the sight of a dead deer makes her identify with it due to sharing a common color and the risks inherent in motion.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Anthony Di Renzo, "Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue" (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 18 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Anthony Di Renzo's Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023) is the most audacious guide to Rome you will ever read. Pasquino, the city’s witty talking statue, will introduce you to the gallant heroes and grotesque villains, humble peddlers and flamboyant nobles, whores and saints and movie stars who have reigned throughout its turbulent history. Life in Rome is a carnival! Let its joy melt in your heart like gelato.

Anthony’s previous books include Trinacria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily, Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America, and Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.

Recommended Books:

John Keahey, Following Caesar

Chris Holmes writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.

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The "Massachusetts Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Jim Hicks and Shailja Patel

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Jim Hicks is the Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst, and a translator of literature from Italian, French, Spanish, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. His latest book is Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer. Shailja Patel is the Public Affairs Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a poet, essayist, and theatre and visual artist. She is the author of Migritude.

The Massachusetts Review generally focuses on the world at large, versus personal essays. Indeed, as Shailja Patel says in this episode, the magazine is about “freedom writing” that necessarily creates some discomfort in readers as tough topics get tackled. In this case, that billing fits well “An Introduction to Exile” by Oz Johnson, where religious conversion means we’re hearing from a Filipina Jew teaching herself about the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways her rabbi wishes she wouldn’t. In turn, in “Roe: Telling the Tale” by Joyce Avrech Berkman, we encounter a historical framing that shows that reproductive rights were common in America until the period following the Civil War, which was of course about slavery and seeking to control others in ways that still echo in the battle over abortion. How to address injustice and abuse? Amba Azaad has a proposal in “Fire to the Grass,” which might at first glance appear to be an ecological essay but quickly proves to be about using Radical Unforgiveness to create a community response that challenges abuse. Finally, this episode touches on “Thirty-Two Eulogies” by Dan Leach, where understanding what the Male Gaze entails is part of the author’s evolution as he reflects on sexual dynamics, power and control, as vividly represented by the infamous rape scene that Leach remembers from watching the movie Deliverance with his dad long ago.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Eve J. Chung, "Daughters of Shandong" (Berkley Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 8 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Daughters of Shandong (Berkley Books, 2024), the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three daughters abandoned by their wealthy family in soon-to-be Communist China. It is 1948, and Chairman Mao’s forces have moved into Shandong Province, driving the Nationalist Army into retreat. Although the town of Zhucheng is small and rural, the Ang family owns a palatial estate, built by generations of government officials and scholars.

Even before the war turns against them, the family has little use for its eldest daughter-in-law, Chiang-Yue, who has produced three daughters but no sons. The family lives by the ancient Chinese proverb “Value men and belittle women,” so even though its second son does have a male heir, that child’s existence cannot redeem Chiang-Yue in her in-laws’ eyes.

When the Communists approach, the other family members, including the girls’ father, flee. The narrator, Li-Hai, stays behind with her mother and sisters—ostensibly to keep either the People’s Army or impoverished local farmers from confiscating the Angs’ palatial home. Of course, this doesn’t work. Soldiers take over the estate the first day. They haul Li-Hai, only thirteen, before an impromptu tribunal as a stand-in for her missing male relatives. She barely escapes with her life. Only Chiang-Yue’s history of treating the villagers kindly saves her and her daughters—first from execution, then from starvation.

Despite the family’s cruel treatment, Chiang-Yue insists that duty requires her to rejoin her husband. Thus begins their trek across China, from Zhucheng to the local hub of Qingdao, then south to Guangzhou (Hong Kong), and eventually across the strait to Taiwan. Hiding in the bushes, scrounging homeless in the streets, surviving a refugee camp—the Ang women and girls are, in their own stubborn way, relentless. And I swear, you will root for them every step of the way.

Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American lawyer and women’s human rights specialist. She has worked on a range of issues, including torture, sexual violence, contemporary forms of slavery, and discriminatory legislation. Her writing is inspired by social justice movements and the continued struggle for equality and fundamental freedoms worldwide. She currently lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs. Daughters of Shandong is her debut novel.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams. Her next novel, Song of the Steadfast, is due early in 2025.

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Alan Lightman, "Einstein's Dreams" (Vintage, 1992)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 7 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, each with a different conceptualization of time. In one, time is circular, and people are destined to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, time stands still. In yet another, time is a nightingale, trapped by a bell jar.

Translated into over thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians and artists around the world. In poetic vignettes, Alan Lightman explores the connections between science and art, creativity and the rhythms of life, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

This conversation includes Alan Lightman (MIT), Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Annette Martínez-Iñesta, of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM), and Joshua Chaparro Mata, a UPRM graduate and doctoral student in Applied Physics at Yale. They discuss dreaming as a scientific and creative resource; the importance of Berne, Switzerland, in the thought of Einstein and Lightman; Lightman’s precise and harmonious poetics; the role of technology in contemporary life; and the course Lightman’s life, experiences and creative process.

This is the second of two episodes about Einstein’s Dreams. The first, in Spanish, appeared on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Lenguaje focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how translanguaging can provide unique dimensions to knowledge.

This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.

Books, scholars, articles and podcasts mentioned in this conversation include:

In Praise of Wasting Time, Alan Lightman.
Mr g, Alan Lightman.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.
Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Sara Majka.
“Academic Life without a Smartphone,” Inside Higher Ed, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera.
The Hemingway Society Podcast.
Carlos Alberto Peón Casas.

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Nat Reeve, "Nettleblack" (Cipher Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 5 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

1893. Henry Nettleblack has to act fast or she’ll be married off by her elder sister. But leaving the safety of her wealthy life isn’t as simple as she thought. Ambushed, robbed, and then saved by a mysterious organisation – part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch – a desperate Henry disguises herself and enlists. Sent out to investigate a string of crimes, she soon realises that she is living in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems.

When the net starts to close around Henry, and sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward. Is the world she’s lost in also a place she can find herself?

Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack (Cipher Press, 2022) by Dr. Nat Reeve is a subversive and playful ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness – particularly transness – as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you’re struggling for words.

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Iris Mwanza, "The Lions' Den" (Graydon House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 4 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A missing boy. A corrupt system. A case that could change everything...

When young queer dancer Wilbess "Bessy" Mulenga is arrested by corrupt police, fresh-from-the-village rookie lawyer Grace Zulu takes up his cause in her first pro bono case. Presented with a freshly beaten client, Grace protests to the police and gets barred from accessing Bessy, who then disappears from the system--and the world--without a trace. As she fights for justice for Bessy, Grace must navigate a dangerous world of corrupt politicians, traditional beliefs, and deep-seated homophobia.

With the help of a former freedom fighter and the head of her law firm, who's rallying for one last fight as AIDS takes its toll on him, Grace brings together a coalition of unions, students, and political opposition to take on the corrupt administration of President Kaunda. But will justice prevail in the face of such overwhelming odds?

The Lions' Den (Graydon House, 2024) is a gripping and enduring novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. With unforgettable characters and a thrilling plot, Iris Mwanza has announced herself as a major new talent in fiction.

Iris Mwanza is a Zambian American writer. As deputy director of the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she leads strategy and investment for the Women in Leadership portfolio, and she has previously worked as a corporate lawyer in both Zambia and the US. Mwanza holds law degrees from Cornell University and the University of Zambia, and an MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to her work at the foundation, Mwanza serves on the supervisory board of CARE International and on the board of directors of the World Wildlife Fund-US.

Recommended Books:

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 Against 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.

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Patrick Colm Hogan, "A People Without Shame" (Blackwater Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 3 Jul 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Somota is society divided by change, and by memories. When A. arrives in the protectorate shortly after the first world war, he is unsure of what to expect. Employed by the government as a linguistic anthropologist, he is tasked with documenting the benefits of the new order and reporting them to the Reverend G. But what are these benefits? In his travels throughout the region, A. finds only the physical and emotional scars of conquest, and of routine colonial administration. Yet, even as the indigenous culture is being reduced to mere fragments, he also learns of a sublime literature responding to those historical traumas. One storyteller in particular, Kehinta, begins to reveal to A. just how much has been lost. A People Without Shame (Blackwater Press, 2024) is a profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story.

Patrick Colm Hogan is the author of The Death of the Goddess: A Poem in Twelve Cantos (2014), a book-length, narrative poem based on Hindu Goddess myths, as well as lyric poems and short fiction, published in such outlets as minnesota review, The Journal of Irish Literature, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, he is the author of over twenty scholarly and interpretive books, most of which treat postcolonial or world literature. Hogan regularly teaches courses in postcolonial literature (often with a focus on Africa), as well as courses on the pre-colonial and postcolonial literary traditions of India and China. In keeping with these interests, he has worked to acquire at least some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Mandarin, and Sanskrit. A People Without Shame is his first novel.

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Sorayya Khan, "We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir" (Ohio State UP, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today’s book is: We Take Our Cities With Us (Ohio State UP, 2022), by Sorayya Khan. After her mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where she finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.

Our guest is: Sorayya Khan, who is the author of the novels City of Spies, Five Queen’s Road, and Noor. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, with her family. She is a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. Find her at sorayyakhan.com.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history which she uses to explore which stories we tell (and why), and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy discussions of these memoirs:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support our show by sharing episodes of the Academic Life.

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Molly Giles, "Life Span" (WTAW Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Molly Giles remembers when her father came back after WWII in 1945. Her memoir, Life Span (WTAW Press, 2024) opens when she is three years old, sitting in the front seat of a moving van as her father drives from San Francisco to their new home in Sausalito. Well-known editor and author of four story-collections and two novels, Giles referenced the journals she began writing at age nine to create a memoir filled with moments and thoughts from her eight decades so far. The Bay area is the backdrop for much of her life, although she spent fourteen years teaching in Arkansas. She delves into family relationships, husbands and lovers, siblings and children, teaching and editing, and the struggles of a being a single mother before women were accepted into the work force. In brutally honest prose, Molly dissects her life with a critical eye, never sugar-coating her failures or glorifying her successes, of which there were many.

Molly Giles’s first collection of short stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Four subsequent story collections—CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES and WIFE WITH KNIFE, have also won awards, including the San Francisco Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and, twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (three times), and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. Molly Giles has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece, and has edited many published writers, including Amy Tan.

Molly enjoys cooking, but she doesn’t love it, what she loves is reading cookbooks in bed, licking salt off her fingers after a light supper of Fritos. She also enjoys gardening (the watering part not the weeding) and watching the resident fawns graze what’s left of her lawn. Molly is a passionate reader and though she often forgets both keys and wallet, she never travels without a book in her purse. She lives in Woodacre, CA.

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Graham McNeill, "Horus Heresy - False Gods" (Games Workshop, 2014)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

For years, fans have been clamoring for novels about the Horus Heresy - the bloody civil war that set Space Marine against Space Marine and nearly spelled the end of mankind at the hands of the traitor Horus. False Gods takes the epic story onwards as Horus struggles to keep his armies in line and the seeds of his downfall are sown.

Join us as we speak with Graham McNeill about one of his several contributions to the Horus Heresy series, False Gods!

Graham McNeill, currently a freelance writer, has written for Games Workshop and for Riot Games in Los Angeles. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller, and Empire, the second novel in the Sigmar trilogy, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. You can visit Graham’s website here: https://graham-mcneill.com/

Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus, and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus, and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption, and Numbers 1-19, Numbers 20-36. He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu

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Dana Elmendorf, "In the Hour of Crows" (Mira Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Dana Elmendorf’s novel In The Hour of Crows (Mira Books, 2024) takes place in small town Appalachia and follows Weatherly Opal Wilder, a young woman with the ability to talk death out of the dying. Our story begins shortly after the death of her cousin, Adaire, as Weatherly struggles to find justice for her cousin and to navigate small town politics in a place where her family is treated with increasing distrust.

In this interview, Elmendorf describes the evolution of her novel from a romance to a murder mystery and the role that death and grief play in the story. She discusses Appalachian folk magic, abusive family structures, and shapeshifting crows. We also talk about poverty and rural healthcare systems, and the intermingling of the interpersonal and supernatural in contemporary fantasy.

In the Hour of Crows is an empathetic, dream-like book and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.

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Emma Copley Eisenberg, "Housemates" (Hogarth, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 22 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Emma Copley Eisenberg's novel Housemates (Hogarth, 2024).

After Bernie’s former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.

What ensues is a journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the housemates into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to chase their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.

Warm and insightful, Housemates is a story of youth and freedom—a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.

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Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty (EH)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What’s the truth and what’s a lie? What’s a memoir, what’s a novel, and what if both are just a series of “prose blocks”? This conversation between Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question.

Mentions:

By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers
Hilary Mantel
Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand.
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game

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Joanna Lowell, "A Shore Thing" (Berkley Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Joanna Lowell is known for her witty historical romances set in late Victorian England, a period both undergoing and resisting dramatic social change. Her previous novels in this series pair a young artist from the East End with her tortured muse, a duke; a runaway duchess with an admirably calm young man convinced she is a plant lover like himself; and a reluctant, poverty-stricken art forger with an art critic who is alienated from his aristocratic family. A Shore Thing (Berkley Books, 2024) follows the romantic fortunes of Kit Griffith, a former painter who now makes his living selling bicycles, and Muriel Pendrake—the intrepid, intelligent, world-traveling botanist impersonated in book 2.

Muriel has traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, to collect seaweed—not because that is her own preference, beautiful as some of it is, but because the stodgy male chauvinist in charge of a forthcoming talk that Muriel has agreed to present in New York has declared that no other topic is acceptable for a woman. She travels in the company of her old friend James, a doctor with a secret, and they are returning to their hotel when a near-accident involving a bicycle leads to Muriel’s dramatic encounter with a semi-conscious Kit.

It’s 1888, and most of the bicycles in town are the old-fashioned penny farthings, with a huge front wheel and a tiny back one. One thing leads to another, and soon Muriel—who has never mounted a bicycle in her life, not even the kind that Kit rides, which we would now consider standard—agrees to accompany this devastatingly handsome young rake (or so she thinks) on a cycling trip around the Cornwellian coast.

Joanna Lowell lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. She is the author of four interconnected historical romances set in late Victorian England—most recently, A Shore Thing. She writes in other genres as Joanna Ruocco.

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels—including The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next novel, Song of the Steadfast, will appear early in 2025.

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Rachel Khong, "Real Americans" (Knopf, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Real Americans (Knopf, 2024) begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.

In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance--a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.

Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?

Rachel’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a cookbook about eggs, called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district; she retired from that role in 2021.

Recommended Books:

Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

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C. J. Spataro, "More Strange Than True" (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Award winning author and short fiction writer, C. J. Spataro's debut novel, More Strange Than True (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) takes us in to a world of faeries and what happens when wishes do come true. After an epically shitty day, Jewell Jamieson unknowingly eats a magic-spiked meal and happens also to make a certain wish-and that's why she awakes the next morning to discover her beloved dog Oberon has been transformed into a beautiful naked man in her bed. Conflict ensues when Titania, the impulsive Queen of the Faeries, decides she wants Oberon for herself. Is Oberon simply a man who used to be a dog, or is he somehow something more? When Jewell discovers the answer, she will be faced with a devastating choice. Will she choose to save the man she's grown to love by giving him up, or will she honor his wishes and watch him die?

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"Conjunctions" Magazine: A Discussion with Bradford Morrow

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children’s book author. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. In 2020, he published The Forger’s Daughter, which the New York Times named a “Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 selection.” His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, will be released early next year.

Three essays from the Ways of Water issue are discussed today: Kristin Posehn’s “The Wave Readers” about Marshall Island natives using their intuitive, sensory skillset to navigate far-flung islands that sit only about seven feet above water; Ryan Habermeyer’s “A North American Field Guide to Glaciers,” a futuristic short story with the inklings of being a work of speculative nonfiction; and Heather Altfeld,’s “With Their Feet in the Water and Their Heads in the Fire” about dealing with intense heat, scorpions, and more, in Morocco. In each case, the climate poses unique challenges and lyrical narrative prose responses in kind with often poignant insights. A final essay covered here is Alyssa Pelish’s “The Four Notes,” a narrative discourse that displays a profound knowledge of classical music.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Kimberly King Parsons, "We Were the Universe" (Knopf, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and--most heartbreaking of all--her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine--long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in--and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024) is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction--a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.

Kimberly King Parsons is the author of We Were the Universe, a novel the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power,” and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.

Recommended Books:

Chelsea Bieker, Mad Woman
Ryan Chapman, The Audacity
Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

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 Against 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.

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Katherine Mezzacappa, "The Maiden of Florence" (Fairlight Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Giulia is an orphan who has been cloistered since she was a baby. In 1584, the powerful Medici family demands a test of virility from the Grand Duke of Mantua before his marriage to Eleanora de Medici. Giulia, who knows nothing about the world of men, is offered a dowry and husband in exchange for one night with the prince. She doesn’t know what that night entails, or that the lecherous minister who arranges it will never set her completely free. The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight Books, 2024) is based on a true story.

Katherine Mezzacappa is an Irish author currently living in Carrara, northern Tuscany. She holds a BA in History of Art from UEA, an MLitt in English Literature from Durham and a master’s in creative writing from Canterbury Christ Church University. Her debut novel (writing as Katie Hutton), The Gypsy Bride, made the last fifteen in the Historical Novel Society’s 2018 new novel competition. Her short fiction has been short- and longlisted in numerous competitions, and she has been awarded residencies at Cill Rialaig Artists village by the Irish Writers Centre in 2019 and at Hald Hovedgaard by the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators in 2022. When she is not writing, Katherine volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founding member. She also sews dresses and is learning Irish and German.

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Jean Trounstine, "Motherlove: Stories" (Concord Free Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Motherlove (Concord Free Press, 2024) is the powerful short-story collection from Jean Trounstine, an acclaimed writer and social-justice activist with a deep knowledge of the US prison system—and its devastating impact on our communities in Massachusetts and beyond. In Motherlove, she turns her sharp eye on an often-forgotten group—the mothers of children who kill.

With deft writing and deep empathy, Trounstine explores the stories of ten mothers, each struggling with the aftermath of murder. While fictional, Trounstine’s characters are drawn from her more than thirty years of experience with prisoners and their families, making her stories all the more real and resonant.

Jean Trounstine is an author, activist, and educator who has written extensively about the criminal legal system in America. She worked at Framingham Women’s Prison (MA) for a decade, where she directed eight plays for prisoners—resulting in her highly praised book, Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison. Her groundbreaking work is considered the first Shakespeare program launched in the US.

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Machine, System, Code: Masande Ntshanga and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra (EH)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Building parallels between technology and the human imagination, Masande Ntshanga’s conversation with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra explains how cities are like machines and how South African history resembles some of the most sinister versions of techno-futurism. Masande is the author of two novels: The Reactive, winner of a Betty Trask Award in 2018, and Triangulum, nominated for the 2020 Nommo Awards for Best Novel in 2020 by the African Speculative Fiction Society. His responses to Magalí’s questions interweave autobiography and history, showing how when you venture into “underwritten spaces” in South Africa, realism starts to seem like speculation. Masande moves from playing bootleg Nintendo and hacking Lego sets in Ciskei, a “homeland” under the apartheid government’s Bantustan system, to data mining and novel writing in the global cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg. All the while, technology is never something “we’re resigned to experiencing” and “endorsing” in fiction—it can be a medium of contemplation as well as conquest. Masande and Magalí are also interested in the queer intimacies of young people busy forming their own “micro-tribes.” Especially young people who are reading the global phenomenon that is Stephen King by moonlight, when they might be just a little too young for it.

Mentions:

Masande Ntshanga, The Reactive, Triangulum, and the short story “Space”
Samuel R. Delany, Equinox
“Hauntology,” from Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx
Ciskei
Masande Ntshanga’s essay “Technologies of Conquest” in The Creative Arts: On Practice, Making, and Meaning (Dryad Press, 2024)
Stephen King, The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
Bonus mention: Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, an edited volume of short stories, artworks, poems and essays that engage with the tragic destruction of the African Studies Library at the University of Cape Town in April 2021.

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"Southern Humanities Review" magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 6 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Justin Gardiner is the author of two nonfiction books and a collection of poetry. His most recent title is the book-length lyric essay Small Altars, published by Tupelo Press in 2024. Besides his role as Nonfiction Editor for Southern Humanities Review, Justin is also an Associate Professor at Auburn University.

Founded in 1967, SHR considers subject matter both within and beyond the South. The magazine has had Justin Gardiner as its nonfiction editor for the past half decade. Four essays are discussed in the episode, with most of all of them showing evidence of the associative qualities that Gardiner, as a poet, enjoys in whatever genre. In this case, we started with Lisa Greenwell’s essay “Your Soul Doesn’t Need You.” While ostensibly an essay about a carjacking she experienced, it goes wider to consider alike how well both more cognitively based therapy and poetry that speaks to one’s soul can aid recovery. In Leslie Stainton’s “Here with You,” an understanding of how the artist Joseph Cornell’s boxes reflect his life with a brother who suffered from cerebral palsy parallels the circumstances of the author’s own, younger sister. Delicacy is the order of the day. In Ceridwen Hall’s essay, “Submarine Reconnaissance: Bodies, Permutations, Voyages,” Hall delves into whether submarines are “female” (as her mom believes) or a “he” when in combat, along with many fascinating aspects of serving aboard a submarine and the “aquatic” nature of our memories and the way we must constantly “refit” our thinking. The other, remaining essay, Jennifer Taylor-Skinner’s “I Don’t Want Somebody in My House,” highlights the grand piano that serves as her companion, in contrast to how an esoteric French composer (Erik Satie) had two baby grand pianos stacked atop each other in his southern France villa. Again, expect the unexpected.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Joan Leegant, "Displaced Persons: Stories" (New American Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 4 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Joan Leegant’s new story collection, Displaced Persons (New American Press 2024) delves into human stories of living in the 21st century. Characters transform after illness or divorce, move to a new city or a new country, get caught between different cultures and traditions, or stumble into scary situations. People can be resilient about change and might rebuild themselves after loss, suffering, and illness, but they don’t all bounce back with equal fervor. Characters struggle with Jewish identity, family issues, social expectations, and health, and stories are set now and, in the past. Some stories are in the states, others are in Europe and Israel. This is a brave collection during a time when antisemitism is bubbling up again, and memories of times past seem surprisingly current.

Joan Leegant’s first book of stories, An Hour in Paradise: Stories (W.W. Norton, 2003), won the PEN/New England Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She is also the author of a novel, Wherever You Go (W. W. Norton, 2010). Her prize-winning stories have appeared in over two dozen literary magazines and anthologies. She has also written essays and pieces on writing craft. Formerly an attorney, she taught at Harvard, Oklahoma State, and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle where she was also the writer-in-residence at Hugo House. For five years she was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv where she also lectured at Israeli schools on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy, and taught English to African refugees and asylum seekers. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband, Allen Katzoff, who works in nonprofit administration. When she’s not working, Joan spends a lot of time at the piano playing show tunes, light jazz, and klezmer.

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Jennine Capó Crucet, "Say Hello to My Little Friend" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 3 Jun 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes--you can call him Izzy--might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding himself at the mercy of a cease-and-desist letter from Pitbull's legal team and living in his aunt's garage-turned-efficiency, Izzy embarks on an absurd quest to turn himself into a modern-day Tony Montana.

When Izzy's efforts lead him to the tank that houses Lolita, a captive orca at the Miami Seaquarium, she proves just how powerful she and the water surrounding her really are--permeating everything from Miami's sinking streets to Izzy's memories to the very heart of the novel itself. What begins as Izzy's story turns into a super-saturated fever dream as sprawling and surreal as the Magic City, one as sharp as an iguana's claws, and as menacing as a killer whale's teeth. As the truth surrounding Izzy's boyhood escape from Cuba surfaces, the novel reckons with the forces of nature, with the limits and absence of love, and with the dangers of pursuing a tragic inheritance. Wildly narrated and expertly rendered, Say Hello to My Little Friend (Simon and Schuster, 2024) is Jennine Capó Crucet's most daring, heartbreaking, and fearless book yet.

Jennine Capó Crucet is a novelist, essayist, and screenwriter. She’s the author of three books, including the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award, was named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice book, and was cited as a best book of the year by NBC Latino, the Guardian, the Miami Herald, and other venues; it has been adopted as an all-campus read at over forty U.S. universities. Her other books include the story collection How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize, the John Gardner Book Award, and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award; and the essay collection My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, which was long-listed for the 2019 PEN America/Open Book Award.

Recommended Books:

Percival Everett, Erasure
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

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Yi-Han Lin, "Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise" (HarperVia, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this episode, Jenna Tang shares with us her translation of Lin Yi-Han's Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise: A Novel (HarperVia, 2024), one of the most iconic works of Taiwan's #MeToo movement.

Thirteen-year-old Fang Si-Chi lives with her family in an upscale apartment complex in Taiwan, a tightknit community of strict yet doting parents and privileged children raised to be ambitious, dutiful, and virtuous. She and her neighbor Liu Yi-Ting bond over their love of learning and books, devouring classic works--Proust, Gabriel García Márquez, the very best Chinese writers. Yet, it is their lack of real-world education that makes them true kindred spirits. Si-Chi's innocence is irresistible to Lee Guo-hua, a revered cram literature teacher and serial predator who lives in her building. When he offers to tutor the academic-minded girls for free, their parents--unaware of Lee's true nature--happily accept. While Yi-Ting's studies with Lee are straightforward, Si-Chi learns about things no one teaches them in school--lessons about sex and love that will change the course of her life. Confused and uncertain, Si-Chi turns to her beloved books for guidance. But literature tells her nothing honest about rape or how to cope with the trauma of abuse. For her own salvation, the young girl begins to think of her personal hell as her "first love paradise," where the power of love, no matter how twisted, gives her the strength to survive.

One of the biggest books to come out of Taiwan in the last decade, Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise is a chilling tale of grooming and its lingering trauma, and the power structures that allow it to flourish. Insightful, unsettling, emotionally raw, it is a staggering work of literature that reverberates across cultures and forces us to confront painful truths about the vulnerability and strength of women and those who use and hurt them.

Jenna Tang is a Taiwanese writer, educator, and translator who translates between Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, French, and English. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. Her translations and essays are published in The Paris Review, Latin American Literature Today, AAWW, Catapult, Mcsweeney’s, and elsewhere. She translated Lin Yi-Han’s novel, Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise.

Linshan Jiang is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also obtained a Ph.D. emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research interests include modern and contemporary literature, film, and popular culture in mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan; trauma and memory studies; gender and sexuality studies; queer studies; as well as comparative literature and translation studies.

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Tahir Annour, “Symphony of the South," The Common magazine (2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Mayada Ibrahim speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her translation of “Symphony of the South,” a short story by Tahir Annour that appears in The Common’s most recent issue, in a portfolio of writing in Arabic from Chad, South Sudan, and Eritrea. Mayada talks about the process of translating this piece, including working with the author and TC Arabic Fiction Editor Hisham Bustani. She also discusses gravitating toward translation as a way to reintegrate Arabic into her life, after years of studying and learning in English. Her translation of Forgive Me, a novel set in Zanzibar and co-translated with her father, will be out in the UK this year.

Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English. Her translations have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and published by Archipelago Books, Dolce Stil Criollo, and 128 Lit. She is managing editor at Tilted Axis Press.

Read “Symphony of the South” in The Common at thecommononline.org/symphony-of-the-south.

To learn more about Mayada and her work, visit mayadaibrahim.com.

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Jessica Leigh Kirkness, "The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light" (Allen & Unwin, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 31 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Emily Pacheco speaks with writer and researcher Jessica Kirkness about her memoir, The House with All the Lights on: Three Generations, One Roof, a Language of Light (Allen & Unwin, 2023). Jessica has published in Meanjin and The Conversation, as well as other outlets. Her PhD focused on the ‘hearing line’: the invisible boundary between Deaf and hearing cultures. She is also a teacher of nonfiction writing at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

The House With All The Lights On explores linguistic and cultural dynamics within Deaf-hearing families. Jessica shares her experience having Deaf grandparents and navigating the cultural borderline between Deaf and hearing cultures. It is a wonderful memoir about family, the complexities of identity, and linguistic diversity.

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Gina Chung, "Green Frog: Stories" (Vintage, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 29 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

From the author of Sea Change comes Green Frog: Stories (Vintage, 2024) a short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival.

Equal parts fantastical--a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death--and true to life--a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death--the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.

Chung is a master at capturing emotion, and her characters--human and otherwise--will claw their way into your heart and make themselves at home.

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Sasha Vasilyuk, "Your Presence Is Mandatory" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 28 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR. After surviving the Red Army, Nazi prison camps and forced labor, Yefim decides to keep the secret of his survival, and invents a story for his wife and children. In the post-war regime, the wrong lie can mean exile or death, and when years later, his presence is demanded by the KGB, he knows that it’ll be easier for him and his family if he’s completely honest. Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a story of Jewish survival, Russian deception, secrecy, and societal disfunction, and the struggle of Ukrainians to endure another war.

Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author who grew up in Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She has an MA in Journalism from New York University, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, CNN, TIME, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, BBC Radio, USA Today, KQED, San Francisco Chronicle, The Telegraph, and Narrative. She has won several writing awards, including the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing and the NATJA award. Sasha lives in San Francisco with her husband and children.

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Alan Jenkins and Gan Golan, "1/6, The Graphic Novel: What if the Attack on the U.S. Capitol had Succeeded?" (Sun Print Solutions, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 26 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

What if the January 6, 2021 Insurrection had been successful? A tale of what was, what could have been, and what still could be?

1/6: The Graphic Novel (Sun Print Solutions, 2023) chillingly illustrates how close we came to authoritarian rule in America and the threats to our democracy that we still face. In the tradition of speculative fiction from George Orwell’s 1984 to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale to the Twilight Zone, it explores themes of autocracy, scapegoating, strategic disinformation, and more, all told through a compelling, character-driven story.

Drawing on real-life events, 1/6 travels the road that led from back-room meetings, white supremacist rallies, and the Four Seasons Landscaping parking lot to a violent attack on the Capitol that left several Americans dead and shook our nation to its core.

It then imagines a world in which the events of that day turned out very differently.

1/6 is for lovers of graphic novels, lovers of speculative fiction, lovers of politics, and lovers of our democracy. It’s a story that demands our attention and calls on us to take action…while we still can.

Issue #1 of the 4-Issue Series is available on Amazon, Issuu, and in a print edition.

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A. Engels, "A Fool for an Heir" (2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 25 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Few destinies are more challenging than life in the orbit of a man obsessed with expanding his power at all costs. Such is the fate endured by Ivan Ivanovich (Ivan the Young), eldest son of Russia’s Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and the narrator of A. Engels’s novel, A Fool for an Heir.

While his father focuses on extending his reach into neighboring principalities and overcoming the legacy of a brutal civil war, little Ivan dreams of becoming a hero like those in the chronicles he reads with his tutor. The sudden, violent death of the boy’s mother forces him into the world of men, where he masters the skills of sword and bow, as well as the art of command. Yet even as Ivan marries and has children of his own, he remains in his father’s shadow.

Appalled by the older Ivan’s attacks against other lands—including some ruled by members of his own family—and by the cruel suppression of dissent both there and at home, Ivan the Younger increasingly feels driven to defend his father’s victims, especially one whom he sees as closer than a brother. He realizes only too late that his focus on the oppressed has blinded him to the presence of a deadlier, more determined enemy as ruthless as his sire.

Although set almost six hundred years ago, this novel derives an uncanny resonance from the war launched by Russia against Ukraine in 2022, where the justification of annexation and subjugation developed by Ivan III still play out in current events.

A. Engels writes historical fiction set in medieval Eastern Europe. A Fool for an Heir is her debut 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 latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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Not Prophecy but Inversion: Omar El Akkad and Min Hyoung Song

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 24 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Omar El Akkad joins critic Min Hyoung Song for a gripping conversation that interrogates fiction’s relationship to the real. Before he became a novelist, Omar was a journalist, and his experiencing reporting on (among other subjects) the war on terror, the Arab Spring, and the Black Lives Matter movement profoundly shapes his fiction. His first novel, American War (Vintage, 2018), follows the protagonist’s radicalization against the backdrop of afossil fuel-motivated civil war. His second, What Strange Paradise (Vintage, 2022), is a haunting retelling of Peter Pan focused on a young Syrian refugee. But as Omar and Min’s dialogue reveals, literary criticism doesn’t always get the politics of political fiction right. Their conversation moves from the preoccupation with “literal prophecy” which plagues the reception of speculative fiction in general and climate fiction in particular to the multifaceted appeal of the fantastical in writing migration stories. They discuss Omar’s interest not in extrapolation, but in inversion. And they take up the imaginative challenges posed by climate change: the way it fails to fit zero-sum colonial ideologies; the way it relies upon the continued development of “the muscle of forgetting, the muscle of looking away.” Finally, Omar’s answer to the signature question is a case study in the inversion that characterizes his work: Little Women readers, prepare yourselves!

Mentioned in This Episode

Paolo Bacigalupi
Kim Stanley Robinson
Barbara Kingsolver
Jenny Offill
Richard Powers, The Overstory
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
Barack Obama, “A New Beginning: Remarks by the President at Cairo University, 6-04-09”
Stephen Markley, The Deluge
Alan Kurdi (photographed by Nilüfer Demir)
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

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The Translator's Daughter: A Discussion with Grace Loh Prasad

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today’s book is: The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books, 2024), by Grace Loh Prasad, which is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home. Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again. This exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity.

Our guest is: Grace Loh Prasad, a finalist for the Louise Meriwether First Book prize. Grace writes frequently on the topics of diaspora and belonging. You can find her work in many publications including The New York Times, Longreads, Catapult, Jellyfish Review, Blood Orange Review, KHÔRA, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Grace received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, and has attended workshops at Tin House and VONA, and residencies at Hedgebrook and Ragdale. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and Seventeen Syllables, an Asian American Pacific Islander writers collective. She is the author of The Translator’s Daughter: A Memoir.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also enjoy these Academic Life episodes:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world.

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"Salmagundi" Magazine: A Discussion with Bob Boyers

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Robert Boyers founded the quarterly Salmagundi in 1965 and has been its editor in chief ever since. He’s the author of 12 books, including most recently Maestros Monsters: Days & Nights with Sontag and Steiner and before that The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy and the Hunt for Political Heresies. Besides teaching at Skidmore College, he directs the New York State Summer Writers Institute.

Salmagundi rightly prides itself on hosting wide-ranging, inquisitive discussions of major topics involving race, gender, literature, psychology and so much more. This discussion goes in depth on four entries from the magazine. First up: “Talking Race Matters: A Conversation with John McWhorter & Thomas Chatterton Williams” explores the limits of racial essentialism as well as total assimilation that risks denying what is unique about the Black perspective and experience. A second piece is Elizabeth Benedict’s essay, “What’s the Matter with Sex?” It tackles how far the influence of pornography has gone (astray) as a training ground that leads young men into often degrading behavior to the women they are intimate with, including the use of choking as a form of eroticism. “The Failure of Censorship” by Adam Phillips looks at how our desires endanger us and yet at the same time to deny them denies aspects of ourselves. When is and isn’t self-censorship fruitful? Finally, Salmagundi hosted a symposium called “Can the American Meritocracy Get Religion?” Five writers are responding to an editorial by Ross Douthat in the New York Times. All found Doughat’s views too narrow or incoherent to be persuasive.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, "How to Love in Sanskrit" (HarperCollins, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 16 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

How to Love in Sanskrit (HarperCollins, 2024) is an invitation to Sanskrit love poetry, bringing together verses and short prose pieces by celebrated writers. How do you brew a love potion? Turn someone crimson with a compliment? How do you make love? How do you quarrel and make up? Nurse a broken heart? And how do you let go? There's something for everyone in this brilliantly translated ancient guide to love for modern readers.

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David Corbett, "The Truth Against the World" (Square Tire Books, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 14 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Truth Against the World (Square Tire Books, 2023) is a brilliant literary fantasy about a divided, dystopian America on the verge of war. Shane, a former Irish combat soldier with a murky past, wants to save his young friend Georgie O’Halloran, who turned his stories of Celtic history and folklore into a beautifully illustrated book. She gave the book to her professor, who published it under his name and earned millions. It became a wildly popular video game that continues to inspire a violent transformation of America by roaming gangs of murderers. Shane, already trying to free Georgie from the psychiatric institution where she’s been hidden by her money-grubbing stepmother, is devoted to finding the deceitful professor. They embark on a cross-country journey, tracked by those in power and pursued by murderers.

David Corbett is the author of seven novels, which have been nominated for numerous awards, including The Edgar. His short fiction has twice been selected for Best American Mystery Stories, and a collaborative novel for which he contributed a chapter—Culprits—was adapted for TV by the producers of Killing Eve and will appear on Hulu in December 2023. His writing guides The Art of Character and The Compass of Character have been widely praised and used by both aspiring and established authors, and he is a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed, an award-winning blog dedicated to the craft and business of fiction.

Prior to his career as a novelist, Corbett was a senior operative with the private investigation firm of Palladino & Sutherland in San Francisco, where he worked on a number of high-profile criminal and civil litigations, including the Cotton Club Murder Case, the People’s Temple Trial, Jordan Chandler v. Michael Jackson, a RICO litigation brought by the Teamsters membership against union leaders associated with organized crime, and a number of marijuana prosecutions linked to the Coronado Company out of San Diego. In his spare time, Corbett enjoys reading history, taking hikes in the Catskills with his wife and Wheaten terrier, Fergus, and tending to the sprawling garden on their property.

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Hilary White, "Holes" (MA Bibliotheque, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 10 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative. In this NBN interview, Holes is exlored and discussed as an experimental biography of holes.

Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.

Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern Jewish thought, critical theories of mourning, and the boundaries of biographical writing.

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Eliza Chan, "Fathomfolk" (Orbit, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 8 May 2024 04:00:00 +0000

Eliza Chan’s debut novel Fathomfolk (Orbit, 2024) takes place in the semi-submerged city of Tiankawi, where humans and fathomfolk - a collection of peoples including sirens, seawitches, kelpies, and kappas - navigate an increasingly tense political situation. The novel follows half-siren Mira, the recently promoted captain of the border guard and Nami, a young exiled royal from a neighboring city as they push for political change and grapple with the city’s growing violence and social unrest.

In this interview, Chan discusses setting-as-character and the depiction of pollution and climate catastrophe in fantasy. She describes her love of folklore, the importance of depicting supportive male partners, and the role of class and poverty in the book. We also chat about creating fictional diseases and the role of motherhood in the novel.

Fathomfolk is a unique and imaginative story and it was a joy to discuss it with the author.

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Ryan Kenedy, "The Blameless" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 7 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Ryan Kenedy’s debut novel, The Blameless (University of Wisconsin Press 2023 ) we meet Virginia, an exhausted adjunct professor and divorced mother of an autistic five-year-old, whose father only takes him for one weekend a month. Virginia is lonely and struggling to make a living as an adjunct professor of English. When she learns that the man who murdered her father has been released from prison despite a life sentence, she decides to confront him and mete out his just punishment. She traces Travis Hilliard to a remote place in the Mojave Desert. He’s inherited his uncle’s trailer on an isolated strip of land and is trying to rebuild his life outside of prison. Because Virginia doesn’t have anyone to care for her little boy, she brings him along for the confrontation.

Ryan Kenedy was born and raised in the working-class neighborhoods of California's Central Valley. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from California State University, Fresno, and has taught writing and literature for over twenty-five years, both as an adjunct instructor and as a tenured faculty member. He currently teaches at Moorpark College. His short fiction is forthcoming in the North Dakota Quarterly and has appeared in North American Review, The Greensboro Review, Sou'wester, and The San Joaquin Review. His debut collection of short fiction, Don’t Let Them Fall, will be published in 2025 by Johns Hopkins University Press. When he’s not teaching or writing, Ryan likes strumming his Gibson guitar and watching the Dodgers on television, biking and kayaking with his wife of twenty-eight years, visiting his son in the heart of New York City, and hiking the forest trails of Washington State. As a volunteer with Alpha USA, Ryan creates opportunities for community members to engage in honest conversations about some of life's biggest questions.

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Andriy Sodomora, "The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations" (Academic Studies Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 7 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.

The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations (Academic Studies Press, 2024) has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program. The book was translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jassi.

Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.

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Gretchen Felker-Martin, "Cuckoo" (Tor Nightfire, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 5 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today I talked to Gretchen Felker-Martin about Cuckoo (Tor Nightfire, 2024).

From Gretchen Felker-Martin, the acclaimed author of Manhunt, comes a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell. Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin. In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived--but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person. Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it's too late. The fate of the world depends on it.

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Hiromi Ito, "Tree Spirits Grass Spirits" (Nightboat Books, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito--part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books, 2023) adopts a non-linear narrative flow that mimics the growth of plants, and can be read as a companion piece to Ito's beloved poem "Wild Grass on the Riverbank". Rather than the vertiginously violent poetics of the latter, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits serves as what we might call a phyto-autobiography: a recounting of one's life through the logic of flora. Ito's graciously potent and philosophical prose examines immigration, language, gender, care work, and death, all through her close (indeed, at times obsessive) attention to plant life.

For a better understanding of this collection and the author, the following books are recommended by translator Dr. Jon Pitt:

Hiromi Ito - Wild Grass on the Riverbank
Hiromi Ito - The Thorn Puller
Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass
Hope Jahren - Lab Girl
Jeanie Shinozuka - Biotic Borders
Banu Subrahmaniam - Ghost Stories for Darwin

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Sasha Vasilyuk, "Your Presence Is Mandatory" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ukraine, 2007. Yefim Shulman, husband, grandfather and war veteran, was beloved by his family and his coworkers. But in the days after his death, his widow Nina finds a letter to the KGB in his briefcase. Yefim had a lifelong secret, and his confession forces them to reassess the man they thought they knew and the country he had defended.

In 1941, Yefim is a young artillerist on the border between the Soviet Union and Germany, eager to defend his country and his large Jewish family against Hitler's forces. But surviving the war requires sacrifices Yefim never imagined-and even when the war ends, his fight isn't over. He must conceal his choices from the KGB and from his family.

Spanning seven decades between World War II and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) traces the effect Yefim's coverup had on the lives of Nina, their two children and grandchildren. In the process, Sasha Vasilyuk shines a light on one family caught between two totalitarian regimes, and the grace they find in the course of their survival.

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"Oxford American" Magazine: A Discussion with Danielle Amir Jackson

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Danielle Amir Jackson is a Memphis-born writer and critic, and the editor-in-chief of the Oxford American. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Vulture, Bookforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Criterion Collection, and elsewhere. Honey’s Grill: Sex, Freedom, and Women of the Blues, her first book, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Originally based in Oxford, Mississippi, hence its name, Oxford American is both a literary and general interest magazine intent on honoring the cultural wealth of the South. Four writings are discussed, beginning with “What If It All Burned Down?” by Katrina Andy, which as its title suggests, is loaded with questions about the largest slave revolt in U.S. history. It happens at the Andry Plantation north of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the successful Haitian Revolution. Two other writings involve music: there’s “How to Take It Slow” by Lauren Du Graf and “Coming Up Fancy” by Jewly Hight. The first portrays Shirley Horn, emphasizing her unique singing and piano style as well as her being such a homebody that she took a pressure cooker along with her on musical road tours. The second takes the song “Fancy” as sung by Reba McEntire and others and explores what home means when it isn’t a place of comfort. The episode’s fourth entry, “The Mustang” by Gwen Thompkins, is an evocative piece about a family journey to see grandparents at the same time that the narrator’s parents’ marriage is coming to an end.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

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You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Although Katie Kitamura feels free when she writes—free from the “soup of everyday life,” from the political realities that weigh upon her, and even at times from the limits of her own thinking—she is keenly aware of the unfreedoms her novels explore. Katie, author of the award-winning Intimacies (2021), talks with critic Alexander Manshel about the darker corners of the human psyche and the inescapable contours of history that shape her fiction. Alexander and Katie explore how she brings these tensions to “the space of interpretation, where the book exists” and places trust in her readers to dwell there thoughtfully. They also discuss the influence of absent men (including Henry James), love triangles, love stories, long books, and titles (hint: someone close to Katie says all her novels could be called Complicity). Stay tuned for Katie’s answer to the signature question, which takes listeners from to the farmlands of Avonlea to the mean streets of Chicago.

Mentioned in this episode

By Katie Kitamura:

Also mentioned:

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Anthony Valerio, "Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer" (Grailing Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Anthony Valerio's novel Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer (Grailing Press, 2024) tells the story of Walter Michael Gregory. Call him Wally.

Walter Michael Gregory is a literary rogue peddling his prose and amours around 1970s Manhattan. He talks like Frank Sinatra sings, he writes truly, he is a lover par excellence, and he will charm you with his bawdy confessions.

Raised in Brooklyn by mobsters and his doting mother, Wally recounts his idyllic childhood and how he came to be such an amorous soul. Now stepping into life as a young man about town, he establishes himself in the Greenwich Village literary scene and sets out to find work, any work, in the publishing industry. What he finds is the heady rush of hobknobbing with the greats and the tough truths of working for a living. Forced to live off his literary wits, Wally finds interesting work as a copy editor, encyclopedia writer, and literary pornographer. If he can dodge lovers, hunger, meteors, and a lurking bengal tiger of his own imagining, he might realize his dream, cashing in with his prose and feeling like a writer.

From his boyhood in Brooklyn to the pastimes and pitfalls of a bachelor's life, join Wally on this jaunt through his consciousness and a bygone big city, big book era.

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Tarek El-Ariss, "Water on Fire: A Memoir of War" (Other Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (Other Press, 2024) tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence. Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021–22). Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University, he is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.

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"Akmaral" (Regal House, 2024): A Discussion with Judith Lindbergh

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Inspired by the legends of Amazon women warriors told by ancient Greek historian Herodotus and evidenced by recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, Akmaral (Regal House Publishing, 2024) is the latest historical fiction novel by author Judith Lindbergh. Through the story of its eponymous main character, a nomadic warrior woman living in the Central Asian steppe in the 5th century BCE, Akmaral vividly brings to life the histories, cultures, and lifestyles of the ancient Sauromatae. In this episode, Judith joins me to talk about the Sauromatae, conducting historical research as a fiction writer, and what contemporary readers can learn about our current world through stories of the past.

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Artem Chapeye, "The Ukraine" (Seven Stories Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A stunning debut collection of fiction and creative nonfiction-- irreverent and unglorified; loving and tender; uncomfortable and inconvenient--by a Ukrainian writer currently fighting for his country in Kyiv.

Includes the celebrated title story "The Ukraine," which was published in the New Yorker in 2022.

The Ukraine (Seven Stories Press, 2024; translated by Zenia Tompkins) is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.

In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article "the" in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places.
In "One Soul per Home" an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town;
In "The Unscrupulous Spirit of the Provinces," a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in "False Premises," a man romanticizes his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin's Russia.

The Ukraine conveys to readers a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.

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Ruth Reichl, "The Paris Novel" (Random House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Stella St. Vincent, a thirty-something copy editor in 1980s New York, has survived a relationship with her mother, Celia, so complicated that even the words “my daughter” give Stella pause. Celia lived life to the fullest, reinventing herself and discarding anything that no longer pleased her, including Stella’s father, whom Celia refused even to name. And when Stella rebelled by becoming the exact opposite of her mother—disciplined, buttoned-down, reliant on schedules to guarantee safety—Celia did her best to push her daughter out of that comfort zone before distancing herself from Stella as well. So the bequest in Celia’s will is no accident: Stella inherits $8,000, a ticket to Paris, and instructions to spend all the money before returning home.

Stella resists until her employer forces her to take a leave of absence. Even then, Stella spends weeks in Paris scheduling every meal and sightseeing tour—until a strange shopkeeper intent on selling a beautiful dress designed by Yves St. Laurent sends Stella on a journey that will expose her to a lost nineteenth-century painting, the artist who created it, her own past, and the sensory experiences that she has denied herself for so long.

Captivating and beautifully written, The Paris Novel (Random House, 2024) contrasts the eternal story of a young woman finding herself with a historical mystery involving a nineteenth-century artists’ model whose own quest to chart a new course for her life challenged the conventions of her time.

Ruth Reichl—author of numerous books about food, former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine from 1999 to 2009—has also written two novels: Delicious! (2014) and The Paris Novel (2024).

C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.

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The Things We Didn't Know: A Conversation with Elba Iris Pérez

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Today’s book is: The Things We Didn’t Know (Gallery Books, 2024), by Dr. Elba Iris Pérez’s. A cross-cultural coming-of-age story, The Things We Didn’t Know is inspired by the author’s own experiences growing up between Woronoco, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico. It explores Andrea Rodríguez’s childhood between Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts factory town. Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town that is the only home they’ve known. With no plan and no money, she leaves them with family in the mountainside villages of Puerto Rico and promises to return. Months later, when Andrea and Pablo are brought back to Massachusetts, they find their hometown significantly changed. As they navigate the rifts between their family’s values and all-American culture, and face the harsh realities of growing up, they must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood. An evocative portrait of another side of life in 1950s and 1960s America, The Things We Didn’t Know is Dr. Elba Iris Pérez debut novel.

Our guest is: Dr. Elba Iris Pérez, who is from Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and spent her early childhood in Woronoco, Massachusetts. She taught theatre and history at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo, and now lives in Houston. Her semi-autobiographical debut novel, The Things We Didn’t Know, was an instant USA TODAY bestseller and the inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us First Novel Contest. She is also the author of El teatro como bandera, a history of street theater in Puerto Rico.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.

Listeners may also be interested in:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.

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Greg Sarris, "The Forgetters" (Heyday Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Greg Sarris' book The Forgetters (Heyday Books, 2024), Answer Woman, a crow, cannot come up with a story until she is asked by Question Woman, her sister. But they both want to remember those who forgot the stories – because only by retelling the stories can they learn lessons of the past. From the time before creation to the near future, Answer Woman knows stories about clouds and sky, people who might be animals, storytelling contests of the past, and lessons learned from mistakes. Greg Sarris’s creation stories represent age old Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native American storytelling traditions, whose goals are to comfort and inspire while understand human frailty and striving.

Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He is the current board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 1992, he co-authored the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act which restored federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native Americans of California, including the right to reestablish tribal lands.

Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), starred Kirkus review Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which he adapted for an HBO film, and co-produced with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and a recent short story, Citizen (2023), was adapted by San Francisco’s Word for Word theater. He is passionate about riding his horse and remembering to connect with the landscape around him.

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Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, "A Nose and Three Eyes" (Hoopoe, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Written by iconic Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, this classic of love, desire, and family breakdown smashed through taboos when first published in Arabic and continues to captivate audiences today

It is 1950s Cairo and 16-year-old Amina is engaged to a much older man. Despite all the excitement of the wedding preparations, Amina is not looking forward to her nuptials. And it is not because of the age gap or because of the fact that she does not love, or even really know, her fiancé. No, it is because she is involved with another man.

This other man is Dr Hashim Abdel-Latif, and while he is Amina’s first love, she is certainly not his. Also many years her senior, Hashim is well-known in polite circles for his adventures with women. A Nose and Three Eyes tells the story of Amina’s love affair with Hashim, and that of two other young women: Nagwa and Rahhab.

A Nose and Three Eyes is a story of female desire and sexual awakening, of love and infatuation, and of exploitation and despair. It quietly critiques the strictures put upon women by conservative social norms and expectations, while a subtle undercurrent of political censure was carefully aimed at the then Nasser regime. As such, it was both deeply controversial and wildly popular when first published in the 1960s. Still a household name, this novel, and its author, have stood the test of time and remain relevant and highly readable today.

Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (Author, 1919–1990) is one of the most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction of the twentieth century. Born in Cairo, Egypt, Abdel Kouddous graduated from law school in 1942 but left his law practice to pursue a long and successful career in journalism. He was an editor at the daily Al-Akhbar and the weekly Rose al-Yusuf, and was editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram. The author of dozens of books, his controversial writings and political views landed him in jail more than once. A Nose and Three Eyes is his second book to be translated into English, and his first was I Do Not Sleep.

Hanan al-Shaykh (Foreword by) was born and raised in Beirut. She is the author of The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in London.

Jonathan Smolin (Translated by) is the Jane and Raphael Bernstein Professor in Asian Studies at Dartmouth College in the US. He is the translator of several works of Arabic fiction, including Whitefly by Abdelilah Hamdouchi, A Rare Blue Bird Flies with Me by Youssef Fadel, and I Do Not Sleep and A Nose and Three Eyes by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and the author of The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (forthcoming Stanford University Press). He lives in Hanover, NH.

Tugrul Mende holds an M.A in Arabic Studies. He is based in Berlin as a project coordinator and independent researcher.

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On Monsters, Goddesses and Myths: A Discussion with Author Katherine Marsh

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

“We’re not monsters, Mom. We’re goddesses—smart, fearless, and beautiful.” That’s the voice of Ava, the superpowered protagonist of Katherine Marsh’s captivating novel for children, Medusa (Clarion Books, 2024). Our discussion focuses on Marsh’s feminist retelling of the Medusa myth—and on the wider topic of the direction of children’s literature at a time when it has become a challenge to pull any child (or adult) away from the siren of social media. Marsh recognizes the challenges but remains optimistic that children’s literature, which has always drawn heavily on the eternal allure of myths, has a vibrant future.

Veteran journalist Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and a former contributing editor of The Atlantic. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and many other publications. His most recent book is Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2024).

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Zhang Ling, "Aftershock" (Amazon Crossing, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 1976, an earthquake swallows up the city of Tangshan, China. Among the hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for survival is a mother who makes an agonising decision that irrevocably changes her life and the lives of her children. In that devastating split second, her seven-year-old daughter, Xiaodeng, is separated from her brother and the mother she loves and trusts. All Xiaodeng remembers of the fateful morning is betrayal.

Thirty years later, Xiaodeng is an acclaimed writer living in Canada with a caring husband and daughter. However, her newfound fame and success do little to cover the deep wounds that disrupt her life, time and again, and edge her toward a breaking point. Xiaodeng realises the only path toward healing is to return to Tangshan, find her mother, and get closure.

Spanning three decades of the emotional and cultural aftershocks of disaster, Zhang Ling’s intimate epic Aftershock (Amazon Crossing, 2024) explores the damage of guilt, the healing pull of family, and the hope of one woman who, after so many years, still longs to be saved.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Rachel Greenlaw, "Compass and Blade" (Inkyard Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Rachel Greenlaw's debut young adult romantasy, Compass and Blade (Inkyard Press, 2024) is filled with sirens and mysterious magic, swoony romance and cutthroat betrayal. This world of sea and storm runs deep with bargains and blood. On the remote isle of Rosevear, Mira, like her mother before her, is a wrecker, one of the seven on the rope who swim out to shipwrecks to plunder them. Mira's job is to rescue survivors, if there are any. After all, she never feels the cold of the frigid ocean waters and the waves seem to sing to her soul. But the people of Rosevear never admit the truth: that they set the beacons themselves to lure ships into the rocks. When the Council watch lays a trap to put an end to the wrecking, they arrest Mira's father. Desperate to save him from the noose, Mira strikes a deal with an enigmatic wreck survivor guarding layers of secrets behind his captivating eyes, and sets off to find something her mother has left her, a family secret buried deep in the sea. With just nine days to find what she needs to rescue her father, all Mira knows for certain is this: The sea gives. The sea takes. And it's up to her to do what she must to save the ones she loves.

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D. J. Green, "No More Empty Spaces" (She Writes Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 9 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn. He plans to tell the kids, once they’re across the world, that they won’t be going back to their alcoholic mother. The kids face the trials of learning the language, grappling with being so far away, and having a blended family. Will faces enormous problems at the building site in this lovely story centered on geology, engineering, science, landscape, and adventure. It’s about how a loving family can provide balance against the emotional and physical challenges of living on this fragile earth.

D. J. Green is a writer, geologist, and sailor, as well as a bookseller and partner in Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She lives near the Sandia Mountains in Placitas, New Mexico, and cruises the Salish Sea on her sailboat during the summers. An avid outdoorswoman, she loves to hike, backpack, birdwatch, and pick up and contemplate rocks (but never ever take any home from a National Park). D. J. revels in a great conversation about books with customers and colleagues at Bookworks, and is always looking for the next great read.

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Wole Talabi, "Convergence Problems" (Astra Publishing House, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 7 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In his new story collection Convergence Problems (DAW Books, 2024), Wole Talabi investigates the rapidly changing role of technology and belief in our lives as we search for meaning, for knowledge, for justice; constantly converging on our future selves. In “An Arc of Electric Skin,” a roadside mechanic seeking justice volunteers to undergo a procedure that will increase the electrical conductivity of his skin by orders of magnitude. In “Blowout,” a woman races against time and a previously undocumented geological phenomenon to save her brother on the surface of Mars. In “Ganger,” a young woman trapped in a city run by machines must transfer her consciousness into an artificial body and find a way to give her life purpose. In “Debut,” Nairobi-based technical support engineer tries to understand what is happening when an AI art system begins malfunctioning in ways that could change the world. The sixteen stories of Convergence Problems, which include work published for the first time in this collection, rare stories, and recently acclaimed work, showcase Talabi at his creative best: playful and profound, exciting and experimental, always interesting.

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"Ploughshares" Magazine: A Discussion with Ladette Randolph

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 4 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Ladette Randolph has served as editor-in-chief of Ploughshares literary journal since 2008, where she had acquired numerous notable essays and short stories. A publishing professional for 30 years, she is co-owner of the manuscript editing firm Randolph Lundine, and the author of five award-winning books, including A Sandhills Ballad, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice book, and most recently the novel Private Way.

Under Ladette Randolph’s stewardship, Ploughshares is thriving with a solid endowment and an increasing pull toward essays that speak to disturbing trends happening in America and abroad. In this episode, the focus is on five essays of which one, Extractions,” by Mihaela Moscaliuc, centers on life as a young female in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania. There, it’s as if one’s pregnancy belongs to the state so eager is it increase the birthrate. Telltale signs of repression are everywhere in an essay notable in part for its chilling, subdued voice. A second essay, “Commuting” by Victoria Gannon, depicts life in the Bay area, with San Francisco rents skyrocketing and greedy developers eager to squeeze out below market renters. In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “Minera” a great-grandmother’s ghostly presence haunts an essay in which (to quote Minerva) “When you can’t move in this life, you die,” and yet the narrator must deal with quicksand, menstrual cramps, her cancer, and helping a woman trapped—in of all things—an igloo somehow survive. Rounding out the discussion were stops at two other, commendable essays; J. D. Mathes’ “On the Origin of Time: A Meditation” and Sarah Twombly’s “The Difference Between Life and Death.” In the first case, the narrator finds a measure of peace in exploring music and learning “to play one note and try to get inside it.” In Twombly’s intensely lyrical piece, a death-wish swim off the coast of Maine in the wintertime becomes an ode to how the water “beads, gulps and roars, thunders and spits.”

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.

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Deborah Kalb, "Off to Join the Circus" (Apprentice House, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 2 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Deborah Kalb’s debut adult novel Off to Join the Circus (Apprentice House Press 2023) it’s 2018, Howard Pinsky’s sister Adele, who ran away in 1954, as his parents said, “to join the circus,” is suddenly, 64 years later, in Bethesda wanting to be a part of the family. Howard, now 75 and a retired lawyer married to Marilyn, a retired teacher, spent years researching circuses and trying to find his sister. Now, during a two-week period when their eldest daughter is about to give birth at 46, their middle daughter’s younger son is about to become a Bar Mitzvah, and their youngest daughter is recovering from a terrible divorce, Adele forces everyone to consider the ties that bind them all as a family. There are secrets to be unearthed, resentments to be faced, concerns about the three sisters’ relationships, misunderstandings to be sorted, and worries that pull even 80-year-old Aunt Adele back into the Pinsky family circus.

Deborah Kalb is a freelance writer and editor. She spent about two decades working as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for news organizations including Gannett News Service, Congressional Quarterly, U.S. News & World Report, and The Hill, mostly covering Congress and politics. Her book blog, Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb, which she started in 2012, features hundreds of interviews she has conducted with a wide variety of authors. She is the author of three novels for kids, Thomas Jefferson and the Return of the Magic Hat (Schiffer, 2020), John Adams and the Magic Bobblehead (Schiffer, 2018), and George Washington and the Magic Hat (Schiffer, 2016) — and she’s the co-author, with her father, Marvin Kalb, of Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Brookings, 2011). She is the author/updater of Elections A to Z, 5th edition (CQ Press/SAGE, 2022), the editor of the two-volume reference book, Guide to U.S. Elections, 7th edition (CQ Press/SAGE, 2016), the co-author of The Presidents, First Ladies, and Vice Presidents (CQ Press, 2009), and the co-editor of State of the Union: Presidential Rhetoric from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush (CQ Press, 2007), and has contributed updates to a variety of other CQ Press books on politics and government.

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Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 2 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year.

From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen's luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents' disparate lives--her father's consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother's relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock--for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation.

A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia--and questions her own ability to become a mother--one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna's love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave.

When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific "paradise," where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits (Knopf, 2024) is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.

NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and son.

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Greg Wrenn, "Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis" (Regalo Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well. Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.

Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis (Regalo Press, 2024) is a deeply researched account of Greg turning to coral reefs and a psychedelic rainforest tea called ayahuasca to heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, Greg takes his readers on a journey across the globe. In his search for healing from personal and ecological trauma, he dives into both the ocean and the psyche—and finds they have a lot in common. Mothership is one man’s audacious search for healing when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late—and what well-being means in a fracturing society on a dying planet.

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Marie Mutsuki Mockett, "The Tree Doctor" (Graywolf Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mother's garden--convinced it contains a kind of visual puzzle--and the dormant cherry tree within it.

Caught between tending to an unwell parent and the weight of obligation to her distant daughters and husband, she becomes isolated and unmoored. She soon starts a torrid affair with an arborist who is equally fascinated by her mother's garden, and together they embark on reviving it. Increasingly engrossed by the garden, and by the awakening of her own body, she comes to see her mother's illness as part of a natural order in which things are perpetually living and dying, consuming and being consumed. All the while, she struggles to teach (remotely) Lady Murasaki's eleventh-century novel, The Tale of Genji, which turns out to resonate eerily with the conditions of contemporary society in the grip of a pandemic.

The Tree Doctor (Graywolf Press, 2024) is a powerful, beautifully written novel full of bodily pleasure, intense observation of nature, and a profound reckoning with the passage of time both within ourselves and in the world we inhabit.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a previous novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and two books of nonfiction, American Harvest, which won the Nebraska book award, and the northern California book award, and Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the Pen Open Book Award. A graduate of Columbia University in East Asian studies she has been awarded NEA – JUSFC and Fulbright Fellowships, both for Japan.

Recommended Books:

Royall Tyler, The Disaster of the Third Princess: Essays on The Tale of Genji
Emily Raboteau, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against "The Apocalypse"
Martin Puchner, Culture

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 Against 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.

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The Georgia Review: A Discussion with Gerald Maa and Maggie Su

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Gerald Maa has been The Georgia Review’s director and editor since 2019. During his tenure there, the magazine has won the National Magazine Award for Best Fiction as well as Best New Poets, and the Robert Dau/PEN Prize. Prior to this role, Maa was the editor-in-chief of The Asian American Literary Review with Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis. Maggie Su is the associate prose editor for The Georgia Review and the author of the forthcoming novel Blob (Harper 2025). She holds a PhD in fiction from the University of Cincinnati and her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The New England Review, TriQuarterly Review, and elsewhere.

The Georgia Review has a long, distinguished tradition of publishing writings vetted by a fully salaried staff. In this case, first up in the discussion is the essay “Campus Maximum” by Christopher Kempf. It explores the social justice versus academic freedom tussle that Cornell University found itself dealing with after an African-American student group took over one of the campus’s main buildings in 1969. To say the essay explores town/gown tensions would be to slight the exploration of multiple, conflicted views taken by everybody involved in the unfolding drama. In “Chopping Up the Gun” by Mary Margaret Alvarado witnesses a weapons turn-in program held in Aurora, Colorado where “cars wait, as though for French fries, or absolution.” Having former weapons transformed into sculpture pieces or other objects invites a variety of responses. In L. J. Sysko’s “Inside Lane,” an ominous foreboding exists among a girl’s swim team where the coach kisses a team member without consent, and may be on the hook for worse before losing his job. Finally, in Brian Truong’s “Fake Handbags,” an Asian-American family’s shopping trips to New York City for knock-off luxury goods doesn’t provide a brand halo that can protect the family members from the dad’s angry outbursts.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

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Jennifer Lang, "Places We Left Behind: A Memoir-in-miniature" (Vine Leaves Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Jennifer Lang's Places We Left Behind: A Memoir in Miniature (Vine Leaf Press, 2023) uses short chapterettes and experimental prose to examine he marriage, commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines.

When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn't perfect.

Both 23, both Jewish, they lead very different lives: she's a secular tourist, he's an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks on two fundamental issues—country and religion—they are determined to make it work. For the next 20 years, they root and uproot their growing family, each longing for a singular place to call home.

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Herbert Gold and Ari Gold, "Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems" (Rare Bird Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems (Rare Bird, 2024). When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father's spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold's incredible oeuvre included twenty-four novels, five collections of stories and essays, and eight nonfiction books. So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari's twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. Thus was launched a lifesaving literary correspondence, and a testament to the bonds of family. The resulting poems are playful, honest, funny, and moving. Secrets are invoked alongside personal - and often painful - history. Ari and Ethan's mother, Herbert Gold's second wife, died in a helicopter crash alongside the famous rock promoter and impresario Phil Graham in 1991. Her ghost roams through the poems and the wonderful archival photos included in full color throughout. In Father Verses Sons, a lushly illustrated "correspondence in poems," ranges across the life, family, and death of a remarkable father. The father and his sons write tenderly of their hunger for connection, about the woman that all three men have lost (a mother, a wife), and about the passion that all three seek. Ultimately, these poems tell a singular story of men bumbling their way towards love.

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Robin Oliveira, "A Wild and Heavenly Place" (Putnam, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

When Samuel Fiddes and Hailey MacIntyre meet by chance in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1878, their worlds appear to be far distant from each other. Samuel lives with his little sister, Alison, in a tenement—the two of them scrabbling to keep themselves fed and clothed. Hailey enjoys a comfortable middle-class life, although the expectations placed on her as a young woman restrict her future not simply to marriage and motherhood but to a union with the “right” man, defined in terms of wealth and prestige.

Despite this social gap, Samuel and Hailey form an instant bond after he rescues her younger brother from a near-fatal run-in with a careless carriage driver. Both know that Hailey’s parents disapprove of their friendship, never mind a budding romance, but a mix of attraction and teenage rebellion draws them together.

Then fate intervenes. Financial disaster strikes the MacIntyre family just as things start to look up for Samuel and Alison. Hailey’s father decides to move his family to Washington Territory, where he plans to oversee a coal mine. A few months later, Samuel sets off with Alison to follow them. But the Seattle of 1880 is nothing like what any of them expect. It will take a lot of time and effort, it turns out, for Samuel and Hailey to find each other in their wild and heavenly place.

Robin Oliveira is the New York Times bestselling author of three previous works of historical fiction. A Wild and Heavenly Place (Putnam, 2024) is her latest novel.

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Céline Keating, "The Stark Beauty of Last Things" (She Writes Press, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Stark Beauty of Last Things (She Writes Press, 2023) is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land.

Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When a forest fire breaks out, Clancy comes under suspicion for arson, complicating his efforts to navigate competing agendas for the best uses of the land and to find the healing and home he has always longed for.

Told from multiple points of view, The Stark Beauty of Last Things explores our connection to nature—and what we stand to lose when that connection is severed.

Céline Keating is an award-winning writer and author of two novels: Layla (2011), a Huffington Post featured title, and Play for Me (2015), a finalist in the International Book Awards, the Indie Excellence Awards, and the USA Book Awards. Her short fiction and articles have been published in many literary journals and magazines. For many years a resident of Montauk, NY, Céline continues to serve on the board of environmental organization Concerned Citizens of Montauk. She is the coeditor of the anthology On Montauk: A Literary Celebration. She lives in Bristol, Rhode Island, and New York City.

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Brenda Novak, "Tourist Season" (Mira Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In Brenda Novak's latest book, Tourist Season (Mira Books, 2024), Ismay Chalmers' plans to spend a relaxing summer at the beach are derailed when she discovers the wealthy family she is marrying into is hiding many scandals and secrets. Ismay is ready for a relaxing summer reconnecting with her fiance at his family's luxurious beachfront cottage. But before Remy can join her, a hurricane bears down on Mariners Island. Alone in the large house, Ismay makes a disturbing discovery in Remy's childhood closet. She's not sure what to make of it, but is relieved when the property's caretaker, Bo, checks in on her. Bo's home is damaged, so they temporarily shelter together, and Ismay is comforted by his quiet strength. But the unannounced arrival of a family member puts Bo back at his place and changes Ismay's summer into something other than what she wants -- or ever expected. With so many reasons to feel unsettled, Ismay finds herself turning to Bo, who gives her more than a sense of security; there's something about him that makes her feel alive, stirring her to wonder what life might be like if she chose a different path... As Ismay grows closer to Bo, she begins to hope the reclusive caretaker might eventually let down his guard. But when she finds out that he has secrets, too, she begins to question how well she knows any of the men in her life -- and how well she can trust her own heart.

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The Iowa Review: A Discussion with Lynne Nugent

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Lynne Nugent is the editor of The Iowa Review and the author of a chapbook of essays, Nest, about motherhood and domesticity published by The Florida Review in 2020. She holds a MFA in nonfiction writing and a PhD in English from the University of Iowa.

It’s a small world, at times, as the podcast’s host grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, the site of the opening essay “Why I Lie” by Jonathan Wei. That essay opens, as guest Lynne Nugent observes, with a series of declarative sentences that quickly get modified as the author takes on the role of the fallible narrator to make the larger point that society isn’t always as grand as we’re led to believe by documents like the Pledge of Allegiance. A second essay discussed by Nugent takes the iconic status of California as the Golden State down a notch by focusing on rats that plague the sleepless nights of Elizabeth Hall, the author of “Rat Beach.” A third essay covered here, “Bloodlust: A Memoir” by Libby Kurz vividly describes life as a U.S. Air Force trauma center nurse, before pivoting to an enlistment interview and the dark memories it invokes.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

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Scott Alexander Howard, "The Other Valley" (Atria Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she'll decide who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it's the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it's twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn't supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he's still alive in Odile's present.

Edme--who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile--is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil's top candidate. Yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.

A breathlessly moving "unique take on the intersection of fate and free will" (Nikki Erlick, author of The Measure), The Other Valley (Astria Books, 2024) is "a stellar debut, full of heartbreak and hope wrapped up in gorgeous prose" (Christina Dalcher, author of Vox).

Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion, and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel.

Jan Zwicky, The Long Walk
Morgan Talty, Fire Exit
Lily Wang, Silver Repetition

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 Against 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.

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Millicent Borges Accardi, "Quarantine Highway" (Flowersong Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer, is the author of four poetry collections, including Only More So (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), and Quarantine Highway (FlowerSong Press). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Fulbright, CantoMundo, Creative Capacity, the California Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (Covid grant), Yaddo, Portuegese National Cultural Foundation, and the Barbara Deming Foundation, "Money for Women." She lives in Topanga canyon.

From re-definition to re-calibration, the poems in Quarantine Highway are artifacts to the early and mid-days of the pandemic. Though not specifically labeled as "Covid poems," they strike to the heart of the universal yet individual struggles of solitude, confinement, justice, isolation and, ultimately, self-reckoning. The poems push and pull between the constantly knocking global news cycle to the stillness of a surreal inner world.

Find more of Millicent's writings here.

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Parul Kapur, "Inside the Mirror" (U Nebraska Press, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 5 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Parul Kapur's novel Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024) centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime. One sister is supposed to study medicine, but she is a talented painter, and other studies education, but she is highly trained in a classical Hindu dance form called Bharata Natyam. They live in a Bengali community in which parents choose their daughters’ husbands and society demands conformity. Jaya’s paintings and Kamlesh’s dancing could destroy their chances of finding a good husband, ruin their father’s career, and affect the family’s standing in their community. Jaya moves out of the house, an aberration not only affects her medical schooling, but also disturbs the bond she has with her twin. This is a beautifully written novel about family, art, British colonialism, and coming of age in a time and place in which women could not easily choose their own paths.

Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven. She received a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Columbia University. Returning to India, she worked for a year as a reporter for the city magazine Bombay, covering social issues, and culture and the arts. A journalist, literary critic and fiction writer, Parul was a press officer at the United Nations in New York and a freelance arts writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, New York Newsday, ARTnews, and Art in America during a decade spent in Germany, France, and England. Her articles and reviews have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Esquire, GQ, Slate, Guernica, and Los Angeles Review of Books. Her short stories appear in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Prime Number, Midway Journal, Wascana Review, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. In 2010, she founded the Books page at ArtsATL, Atlanta’s leading online arts review, covering the literary scene for four years. She was also a co-founder of the global voices program, showcasing a diversity of authors, at the Decatur Book Festival, formerly the nation’s largest indie book festival. She created programs such as visits to collectors’ homes and artist studio visits for members of the High Museum in Atlanta.

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Nayereh Doosti, “The Little One” The Common magazine (Nov, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Fri, 1 Mar 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Nayereh Doosti speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Little One,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Nayereh talks about the many inspirations behind this story, which follows an older Iranian man coming to America, where he feels out of place with his family members, the community, and the younger generations. Nayereh also discusses her time as an intern at The Common, her MFA program at BU, and her brand new Persian translation of Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of my Lives, out now in Tehran.

Nayereh Doosti is an Iranian writer and translator based in Berkeley, California. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and Nowruz Journal, among others. She holds an MFA from Boston University, and is a former intern at The Common.

Read Nayereh’s story “The Little One” in The Common at thecommonoline.org/the-little-one.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming in 2025 from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

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John Wray, "Gone to the Wolves" (FSG, 2023)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Kip, Leslie, and Kira are outliers—even in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another.

Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida's swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they've found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darker and more extreme strains of metal. On a trip to northern Europe for her twenty-second birthday, in the middle of a show, she simply vanishes. Two years later, the truth about her disappearance reunites Kip with Leslie, who in order to bring Kira home alive must make greater sacrifices than they could ever have imagined.

In his most absorbing and ambitious novel yet, John Wray dives deep into the wild, funhouse world of heavy metal and death cults in the 1980s and '90s. Gone to the Wolves (FSG, 2023) lays bare the intensity, tumult, and thrill of friendship in adolescence—a time when music can often feel like life or death.

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Tyler C. Gore, "My Life of Crime: Essays and Other Entertainments" (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

In his debut essay collection, My Life of Crime (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2022), Tyler C. Gore brings readers on an awkward visit to a nude beach. A bike-pedaling angel careening through rush-hour traffic. The mystery of a sandwich found in a bathroom stall. A lyric, rainy-day ramble through the East Village. With the personal essays (and three other entertainments) Gore reveals the artistic secrets of his life of crime: a charming wit, compassionate observation, perfection of style, and, over all, a winsomely colorful light tinged with just enough despair. Whether stewing over a subway encounter with a deranged businessman, confessing his sordid past as a prankster, or recounting his family’s history of hoarding, Gore is by turns melancholy, profound and hilarious. The collection culminates with the novella-length essay “Appendix,” a twisted, sprawling account of routine surgery that grapples with evolution, mortality, strangely attractive doctors, simulated universes, and an anorexic cat. My Life of Crime conjures up from the flotsam of an individual life something uncannily majestic: an insomniac contemplation of life in our eternal, twenty-four-hour New York City, infused throughout with its grit, humanity, unexpected romance, and the poignant intimacy of all the lives joined together within it.

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Marie-Helene Bertino, "Beautyland" (FSG, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.

For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone?

Marie-Helene Bertino's Beautyland (FSG, 2024) is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.

Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of the novels PARAKEET (New York Times Editors’ Choice) and 2 A.M. AT THE CAT’S PAJAMAS (NPR Best Books 2014), and the story collection SAFE AS HOUSES (Iowa Short Fiction Award). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, and elsewhere. She has been awarded The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook Writers Colony, The Center For Fiction NYC, and Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has twice been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing program at Yale University.

Recommended Books:

Tea Obreht, The Morning Side
Diana Khoi Nguyen, Root Fractures

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 Against 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.

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Harry Turtledove, "Wages of Sin" (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

What if HIV started spreading in the early 1500s rather than the late 1900s? Without modern medicine, anybody who catches HIV is going to die. In Wages of Sin (Caezik SF & Fantasy, 2024), by Dr. Harry Turtledove, a patriarchal society reacts to this devastating disease in the only way it knows how: it sequesters women as much as possible, limiting contacts between the sexes except for married couples. While imperfect, such drastic actions do limit the spread of the disease.

The ‘Wasting’ (HIV) has caused devastating destruction throughout the known world and severely limited the development of technology as well, creating a mid-nineteenth century England and London almost unrecognisable to us. This is the world Viola is born into. Extremely intelligent and growing up in a house full of medical books which she reads, she dreams of travelling to far-off places, something she can only do via books since her actions and movements are severely restricted by both law and custom.

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Kate Quinn and Janie Chang, "The Phoenix Crown" (William Morrow, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Kate Quinn and Janie Chang are independently acclaimed authors of historical fiction, both of whom have previously appeared on this podcast channel. Here they combine their skills to tell a story about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake from multiple points of view. One line follows the story of Alice Eastwood, a botanist whom we meet in London five years after the tragedy. Her perspective is contrasted with that of Gemma Garland, an aspiring opera star whose unique voice can’t quite compensate for the migraines that sideline her just as she’s about to make her mark on the world. The third narrator is a young Chinese-American named Feng Suling (“Susie” to the rich white customers who can’t be bothered to learn her name), with a gift for embroidery and a grand ambition: to escape the arranged marriage her uncle plans for her and reunite with Reggie, the love she has lost.

How these three stories intersect and overlap, united by the Phoenix Crown and the man who owns it, I’ll leave for readers to discover. Each chapter is marked by its proximity to the forthcoming earthquake (unknown to the protagonists, of course), but even without that impending threat, the story will draw you in and keep you hooked.

Kate Quinn is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of numerous previous works of historical fiction, ranging from ancient Rome to the 1950s. The Phoenix Crown is her latest novel.

Janie Chang is the award-winning and bestselling author of four previous historical novels, including The Library of Legends and The Porcelain Moon. The Phoenix Crown is her most recent book.

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"Michigan Quarterly Review" magazine

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Chandrica Barua is the Nonfiction and Online Editor for MQR. A PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature, her dissertation focuses on encounters between imperial objects and colonial bodies in the British Empire, especially in British India. She hails from Assam, India.

What draws an editor to a particular essay? In Chandrica Barua’s case, her criteria definitely include: whether the essay is inventive in form (for instance, by being a hybrid or “braided” essay that brings together different topical strands) and if it surprises the reader by where it goes. Also of note are factors like: does it have a compelling title, a strong start, and a satisfying moment of closure? The first of the essays discussed here comes from a special, forthcoming African literature issue. Does Emelda Nyaradzai Gwitimah’s “My Hairdresser Is Dead” have an intriguing title? Absolutely, along with a sense of humor missing in many memoirs. In turn, another African essay, “Side Pieces” by Chike Frankie Edozien, looks at how gay sexual practices both operate outside of marriage norms and yet, in the end, conform to those norms to a degree. From the 2024 Winter issue, we discussed Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s “Zombie Tag,” about a Jewish refugee from the Ukraine and her autistic son obsessed with lizards because their identities change through camouflage. Finally, a visual essay, “Enacting Masculinity” by McCain Thomas, uses redacted legislative proposals from four Southern states to show how oppressive and misguided attempts can be to limit the rights of transgender people.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc.

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Mako Yoshikawa, "Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2024)

marshallpoe@gmail.com (Marshall Poe) — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding. He had been a genius, renowned for his research in nuclear fusion and respected at Princeton, until he fell apart. She remembered him being alternatingly kind or violent when bipolar disease gripped him. Her mother packed up and left the house with Mako and her sisters, later remarrying a wonderful man and brilliant chess player who Mako considered the father she always wanted. Mako wants to understand him; why he cross-dressed, why he was so passionate about fusion, why he alienated his daughters so that he hadn’t even been invited to Mako’s wedding.

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Ways and Once Removed. Her novels have been translated into six languages; awards include a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant and a Radcliffe Fellowship. As a literary critic, she has published articles that explore the relationship between incest and race in 20th-century American fiction. After her father’s death in 2010, Mako began writing about him and their relationship: essays which have appeared in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review, Harvard Review, Story, Lit Hub, Longreads, and Best American Essays. These essays became the basis for her new memoir, Secrets of the Sun. Yoshikawa grew up in Princeton, New Jersey but spent two years of her childhood in Tokyo, Japan. She received a B.A. in English literature from Columbia University, a Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and a Ph. D. in English literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mako is a professor of creative writing and the director of the MFA program at Emerson College. In addition to her MFA classes, Mako teaches Comedic Lit to undergraduates in Emerson’s Comedic Arts program. She also teaches as often as she can in the Emerson Prison Initiative, a degree-granting program that is based in MCI-Norfolk, a medium-security prison for men. She lives with her husband and two unruly cats in Boston and Baltimore.

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