New Books In Literature

The Lost Archive (U Wisconsin Press, 2023) is comprised of a cast of characters who are mostly dealing with, or in the aftermath of a crisis of some kind. Or they are making big decisions about their lives. The stories bump up against each other, some longer, others shorter, from different time periods, geographical locations, and circumstances. There are several ex-husbands trying to weasel back in or extort, several women haunted by previous relationships, and several people who need to move, want to move, or just moved. Some stories are about friendship, relationships, lost chances, and the search for love, others are about mysterious happenings, mistaken identities, and end of life decisions. The Lost Archive is a collection of stories that delve into universal themes of resentment, betrayal, and redemption. Lynn C. Miller is the author of four novels. Her third novel, The Day After Death, was named a 2017 Lambda Literary Award finalist in lesbian fiction, and her short story, “Words Shimmer,” won an Edit

Today I talked to Andy Mozina about his new novel Tandem (Tortoise Books, 2023). An economics professor at a Michigan college is struggling through a bad divorce, having a tough time with his only son, and then, through hardly any fault of his own, he must avoid getting caught by the police. He only had one extra beer and it was late and foggy outside, plus the two college kids were biking out of the entrance to the deserted beach, instead of the exit, without a headlight, so was it really his fault when he hit and killed them? Also, couldn’t he do more for the world and right his wrongs, if he was still teaching and making contributions, than if he was stuck in jail forever? Mike will do anything to avoid being caught in this moving novel about the lengths a person will go to avoid facing uncomfortable truths. Born and raised in Milwaukee, Andy Mozina majored in economics at Northwestern, then dropped out of Harvard Law School to study literature and write. He’s published fiction in Tin House, Ecotone, McSwe

Rivkah Milman is just one of the thousands of young women who fled their homes in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, looking for better prospects in New York—where the streets, people said, would be paved with gold. In Rivkah’s case, she is sixteen and pregnant, sailing to join her husband, who doesn’t even bother to meet her at the docks. Rivkah struggles, raising her daughter in a tenement and keeping that shoddy roof over their heads through endless hours of sewing piecework for a sweatshop. But tough as Rivkah’s life is, this is really the story of her daughter, Miriam, who through a colossal but familiar misjudgment falls under the spell of Frederick Winthrop, a rich and immoral playboy who seeks out underage girls. But with help from a family friend, Mimi succeeds in separating herself from her difficult childhood in pursuit of a better life. Miriam, who adopts the name Mimi to signal her break with the past, has always longed to become not just a seamstress but an haute couture designer. An

Today I talked to Christopher Patterson about two books: the late Y-Dang Troeung's Landbridge [life in fragments] (Knopf Canada, 2023) and Christopher's own Nimrods: A Fake-Punk Self-Hurt Anti-Memoir (Duke UP, 2023), which was published under the name Kawika Guillermo. In Landbridge, Y-Dang Troeung meditates on her family’s refugee history and the genocide that has marked the lives of millions of Cambodians like herself. She writes scathingly about how she and her family became the “faces” of Cambodian refugees in Canada, officially welcomed by then prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau, her 11-month old face plastered on newspapers as a sign of Canadian benevolence; her return trips to Phnom Penh with her mother and then with her partner Chris are filled with anguish and guilt but also love and friendship. Interspersed with memories of her childhood growing up in Canada – going out in the middle of the night to collect worms for money, enduring the racist attack of neighbors and schoolmates, staying up with h

Wole Talabi’s debut novel Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon (Daw Books, 2023) follows Shigidi–a former nightmare god–and his partner, the succubus Nneoma as they attempt to carve a life independent from the control of Spirit Corporations. The story spans continents and decades but centers on a heist to steal an artifact back from the British Museum. In this interview, Talabi describes using the Yoruba pantheon of gods while also drawing on other global mythologies. We discuss the process of writing a novel with a fragmented timeline with scenes spanning millennia and the power of speculative fiction to tackle complex issues in a thoughtful and engaging way. We talk heist stories, subverting misogynistic succubus tropes, and cinematic action in novels. Shigidi and the Brass Head of Obalufon is an energetic, fast paced read with great depth and it was so much fun discussing it with the author. A. E. Lanier is a short fiction writer and educator living in Central Texas. More about her work can be found at a

Under the direction of founding editor Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age series is reissuing notable proto–science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto–science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p

In 2016, poet Ross Gay set out to document a delight each day for a year. After he published The Book of Delights, his friend asked him if he planned to continue his practice. Five years later, he began The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023) demonstrating that the sources of delight are indeed endless—and that they multiply when attended to and shared. For Gay, delight serves as evidence of our interconnectedness, and it is inextricable from the fact of our mortality. With characteristic humor and grace, he chronicles his everyday encounters with joy and delight, from the fleeting sweetness of strangers to the startling beauty of the falsetto to the unexpected joys of aging. In this episode of Life As It Is, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, and meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg sit down with Gay to talk about why he believes delight is a radical and necessary practice, how he understands faith, and how delight has restructured how he pays attention. Gay also reads an essay from his new

No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges. That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo's subtly sinister edge, and watches her carefully. When a patron's death in the library bathroom gives her a hint of Margo's mysterious past, Patricia can't resist digging deeper--even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming. Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession as these "transfixing dual female narrators" (Kimberly McCreight) hurtle toward a stunning climax. How Can I Help You (Putnam, 2023) is a LibraryReads Top Ten Pick

Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Norton, 2022), which won the Booker Prize in 2022, is a thriller that begins in the afterlife, an uproarious murder mystery set amid the tragedies of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. Its protagonist, a war photographer, has become a ghost with just seven moons to find his killer and give his life’s work meaning. This is a historical novel that bends and twists genre and narrative into wondrous and disorienting knots and makes space for the cacophony of ghostly voices of those killed and disappeared in Sri Lanka. Shehan notes that if anything survives the death of your body, it’s probably the voice in your head, and the voice in his head speaks in the second person.  Moving from philosophy to the politics of fiction, Professor Sangeeta Ray, author of En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives (Duke), prompts Shehan to think about Sri Lankan literature’s rise on the global stage, and Shehan makes the case for fiction standing i

Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown by Annie Dawid, (Inkspot Publishing 2023), opens long after 917 people died by drinking cyanide or by lethal injection on November 18, 1978. It’s 2008, and one of the survivors, who made it out earlier that day, is speaking to a reporter on the 30th anniversary of the “Jonestown Massacre.” When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline found Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised of all colors. They wanted to live honest lives earning their bread from the earth. They dreamt of their followers coming together as equals, loving each other as sisters and brothers, and building a commune in the British Guyana jungle. As the years passed, Jim Jones became more autocratic, he bedded his followers and sired children, and although Marceline hated what their marriage had become, she still loved him. Even unto death. Annie Dawid writes and teaches online in very rural Colorado, where she also makes rugs and assemblages as well as plays tennis a

Mina Seçkin's novel The Four Humors (Catapult, 2022) follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine. Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother in Istanbul, visit her father's grave, and study for the MCAT. Instead, she finds herself watching Turkish soap operas and self-diagnosing her own possible chronic illness with the four humors theory of ancient medicine. Also on Sibel's mind: her blond American boyfriend who accompanies her to Turkey; her energetic but distraught younger sister; and her devoted grandmother, who, Sibel comes to learn, carries a harrowing secret. Delving into her family's history, the narrative weaves through periods of political unrest in Turkey, from military coups to the Gezi Park protests. Told with pathos and humor, Sibel's search for strange and unusual cures is disrupted as sh

Today we talked to Reese Hogan about his book My Heart Is Human (Space Wizard Science Fantasy, 2023). The body belongs to Joel Lodowick, a single parent and trans man whose only wish, at the story’s outset, is to raise his five year old daughter in peace. The robot is Acubens, who has been warehoused for nearly 10 years until Joel tries to activate him. At first, Joel is excited for the advantages Acubens’ conjoined consciousness confers, like the ability to get a much higher paying job with Acubens’ ability to make any numeric calculations with dizzying speed. But when Acubens—professing to have only Joel’s best interests at heart—threatens to erase Joel’s memory as part of an “upgrade,” Joel gets more than he bargained for. Complicating their relationship is the fact that in this near future world, all technology has been outlawed. If the authorities discover Acubens has been reactivated—and worse, that Acubens is taking up more and more space in Joel’s mind—they both risk being destroyed. Reese Hogan is a

Today I talked to Kim Taylor Blakemore about her new book The Good Time Girls Get Famous (Sycamore Creek Press, 2023). Get ready for the latest rip-roaring "Good Time Girls" adventure with Ruby Calhoun and Pip Quinn, two accidental outlaws now on the run for too many crimes to count. As the silent film industry booms and Westerns steal the spotlight, a movie producer sees potential gold in Ruby and Pip's outlaw story. With their misdeeds now legendary, the duo is offered a chance to play themselves on the big screen. It's an opportunity for fame, fortune, and a safe getaway to Mexico once the film wraps. However, the world of filmmaking proves to be a turbulent ride, even for these seasoned outlaws. The law is hot on their heels, pursuing them from Kansas across the plains to the Rockies, determined to bring them to justice. The newspapers tell half-truths and tall tales of their exploits. To make matters worse, a feared foe from their past has resurfaced, putting the film troupe and Ruby's sister in grave da

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia's brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak. What follows is both a ticking-clock investigation into the whereabouts of a father and an emotionally rich portrait of a family whose most personal secrets just may be at the heart of his disappearance. Full of shocking twists and fascinating ques

12 tables; 300 novels, 1500 pages of nature description: This is how Tom Comitta created The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), a one-of-a-kind novel cut from 300 years of English literary tradition. It has no human characters, no original writing, and it is astoundingly good! Tom sits down with distinguished Harvard prof, Deidre Lynch and host Aarthi Vadde to talk about how he wrote a book out of found language.  The conversation reveals why The Nature Book is so compelling: it scrambles the usual distinctions between narrative and database. It is fast-paced, propulsive, full of cliffhangers and yet also a “mood collage” composed of macro, micro, and nanopatterns that Tom identified in his corpus. Writing through a complex set of Oulipo-like constraints, he checked his own authorial freedom to create a book in which the human hand becomes distant and ghostly – its traces felt in the change of seasons and at the bottoms of oceans yet nowhere seen. Deidre connects Tom’s “literary supercut” (his own term f

A Coup, the third novel in Phyllis Skoy’s Turkish Trilogy (Black Rose Writing 2023) follows a young woman in Turkey. In the first book of the trilogy, Adalet, who has found new friends after a devastating earthquake killed her parents, destroyed their home, took her unborn baby, and left her scarred for life. Her husband leaves her for another woman, and as part of the divorce agreement, she’s forced to live far from the city. Now in the third book, Adalet is back in the city, visiting Nuray, a college friend who runs a small women’s magazine. It’s not long after an attempted coup against Erdogan, a strongman who is set to crush all opposition, and police suddenly show up and throw Nuray, her fellow journalists, and Adalet into a notorious prison. They’re in separate, filthy and horrifying cells, and Adalet has to confront the possibility of never getting out alive. This is a novel about regular people trying to live their lives in the aftermath of Turkey’s takeover by a populist authoritarian leader. Phyllis

Thieves (Fence Books, 2023) is an autofictional account of a gallery girl named Valerie – an art worker in the big city, a product of an American childhood in a small place where she learned to value objects and their promise. The magic of being, thinking, speaking, and writing is all bound up for Valerie, a self-conscious creature, in the ways she can acquire and be acquired. She lives and works in a storm of things, many of which are commodities, including herself. In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, the consumption and reflectivity of a white American young-womanhood lived in a phenomenological endzone comes delicately to life out of the sharp particulars thefted and loved in this urbane, semi-psychedelic bildungsroman. Valerie Werder is an art writer, a fiction author, and a doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her critical, creative, and scholarly work has been published in Public Culture, BOMB, Flash Art, and various exhibition catalogues, and has been performed at Par

Sheldon Birnie's novel Down in the Flood (BookBaby, 2012) is the story of a man who is rapidly becoming lost in a sea of women, whisky, and bad weather. Set in the Canadian West, the story follows the narrator through a season of torrential rain and personal tribulation. With a colourful cast of characters along for the ride, Down in the Flood is a frank examination of alcoholism, friendship, love, and bad weather. After adventuring around the Canadian West, our narrator and his best friend, Jack, return to their small hometown on the prairies to regroup and try to shake their addictions. But quickly, the pair fall into familiar patterns. Their personal quests for redemption are complicated by the arrival of two beautiful women - Iris and Rose - and an assorted cast of characters who make giving up the bottle even harder. Compounded by a season of unprecedented bad weather, their struggles soon come to overwhelm them. Will our narrator and Jack make it out with their lives intact, or will they go down in the

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished New York publishing house and their son, Gideon, is preparing to follow in his father's footsteps. They are an exceptional family from an exceptional place, living in exceptional times. But when Scott is caught falsifying blood samples at work, he sets in motion a series of scandals that threatens to shatter his family. Deb leaves him for a female power broker; Maya rekindles a hazardous affair from her youth; and Gideon drops out of college to go on a dangerous journey that will put his principles to the test. From Brookline to Berlin to the battlefields of Syria, Hope follows the Greenspans over the course of one tumultuous year as they question, and compromise, the

Marjorie Hudson's Indigo Field (Regal House Publishing, 2023) paints a sweeping picture of multigenerational family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel is stunned when his wife dies, leaving him stranded in the fancy, rural North Carolina retirement community he’d hated from the start. The community is located next to an abandoned field that hides centuries of crimes. The only person who remembers is Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her entire family. Reba takes in the white child whose evil father killed her beloved niece, whom she doesn’t want to disappoint. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while the colonel’s son guards bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut in which North Carolina race relations, land use and ancient trees, farming and development, history and memory are all uprooted during a massive storm