New Books in Literature

New Books in Literature

Interviews with Writers about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Episodes

Alejandro Puyana, "Freedom Is a Feast" (Little, Brown, 2024)

August 23, 2025 • 54 mins
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 barri...
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Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)

August 21, 2025 • 29 mins
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 rewa...
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Harriet Jacobs, "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" (Norton, 2025)

August 16, 2025 • 72 mins
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 Ye...
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Nell Stevens, "The Original" (Norton, 2025)

August 15, 2025 • 53 mins
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 ...
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Joyce Hinnefeld, "The Dime Museum" (Unbridled Books, 2025)

August 12, 2025 • 28 mins
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 w...
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Kathleen Waites, "The Faithful Ones" (Invictus, 2025)

August 7, 2025 • 45 mins
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 d...
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Megan Cummins, "Atomic Hearts" (Ballentine Books, 2025)

August 5, 2025 • 51 mins
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 t...
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Michelle De Kretser, "Theory & Practice" (Catapult, 2025)

August 4, 2025 • 63 mins
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 Melbo...
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Jan Dost, "Safe Corridor" (DarArab, 2025)

August 4, 2025 • 32 mins
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...
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Mark Vernon, "Awake!: William Blake and the Power of the Imagination" (Hurst & Co., 2025)

August 2, 2025 • 46 mins
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...
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Therí Alyce Pickens, "What Had Happened Was" (Duke UP, 2025)

July 31, 2025 • 79 mins
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 ...
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Aatish Taseer, "A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile" (Catapult, 2025)

July 31, 2025 • 46 mins
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 t...
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Rehearsals for Dying

July 31, 2025 • 60 mins
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 bre...
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Benoit Berthelier and Immanuel Kim, "Hidden Heros: Anthology of North Korean FIction" (Anthem, 2025)

July 29, 2025 • 45 mins
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 in...
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Saad Omar Khan, "Drinking the Ocean" (Buckrider Books, 2025)

July 25, 2025 • 32 mins
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 s...
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Cynthia Blakeley, "The Innermost House: A Memoir" (Bright Leaf, 2024)

July 24, 2025 • 54 mins
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 writ...
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Sanjena Sathian, "Goddess Complex" (Penguin Press, 2025)

July 24, 2025 • 40 mins
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 he...
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Mariah Rigg, "Target Island," The Common (Spring, 2025)

July 24, 2025 • 39 mins
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...
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James Cairns, "In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times" (Wolsak and Wynn, 2025)

July 23, 2025 • 47 mins
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 breakin...
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Greg Rhyno, "Who by Water" (Cormorant Books, 2025)

July 22, 2025 • 43 mins
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 inexplicab...
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