New Books in Literature

The seven stories and novella that comprise The Calamity of Desire, Judith Dancoff’s debut collection of short fiction, each focus on a famous painter or well-known work of art. Inspired by the art of Gustav Klimt, John Singer Sargent, Auguste Renoir, Diego Velásquez, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin, and Roman glass found around the world, these stories explore the imagined desires and dreams of bo...

In How to Date a Fanatic  (HarperVia, 2026), a novel by Aruni Kashyap, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval. As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks rela...

Danny Bradigan survived brutal fighting in Afghanistan and fought as a professional boxer, but a bullet finally puts him in a coma. Part of his recovery involves heading to a small Appalachian town where he’s inherited a property and a car mechanic business. He knows nothing about repairing cars and needs to understand who gave him this chance at another life. He begins mentoring Ryan, the young m...

In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's  March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III  available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and Mahoney discuss the historical, literary, and cultural significance of MARCH 1917. Hosted by Simplecast, an...

Samantha: The Next Chapter (American Girl Publishing, 2026). From American Girl and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis comes the next chapter of Samantha Parkington's story--now an adult searching for justice after her legacy is stolen in New York City in 1920. It’s 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them t...

Her clothes shredded and disrobed by her own teeth, Lucy finds herself draped over a high tree branch in the quad of her college, naked but unafraid, a wild leopard more than any humankind. So begins Emeline Atwood’s starling debut novel, A Real Animal   (Catapult, 2026). We know early on that Lucy will never be able to reach back to that precise feeling of being the leopard, powerful...

Jaclyn Gilbert 's Butter Road (Acre Books, 2026) is a searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence. In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explore...

In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees a...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Nancy Jo Cullen about her new novel, Dish (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026). In this smart, sexy romp of a novel, Nancy Jo Cullen explores the joys of second chances – at life and at love. Frida Davis-Lefebvre is back in her hometown of Lakeland, BC, sober and recovering from the sale of her popular, but debt-ridden, Toronto restaur...

 Meg Reid and Will Evans join Mesha Maren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem. As leaders of two nonprofit independent presses, Hub City Writers Project and Deep Vellum Press , Meg and Will describe their roles as publishers, booksellers, community builders, and advocates working with the many interconnected players in publishing: writers, readers, translators, critics, librarians,...

“I hear whispers: Have you seen her? The woman who is not a woman, she is a walking museum. Have you seen her wares?” The narrator of SL Carroll’s radiant debut leads an empty life in a small town until she is employed to catalogue the Museum's collection. She has never seen anyone rewrite their bones the way the Museum has, until they are hardly bones at all. Obsession takes hold and the Museum's...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Malon Edwards about his book, If Wishes Were Obfuscation Codes (Fireside Fiction Company, 2023).  “Electric Resurrection. Born again perfection. The six-zero correction.” For the last decade, Malon Edwards has been spinning out a world where humans have conquered death but still haven't bothered to take care of the living. Where resurrectio...

Taylor D. Lott's The Stitches Between Us (Hawes & Jenkins, 2025) tells the story of Theo, a quiet, imaginative boy growing up in a home where sensitivity is punished and creativity is met with cruelty. He learns early to retreat inward, expressing what he cannot say through fabric, sketches, and observation. In a world that leaves little room for softness, Theo finds refuge in Danielle-unguard...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Joanna Cockerline about her acclaimed novel, Still (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025). Longlisted for the Giller Prize, Still is the story of Kayla, who lives and works on the streets of Kelowna, Canada, and of Little Zoe, a woman working in the sex trade who is missing. Set in a vibrant and diverse community of people living unhoused, the novel expl...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Su Chang, author of The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, 2025).  A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.  Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, wa...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Robin Blackburn McBride about her novel, River of Dreams (Guernica Editions, 2026). A near-tragic accident. A life-changing phenomenon. A calling she couldn't foresee. Toronto, 1914. Avery Conlon's world turns upside down in an instant. Overhearing a comment that casts doubt on her blood ties with the mother raising her, the despairing twelve-ye...

In this NBN episode,  host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Liz Johnston about her eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect (Book*hug, 2026). The Fall-Down Effect traces the diverging fates of siblings Sylvia, Fern, and River from their late-1980s childhood in a small British Columbia logging town, where their mother Lynn' s environmental activism sets them apart from the local communi...

Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself   (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) is a collection of ten playfully strange and unsettling stories, some realistic and some surreal. The characters in these pages feel alienated: from their communities and relationships, on the streets of wealthy suburbs, at the doctor's office, in classrooms and swimming pools, in their own homes and their own...

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt   (SUNY Press, 2026) is an edited collection exploring utopias ad dystopias in films and literature. It challenges readers, in these uniquely dystopian times, to reevaluate their ideas about utopia and dystopia.  The book brings together film, literary, and utopian studies scholars from across...

DON’T FALL IN LOVE. That’s the only rule.  In this world, everyone knows their death date. If you’re rich, you can check in to a resort to have the greatest final few weeks of your life, in five-star luxury. Regan works at one of these resorts as a “Juliet”. Her next client is Jude, who has a week to live. Regan’s job is simple: make Jude feel as though he has found true love before he dies....

Liz DeWolf speaks to Emily Everett about her story “ Ex Situ ,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows an American living in Istanbul, navigating the end of a relationship, alongside the appeal and alienation of living abroad in a layered, complex city. Liz also discusses her process and revision methods, the themes she often returns to, and her work as a nonfiction book...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Ed Seaward about his thrilling novel, London Gothic (Dark Winter Press, 2026).  In 1975, John Caine and his nineteen-year-old son Ricky bury a woman near a clump of trees in an open field on the rural outskirts of London, Ontario. In 1984, seventeen-year-old Bethany Caine is haunted by the disappearance of her mother nine years previous. He...

It seems likely that most listeners to this podcast channel have heard of “shell shock,” the old name for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (usually abbreviated as PTSD). Even today, the long-term effects of combat tend to be under-estimated, but that was much more true in the years following World War I, when the diagnosis of “shell shock” first appeared.  Terri Lewis’s When...

In Alice Sees Ghosts (Galiot Press, 2026) , Daisy Rockwell tells an unforgettable story of love, grief and wanting closure. A profound exploration of people trying to piece their broken selves together, this novel celebrates life in all its guises, and what comes after. Alice's ancestral home is crumbling. As her grandmother lies on her deathbed, and her relationships with her alcoholic mother and...

Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expres...