New Books in Literature

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 u...

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...

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 La...

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, tim...

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 he...

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...

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 intim...

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...

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...

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 i...

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 s...

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 c...

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...

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, d...

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 cultu...

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...

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...

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 MacK...

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 rec...

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....

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 system...

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...

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 Unive...

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...

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...