New Books in Literature

It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed. The boys quit school to...

Every year one of my absolute favorite episodes is the Booksellers Best-Of episode for which I get to interview independent bookstore managers, owners, and booksellers about the books that meant the most to them over the course of a year.  This year I welcome an exciting new bookseller to the program: Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of Programs for Loyalty Bookstores in Washington, D...

Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, Jarret Keene's, Hammer of the Dogs (University of Nevada Press, 2023),  is a literary dystopian adventure filled with high-octane fun starring twenty-one-year-old Lash. With her high-tech skill set and warrior mentality, Lash is a master of her own fate as she helps to shield the Las Vegas valley's survivors and protect her younger classmates at...

Alina Gorban is an illustrator of 22 children's books, a cartoonist, and a teaching artist. In our interview we celebrate her new graphic novel entitled, Silence, Full Stop (Street Noise Books, 2023), a very personal and explicit graphic memoir of the struggles of an adolescent girl processing the trauma of childhood sexual assault. It is her debut as an author, and it is published under the pseud...

Linking literature, philosophy, art, and personal experience, a moving exploration of the wooded landscape’s power. In 1985 Boria Sax inherited an area of forest in New York State, which had been purchased by his Russian, Jewish, and Communist grandparents as a buffer against what they felt was a hostile world. For Sax, in the years following, the woodland came to represent a link with those who c...

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes...

Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice. Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spe...

In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the loca...

Where the Pavement Turns to Sand (Malarkey Books, 2023) is a collection of working class, everyday heartbreaks and bad decisions. In a refreshing rural Canadian setting, the characters in these slice of life tales stumble through divorce, debt, bad sex, and boring jobs, but also curling robots, aliens, jackalopes, wendigo, lots of legs wet with urine, and (maybe) sasquatches with an unexpected whi...

Today I talked to Katherine Vaz about her new novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books, 2023). In 1843-1846, on the Portuguese island of Madeira, five-year-old John Alves lived in jail and starved alongside his heretic mother, who was condemned to death for converting to Protestantism from Catholicism. Finally freed, John befriends young Mary Freitas, the adopted daughter of a wonderful botanist. Both...

Annie Fisk—an only child in Los Alamos, New Mexico—spends a lot of time investigating the treasure trove of objects at the back of her garden. Her father, with whom she is close, works long hours on the nuclear bomb project, her mother seems distant and preoccupied, and Annie has trouble making friends. But she is a gifted student, and she leaves home to major in physics and astronomy at a Texas c...

Today I talked to Jule Schumacher about her new novel The English Experience (Doubleday, 2023). Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he's the only professor available to chaperone Payne University's annual "Experience: Abroad" (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between the words) occurring during the three weeks of wi...

Angus McDonald had to escape from Scotland or risk arrest. In 1838, he contracted with the Hudson Bay Company to trade in the Pacific Northwest. There he discovers majestic mountains, raging rivers, and buffalo. He meets and marries Catherine, who is related to Nez Perce royalty, and together they face competing claims of British fur traders and gold seekers, settlers and Native Americans who’ve l...

The Dragons of Deepwood Fen (Daw Books, 2023) is an immersive fantasy which takes you deep into a world of duality. There are two suns, one light and one dark; and two types of dragons, one yielding a substance called umbra and one a substance called aura. There are two peoples, one subjugated by the other. The people of the woods, mostly the dark-skinned Kin, have been conquered by the people of...

In Life Between Seconds (Addison & Highsmith, 2022), Douglas Weissman explores found family and magic.  After his mother dies, Peter Berry collects memories in broken watches the way others collect photographs. Peter takes his box filled with broken watches and flees his childhood home to a battered apartment complex in San Francisco—his mother's favorite city—in an attempt to bury the box with th...

The Archive Is All in Present Tense (Barrow Street Press, 2022) attempts to capture the feeling of archival research, which, despite being an attempt to access information about the past, has a way of infusing the present; research unfolds in real time as you touch and handle objects that radiate with presence. In the archive we follow a researcher who is exploring a fantastical, limitless archive...

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco Press, 2023) probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants. A woman known only to her neighbors as "the Asian recycling lady" collects bottles from...

Just days before the release of her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), three-time National Book Award Finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author Lauren Groff sat down to talk to critic Laura McGrath and host Sarah Wasserman. Although Groff admits that she wants “each subsequent book to destroy the one” that came before, writing is always for her an endeavor of focus, r...

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...

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 te...

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...

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...

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 t...

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-cat...

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 evide...