New Books in Literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jinwoo Park about his novel, Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Press, 2025).  A SHELF AWARENESS BEST BOOK OF 2025 • A CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION BOOK OF 2025 • A CRIMEREADS BEST BOOK OF 2025  The natural enemy of a Korean is another Korean. When North Korean spymaster Doha Kim is mysteriously killed in Oxford, his protégé, Yohan Kim, chases the onl...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks wit Griffin Prize winner Kaie Kellough about his new long poem, Interposition (McClelland & Steward, 2026). Featured in the Publishers Weekly Spring 2026 PreviewFrom Kaie Kellough, poet, sound performer, and Griffin prize winner, comes a linguistic incursion into desire, technology, and the absurd. Kaie Kellough (Magnetic Equator, Griffin Poetry Priz...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Dawn MacDonald about her Griffin Prize winning collection, Northerny (University of Alberta Press, 2024). Northerny: winner of the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize, awarded by the Griffin Poetry Prize. Fresh, funny, and imbued with infectious energy, Northerny tells a much-needed and compelling story of growing up and living in the North. Here are...

Starting in the late 1970s, three women navigate post Cultural Revolution China: Lulu, who’s forced to become a prostitute in Shanghai to save her mother and sister from starving, Lei who is sold in marriage for cigarettes and a few eggs, and Yan, Lei’s smart, beautiful daughter, whose kindness to the farmer master’s neurodivergent son allows her to get an education. Both Lei and Lulu must put asi...

Aphrodite in Pieces gathers diverse myths featuring the goddess and unites them to create a comprehensive portrait. Beginning with her innocent days on the island of Cyprus, progressing to her disappointing welcome in the pantheon of Olympus, and culminating in her shattering experiences of the Trojan war, Aphrodite is depicted in all her aspects—calculating and vengeful, kind and forgiving, passi...

In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and...

Sayantani DasGupta's latest middle grades novel, Theft of the Ruby Lotus (Scholastic, 2026) is an adventure heist. Ria Bailey finds herself in quite a fix, and it's all because of a strange treasure that turns up in the mail one fateful day. It might be a ruby, and it just might hold the key to some troubling developments in her life. Most importantly, if she and her besties Miracle Owusu and Anni...

This episode of the Books on Asia podcast introduces new fiction and non-fiction on Japan to be published this year, 2026, along with two upcoming books on Taiwan. Books are presented in the order they appear on the podcast. Listen to the episode for more information on each title: Phantom Paradise: Escape from Manchuria, by Kay Enokido (Bold Story Press, January 13, 2026) Kokun: The Girl from the...

Doha, a North Korean spymaster, is found stabbed in an alley in Oxford. Doha tells his mentee–another North Korean spy named Yohan—to go to the Oxford Soju Club, a restaurant in the British college town. That starts a dance between three different Koreans: Yohan; Jihoon, the South Korean owner of the Soju Club; and Yunah, a Korean-American recruited to weed out Yonah. Oxford Soju Club (Dundurn Pre...

Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, Jane Kim and her brother, Kevin, dutifully embodied the model minority myth as their parents demanded: both stellar tennis players and academically gifted, they worked hard to make their parents proud. Jane went on to law school. Kevin came close to becoming a professional tennis player. But where they started is nowhere near where they have e...

There must be a shift in the Zeitgeist of the publishing world, because after a long drought in Gothic novels, this is the second one I’ve encountered in little more than a month. The Fourth Wife (Kensington, 2026) takes place near Salt Lake City, Utah, during the years when the Mormon community there still practiced polygamy but was coming under increasing pressure from the US government to aband...

The print adaptation of Jason Reynolds acclaimed, award-winning audiobook Soundtrack (Crown Books, 2026)—a stirring story of music, friendship, and finding your voice in 2000s New York City. Stuy Grey plays the drums, just like his mom, a founding member of the all-black punk band the Bed-Stuy Magic Dusters. He teaches himself by watching videos of tap dancers. Now he’s left home, estranged from h...

Casey Walker speaks to Emily Everett about his story “Islands,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Set at an old lake house rife with unresolved family tensions, the story explores the dynamics between three orphaned brothers, and between the narrator and his pregnant wife. Casey discusses how the piece evolved over more than a decade, and how he always hopes a story will take on a life of...

In Pinky Swear (Simon and Schuster, 2026) Lexi thought she knew everything about Mara Vannatta. Best friends since middle school, they drifted apart after a tragedy derailed their senior year. But when Mara shows up on Lexi’s doorstep sixteen years later fleeing an abusive husband, Lexi takes her in without question. Lexi’s own marriage has been strained by her desire to have a baby, and when Mar...

Chicago is the main character, the setting, the obsession, and the historical grist for the mill of Peter Orner’s most recent novel, The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter (Little Brown and Company, 2025). In conversation about his hometown with Novel Dialogue host Sarah Wasserman, Peter brings us into a lost pocket of time. It is the early 1960s, when Chicagoans partied in a kind of “Midwestern Weimar”...

Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist. In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we fa...

Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), Serpell brings her unique experience as both an awar...

Dana Mele talks about their latest book, The Beast You Let In (Sourcebooks, 2026). Everyone in the rural town of Ashling knows the tale of Veronica Green, a teen who was murdered in the woods. But did a party trick bring her back to claim her revenge? A fast-paced, suspenseful YA horror from the author of Summer's Edge and People Like Us. There is no one Hazel trusts less than her self-centered tw...

Cameron Sullivan’s novel The Red Winter (Tor Books, 2026) follows Sebastian Grave, a centuries old monster hunter, recounting events that occurred in largely the woods of Gévaudan during the years leading up to the French Revolution. The story centers around a terrible beast that hunts the local people and has not been stopped by even the resources of the French crown itself. Sebastian is drawn i...

"Honoured Investors, As Zhongfu Group enters its eighth decade, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of two famous coal mines. These assets further demonstrate our steadfast commitment to promoting the interests of local government and the people of Jingzhou. While the recent death of a Discipline Inspection Committee member has been regrettable, rest assured that any accusations of accounti...

When a young reporter comes to interview Margaret Kenyon, the oldest practicing nurse in the Texas panhandle, she tells him that he’ll have to listen to her story before she answers any questions. It’s 2000, but her story begins in 1925, with Frankie, a beautiful 15-year-old who has never known anything other than violence, hunger, and fear. Frankie grabs the opportunity to escape her home with a...

n this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alison Gadsby about her collection of short fiction, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026). Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer...

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than...

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator...

Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. He is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals. The recipient of awards from MacDowell and Yaddo and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he h...