New Books in Literature

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across...

Aminatta Forna, author of Ancestor Stones (2006), Happiness (2018), and most recently The Window Seat (2021) joins Georgetown prof. Nicole Rizzuto and host Aarthi Vadde for a wide-ranging conversation about reversing the gaze. Born in Sierra Leone, Aminatta is of Scottish and Malian ancestry and grew up around the world. Her mixed upbringing led her to develop a prismatic view of identity and, tho...

Today’s book is: The Lost Journals of Sacajewea (Milkweed Editions, 2023), by Debra Magpie Earling, which is a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea. Among the most memorialized women in American history, Sacajewea served as interpreter and guide for Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.  In this visionary novel, acclaimed Indigenous author Deb...

Tania James' novel Loot (Knopf 2023) is about a young woodcarver who is ordered by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in late 18th century India to carve a large wooden tiger. The tiger seems to devour a life-sized European man. As the apprentice of an alcoholic French clockmaker, Abbas has a short time to create this gift for the sultan’s youngest sons after they return from being held c...

Today I interview Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart about their new collaboration, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature (Rose Metal Press, 2023). The book brings together 28 of today’s most innovative creators of poetry comics, graphic narratives, and image-text hybrids. With original craft essays, corresponding exercises, and full-color examples of their work, each contributor offers r...

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel,...

Today I talked to Liisa Kovala about her new novel Sisu's Winter War (Latitude 46, 2022). Meri Saari made a promise to her dying mother she would keep the family together, but she was too young to know how a war can pull people apart. As a teenager responsible for her siblings she finds herself following her father to the front lines during the Winter War when he goes missing in action. Forty year...

Emily Hockaday is a poet from Queens who writes about ecology, astronomy, and the city landscape, alongside more personal subjects. Her first collection Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press, 2022) tackles the onset of chronic illness and parenting through grief. Her next full-length, In a Body, will be out in October with Harbor Editions. This collection looks at chronic illness through the lens of...

In Dreaming in Spanish: An Unexpected Love Story In Puerto Vallarta (Little Creek Press, 2023), Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. She’s honest about her struggle to overcome her weaknesses, her relationships, and her addictions at the age of twenty-four....

In 1897, a Mount Holyoke College junior named Bertha Mellish disappears from campus overnight, leaving no word for her family. It’s a time when female college students are still considered “queer” (in the old sense of peculiar as well as the modern understanding of the word), although the college administrators insist that their primary purpose is to produce excellent wives and mothers. But even t...

Booker Prize shortlister Mariana Enriquez, author of Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, joins Penn State professor Magalí Armillas-Tisyera and host Chris Holmes to talk about her most recent novel, Our Share of Night, her first to be translated into English. Our Share of Night follows a spiritual medium, Juan, who can commune with the dead and with the world of demons, a...

Monica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup. Monica stays in Pyongyang until 1994, when she graduates from Pyongyang University of Light Industry, a...

The Archive Undying (Tordotcom, 2023) is Emma Mieko Candon’s ambitious epic science fiction novel about intertwined human survivors following the violent fall of cities run by AI entities so massive, they had the power and influence of gods. When the robotic god of Khuon Mo went mad, it destroyed everything it touched. It killed its priests, its city, and all its wondrous works. But in its final d...

Tariq Goddard (author, publisher and co-founder of Repeater Books) speaks with Victoria Nelson about her forthcoming book Neighbor George. Do you know the language of the birds? Summer, 1979: A lonely young woman housesitting for her aunt and uncle in an isolated bohemian enclave finds troubling reminders of a past family tragedy surfacing in odd and unsettling ways. When a mysterious man moves in...

The story of middle-aged sisters Zara and Lilly begins in Long’s fast-paced, first novel in this witty series, Nine Tenths of the Law, when Zara recognizes a family menorah in a New York City Museum. She remembers seeing it displayed thirty years before on a visit to the Jewish Museum, when her mother recognized it as a family heirloom. Zara is haunted by her mother’s memory, and schemes to get it...

Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Fiction, Susan Stinson's Martha Moody (Small Beer Press, 2020) is a speculative western that follows Amanda, a woman with a vibrant, sensuous imagination, as she falls in love with Martha, a luxuriously fat shop owner. Funny, tender, and undeniably sexy, this novel delights readers as much as Amanda’s homemade butter delights her lover’s lips. Kendall Dinni...

Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed off the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where a species of octopus has been discovered that may have developed its own language and culture. The marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has s...

In this timely and witty combination of So You've Been Publicly Shamed and Where'd You Go, Bernadette? a viral photo of a politician's wife's "feminine hygiene malfunction" catapults her to unwanted fame in a story that's both a satire of social media stardom and internet activism, and a tender mother-daughter tale. Kathleen Held's life is turned upside down when she arrives home to find her house...

Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko's Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. "Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing," note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and...

In As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book (U Georgia Press, 2022), Ann-Marie Oomen offers a real-time narrative of walking her mother through dementia to the end of her life. Writer Pam Houston once summed it up: "Nice mother-daughter stories are a dime a dozen; pain-in-the-ass mother-daughter stories are the ones that grab us." We start this rending journey witnessing the small-not-small clashes bet...

Cathi Unsworth, journalist and author of Bad Penny Blues, as well as numerous other novels, speaks with artists and author Jenny Hval about her recent book Girls Against God. At once a time-travelling horror story and a fugue-like feminist manifesto, this is a singular, genre-warping new novel from the author of the acclaimed Paradise Rot. “It’s 1992 and I’m the Gloomiest Child Queen.” Welcome to...

Today I talked to Jessica Stilling about her new novel After the Barricades (DX Varos, 2023). After her mother dies in a tragic accident, Anna cleans out her closet and finds a striking painting that she’d never seen before. She also finds a trove of letters from Stefan Terre, a name she’s never heard. She travels to Paris for work and also to learn more about her mother, Bethany, who studied at t...

A husband and wife hear a mysterious bump in the night. A father mourns the closeness he has lost with his son. A friendship with a married couple turns into a dangerous codependency. With gorgeous sensitivity, assurance, and a propulsive sense of menace, these stories center on disappearances both literal and figurative--lives and loves that are cut short, the vanishing of one's youthful self. Fr...

Aside from being John’s (younger, suaver and beardier) brother, what has the inimitable David Plotz done lately? Only hosted “The Slate Political Gabfest“, written two books (“The Genius Factory” and “The Good Book“) and left Atlas Obscura to found City Cast. So, when John called him up in April 2020 for the Books in Dark Times series, what was his Pandemic reading? The fully absorbing “other worl...

With the publication of her most recent novel, White Horse, Erika T. Wurth breaks from the realism that characterized her earlier fiction and ventures into horror. White Horse follows Kari, an urban Native living in Denver, as a family heirloom belonging to her long-missing mother launches her into a world of the uncanny: ghosts and monsters lurch into real life and portals transport her into scen...