New Books in Literature

Today I talked to Donnaldson Brown about her new novel Because I Loved You (She Writes Press 2023) Sixteen-year-old Leni O’Hare loves her horse, so when her mother tries to sell it, she rides as far as she can. It’s 1972, and she ends up falling in love with another horse-lover. Seventeen-year-old Caleb McGrath plays football with Leni’s beloved older brother Foy, and dreams of a future far from E...

Lauren Kay Johnson is just seven when she first experiences a sacrifice of war as her mother, a nurse in the Army Reserves, deploys in support of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. A decade later, in the wake of 9/11, Lauren signs her own military contract and deploys to a small Afghan province with a non-combat nation-building team. Through her role as the team's information operations officer...

Today I talked to the translators of Marianna Kiyanovska's The Voices of Babyn Yar (HURI, 2022), Max Rosochinsky and Oksana Maksymchuk. With this collection of stirring poems the award-winning Ukrainian poet honors the victims of the Holocaust by writing their stories of horror, death, and survival in their own imagined voices. Artful and carefully intoned, the poems convey the experiences of ordi...

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar...

"For me, there is something so solid and comforting in stone" says Sassan Tabatabai in our conversation, and in his poem "Firestones" the words roll, weigh and satisfyingly click together. Firestones I was collecting rocks on the Cardiff coast, a testimony to centuries of silt left on the shore, of sediment pressed into stone: sandstone, shale, tufa, travertine, jasper, flint. There was the stone...

In Charred, the third of G. P. Gottlieb’s Whipped and Sipped Mysteries, her heroine, Alene Baron, has a lot on her mind. Chicago is in lockdown, a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, complicating Alene’s already hectic life. The vegan café she owns can serve only takeout, and her three kids complain constantly about school via Zoom and the near-absence of opportunities to interact with their friend...

Today I talked to S. L. Wisenberg about her book The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home (U Massachusetts Press, 2023). As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. In this remarkable collection of essays, she recalls chasing popularity, taking a Neiman Marcus sponsored class about fashion at age e...

In his debut short story collection, Nomad, Nomad (Bound to Brew, 2021), Jonan Pilet explores the lives of Mongols and expats looking for a sense of home within the nomadic culture. Based on Jonan’s insights having grown up in Mongolia, the series of interlinked narratives capture the cultural turmoil Mongolia experienced after the fall of the Soviet Union, painting a vivid picture of Mongol lands...

The Memory Seeker is a novel that, drawing upon Professor Ronald Niezen's background in researching human rights, takes on the experiences of war violence and its aftermath, the vagaries of memory, and the incompleteness of courtroom justice. When Dutch-Canadian Peter Dekker is hired as an investigator by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he has no inkling of the war crimes that lie i...

Today I interview Sarah Fawn Montgomery about her new collection of essays, Halfway from Home (Split Lip Press, 2022). These essays explore, in nuanced and beautiful prose, Montgomery’s journey to find a place—or perhaps a place of mind—she might call home. We follow Montgomery from childhood to adulthood, from California, to the Midwest, to the East Coast. This is a journey that asks what it mean...

Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind. In the city, Trey meets up with a cast of characters that changes his life forever. He volunteers at a renegade home hospice for AIDS patients, and after being put to the test by g...

When the two immigrant parents in Zeno Sworder’s latest illustrated book go to the baker asking for a cake for their son, the baker asks for something different instead of money. “Five centimeters should do it,” says the baker. “Your height, of course” That starts the story of My Strange Shrinking Parents (Thames & Hudson: 2023): a tale that connects to immigration, parental sacrifice, and the cha...

Leslye Penelope’s latest novel, The Monsters We Defy (Redhook, 2022), takes readers to a version of 1920s Washington D.C. where bootleggers, powerful spirits, and humans blessed (and burdened) with enchantments engage in an epic battle over peoples’ destinies. Penelope’s protagonist, Clara Johnson, is based upon a real person—a woman who, as a teenager during the Red Summer race riots of 1919 shot...

Today I talked to Sarit Yishai-Levi about The Woman Beyond the Sea (Amazon Crossing, 2023). The book was translated by Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann. Eliyah is 25 when she travels from Tel Aviv to Paris to meet up with her husband, who turns out to be having an affair with a French woman. As her life crumbles, Eliyah plunges into a deep depression, returns home to her childhood bed, and slowly descends into...

Sherry Thomas' latest book in her Lady Sherlock Series, A Tempest at Sea (Berkley, 2023), finds Charlotte Holmes in a dangerous investigation at set in the seventh book in this bestselling series. After feigning her own death in Cornwall to escape from Moriarty’s perilous attention, Charlotte Holmes goes into hiding. But then she receives a tempting offer: Find a dossier the crown is desperately s...

Today I talked to Kelly Barnhill about her book The Crane Husband (Tordotcom, 2023). Our unnamed narrator, a fifteen-year-old girl, manages to care for her six-year-old brother and creative but irresponsible mother by skipping school and selling her mother’s artwork. Her father taught her everything useful before he died, and much like Katniss in The Hunger Games, she devotes herself to keeping he...

Four days before Christmas, 8-year-old Bo loses his mother in a tragic accident, 28-year-old Brandon loses his job after a hostile takeover of his big-media employer, and 48-year-old Blue, a key witness in a criminal trial against an infamous now-defunct tech startup, struggles to reconnect with his family. So begins Jinwoo Chong's dazzling, time-bending debut that blends elements of neo-noir and...

Svetlana Lavochkina's book Dam Duchess (Whiskey Tit, 2018) invites readers to take a surreal journey into the past: the construction of Dnipro Dam, the Stalinist regime, the fate of the aristocrats of the Russian Empire, the horrors of the Holodomor, the memory of the Cossack Hetmanate that travels from generation to generation, the Soviet harrowing of life and psyche. To survive in the Soviet Uni...

It’s just after World War II, and Elinor White (born Elinor de Witt, which also means “white”), a single woman in her mid-forties, lives as a recluse in a village near Tunbridge Wells. One day in 1947, while on a walk, she encounters a recent arrival named Rose Mackie and is drawn to Rose’s three-year-old daughter, Susie. When thugs from London threaten Rose and Susie, Elinor brushes off the skill...

Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist novel American Mermaid becomes a best-seller. Lured by the promise of a big payday, she quits teaching and moves to L.A. to turn the novel into an action flick with the help of some studio hacks. But as she's pressured to change her main character from a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a cl...

Victoria Garza begins her poetic memoir with her ten-year-old self learning that her little sister and cousin have died in a car accident. She painstakingly recalls lovely moments with her sister as they faced their parents’ divorce, their new lives surrounded by family members, their Mexican American culture and celebrations. Over the course of the book, she examines her own survivor’s guilt, her...

An early American adage proclaimed, "The frontier was heaven for men and dogs―hell for women and mules." Since the 1700s, when his name first appeared in print, Daniel Boone has been synonymous with America's westward expansion and life on the frontier. Traces (Fireside Industries, 2022) is a retelling of Boone's saga through the eyes of his wife, Rebecca, and her two oldest daughters, Susannah an...

In this episode, our podcast host, Ti-han Chang, invited Ms Lin Hsin-hui, a bourgeoning Taiwanese Sci-fi writer to talk about her award-winning short story collection, Human Glitches. Lin comments on our transforming process as cyborgs. For Lin, sci-fi no longer represents futuristic imagination, but the very reflection of our technologically conditioned hyperreality. We chat about her fascination...

The star of On Java Road (Hogarth: 2022), the latest novel from Lawrence Osborne, is Adrian Gyle, a down-on-his-luck correspondent in Hong Kong, in the midst of its 2019 protests. Adrian spends his time drinking with Jimmy Tang, a royal screw-up from one of Hong Kong’s tycoon families. But a new character–and an unexpected death–threatens to drive a wedge in their relationship, as Hong Kong is mir...

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023) is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In "belly," a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In "We Feel it in P...