New Books in Literature

Today I talked to Idra Novey about her new novel Take What You Need (Viking 2023). Leah, her husband, and their little son are driving back to where she grew up in the mountains of Appalachia. They are heading to the home where her stepmother fled after leaving Leah’s father, and after the divorce, Jean was no longer allowed to stay in touch with Leah. But she was the mother Leah knew and loved. N...

You Must Believe in Spring (Hajar Press, 2022) is Mohamed Tonsy's "speculative fiction." It is about the future of Egypt when people's memory of the recent revolution is beginning to fade away as a distant past. How can we find hope when we find ourselves in a dystopia?   Twenty years after she first chanted in Tahrir, Hanan’s son is living under military rule in Egypt. Though he is both a discipl...

Spring 1944. A Jewish family is murdered in a remote Ukrainian village. Who were they? Who were the killers? Three generations later, an Israeli woman and a British man of Ukrainian origins set out to find out how their families were implicated in this crime. They also discover how this untold murder has warped their own lives. Narrated by an unnamed historian, and based on fragments of memories,...

Once in a while, a novel comes along that is both different and special. Marvelous (William Morrow, 2023) is such a book. Retellings of fairy tales are not unusual, and some of them are quite good. But here Molly Greeley explores the real-life story that gave rise to one of the best-loved tales, “Beauty and the Beast.” In doing so, she raises issues of inclusion, trust, acceptance, the effects of...

Kashana is the author of the novel The Survivalists, which was published in January 2023 by Soft Skull Press. She’s also a TV writer who has written for The Great North and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Recommend...

Through nine emotionally vivid stories, all narrated from animal perspectives, Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s debut collection explores themes of environmentalism, conservation, identity, belonging, loss, and family with resounding heart and deep tenderness. In Kolluri’s pages, a faithful hound mourns the loss of the endangered rhino he swore to protect. Vultures seek meaning as they attend to the antelo...

Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that s...

In Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s science fiction novel, The Ten-Percent Thief (Solaris, 2023), is set in a world centered on meritocracy, where everyone is judged on the Bell Curve. Apex City, formerly Bangalore, divides its population into the Virtual and Analog societies where access to technology earns a stark difference in quality of life. With the right image, values and opinions, citizens can asc...

What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (UP of Kentucky, 2023) is the first major anthology of labor writing in nearly a century. Here, editors Rebecca Gayle Howell & Ashley M. Jones bring together more than one hundred contemporary writers singing out from the corners of the 99 Percent, each telling their own truth of today's economy. In his final days, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. calle...

Today I talked to Olivia Atwater about her new book Half a Soul (Orbit, 2022). When a nasty fairy Lord tries to take young Dora’s soul, her doting cousin, Vanessa, fights him off with a pair of iron scissors—but not before he can abscond with half of his desired bounty. As an orphan, Dora is already disadvantaged. After losing half her soul, her affliction manifests as the inability to feel emotio...

Can anyone break into high society? From Cinderella, Eliza Doolittle and Jay Gatsby to Don Draper and Anna Sorokin, characters that can fool their way into the elite through their smarts, willpower and chutzpah help us pierce the pretensions of the rich. Kyla Zhao, in her debut novel, The Fraud Squad (Berkley Books: 2023) creates her own version of the character in Samantha Song, a harried writer...

Today I talked to Joanna Higgins about her new book In the Fall They Leave: a Novel of the First World War (Regal House Publishing, 2023). Nineteen-year-old pianist Marie-Thérèse has dropped out of her prestigious conservatory in favor of becoming a nurse, much to her mother’s disappointment. As she begins her final year of study, Germany invades Belgium on its way to France. It’s 1914, and Marie-...

Today I talked to Deepti Kapoor about her new novel Age of Vice (Riverhead, 2023). Deepti Kapoor grew up in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband. Recommended Books: Rafael Chirbes, Crematoria Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories  Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in Engli...

The essential contribution of The Woman with the Cure (Berkley Books, 2023) can be summarized in one sentence: like most of its future readers (I assume), I had never before heard of Dorothy Horstmann and her fundamental role in the research that led to the near-eradication of polio, despite having benefited hugely from her work. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and into the 1960s, she devoted her con...

Today is a Different War (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) is Lyudmyla Khersonska's striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. Masterfully translated into English by Olga Livshin, Andrew Janco, Maya Chhabra, and Lev Fridman, no other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrai...

In 1937 tens of thousands of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic were slaughtered by Dominican troops wielding machetes and knives. Dominican writer and lawyer Freddy Prestol Castillo worked on the Haiti-Dominican Republic border during the massacre, known as "The Cutting," and documented the atrocities in real time in You Can Cross the Massacre on Foot (Duke UP, 2019).  Written in 1937, pub...

In his memoir, Bang Bang Crash (Counterpoint, 2023), Nic Brown shares his experiences as a rock and roll drummer who abandons his successful music career to pursue his true passion and discovers a deeper understanding of artistic fulfillment in this episodic memoir of swapping one dream for another In the mid-1990s, fresh out of high school, Nic Brown was living his childhood dream as a rock and r...

In Side Effects of Wanting (Main Street Rag, 2022), author Mary Salisbury spent nearly twenty years gathering together the pieces of humanity she saw reflected in the lives around her and distilled them into a poetically written, beautifully curated short story collection. In this debut, small-town stories speak of love and belonging, longing and regret. The people who populate these tales yearn f...

“Kopi Dulu,” means “coffee first” in Indonesian–a common phrase from Indonesians who are happy to have coffee anywhere, anytime and with anyone. At least, that was Mark Eveleigh’s experience, as a travel writer and reporter, traveling across the country’s many islands. The phrase gives us the title of his latest book: Kopi Dulu: Caffeine-Fuelled Travels Through Indonesia (Penguin Southeast Asia, 2...

Today I talked to Kerri Schlottman about her new novel Tell Me One Thing (Regal House Publishing, 2023). Quinn and a friend are driving from New York City to Pennsylvania when she sees 9-year-old Lulu sitting on a trucker’s lap, smoking a cigarette. At the truck stop for her friend to score drugs, Quinn takes an astounding picture and then leaves, disappointing Lulu, who thinks maybe people will s...

Christopher M. Hood is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the Dalton School in New York City and lives nearby with his wife and daughter. He received an MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine. The Revivalists (Harper, 2022) is his debut novel. Book Recommendations: Chang-rae Lee, My Year Abroad Jenny Liou, Muscle Memory Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at...

Denise Crittendon’s debut science fiction novel,Where it Rains in Color (Angry Robot, 2022), is set far in the future, long after the Earth has been destroyed, on the planet of Swazembi. Swazembi is a color-rich utopia and famous vacation center of the Milky Way. No one is used to serious trouble in this idyllic, peace-loving world, least of all the Rare Indigo. But Lileala’s perfect, pampered lif...

Cheryl said many times that "I'm done with that life, I'll never go back to it." But she did. When her Aunt Judy finds her in jail after two years of thinking she may be dead, she hopes and prays this is a second chance for her niece. Her sensitive, funny, bookworm niece. Her big sister's eldest daughter, the sister who has since died. And through writing White Flag: A Memoir (Legacy Book Press, 2...

Food journalist Angela Hui grew up in rural Wales, as daughter to the owners of the Lucky Star Chinese takeaway. Angela grew up behind the counter, helping take orders and serve customers, while also trying to find her place in this small Welsh town. In her new memoir, Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood behind the Counter (Trapeze, 2022), she writes about the surprisingly central role the takeaway...

Today I talked to C. P. Lesley about Song of the Storyteller (Five Directions Press, 2023).  It’s 1546, and Ivan the Terrible is about to be coronated and married off. Government nobles are given 6 weeks to choose the most beautiful, highborn, fertile, and politically expedient brides from around the country. Before Tsar Ivan makes his choice, 16-year-old Lyuba is forced to go through a series of...