New Books in Literature

An interview with Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, editors of Anonymous Sex, a collection of 27 explicit sex stories unattributed to the 27 writers listed in the byline. Cheryl, Hillary, and I discuss how exactly you get writers like Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi, and Robert Olen Butler to contribute a story when the conceit is sex. We talk about the problem with stale erotic...

Mona Kareem speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her essay “Mapping Exile: A Writer’s Story of Growing Up Stateless in Post-Gulf War Kuwait,” which appears in a portfolio of writing from the Arabian Gulf, in The Common’s fall issue. In this conversation, Mona talks about her family’s experience living in Kuwait as Bidoon, or stateless people, and why examining and writing about that exper...

Starting a new historical mystery series is always fun, but summarizing one at book 7 creates a certain conundrum: how to convey the essence of a character and her development without giving away too much information? Since her first adventure in 1887 (A Curious Beginning, published in 2015), Veronica Speedwell, a lepidopterist by inclination and training, has had an exciting two years. Early in t...

An interview with Andrew Lipstein, author of the debut novel, Last Resort. Andrew and I discuss ownership over stories, the blurring of the commercial and the literary in contemporary publishing, the dread that accompanies a story that grows out of your control, and so much more. Andrew Recommends: Natasha Brown, Assembly Sheila Heti, Pure Color Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and...

In Green Unpleasant Land: Creative Responses to Rural England's Colonial Connections (PeePal Tree Press, 2021), Dr. Corinne Fowler explores the repressed history of rural England's links to transatlantic enslavement and the East India Company. “Historical and literary ideas about the countryside have shifted significantly in the last three decades. For a long time now, historians, social geographe...

An interview with Xochitl Gonzalez, author of the debut novel, Olga Dies Dreaming (Flatiron Books, 2022). Xochitl and I discuss the unique narrative perspective that a wedding planner has on American privilege and inequality, the gentrification of Brooklyn, the rich and wealthy colonizers of Puerto Rico post- la Promesa, Nuyorican culture as the creole of NYC, and so much more. Xochitl Recommends:...

In the Shadow of Dora by Patrick Hicks (Stephen F. Austin University Press 2020) explores the space program’s path from the Dora Mittelbau concentration camp in 1940’s Nazi Germany, to the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Eli Hessel has lost his entire family and is pulled out of the Auschwitz death camp to march with thousands of other emaciated prisoners to the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp i...

Early in the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, Olive Senior began posting her series of Pandemic Poems on social media. The project was a way of bearing witness to the strangeness of it all and forging a reassuring connection with readers. Each poem is a riff on a word or phrase trending in the first wave of the pandemic - an A to Z of the lexicon newly coined or quickly repurposed for our hist...

We all live surrounded by objects: some practical, some personal, some handed down from family generations past. But though we interact with material things every day, we don’t often stop to consider the complex histories and stories of the objects in our lives—what they say about our culture, our families, and ourselves. Over a lifetime we accumulate these things, and when we die, they serve as e...

Season three of Novel Dialogue launches in partnership with Public Books and introduces some fresh new voices into the mix. John and Aarthi welcome Chris Holmes, Emily Hyde, Tara Menon, and Sarah Wasserman into the ND pod as guest hosts. And have they brought a series of scintillating conversations with them! In our series premiere, Sarah sits down with acclaimed novelist Chang-rae Lee and Anne An...

John and Elizabeth had the marvelous fortune to talk with George Kalogeris about his new book Winthropos (LSU Press, 2021). The title comes from the "Greek-ified" name that George's father gave to their town, Winthrop, MA. George's poems are soaked in memories and tacit, deep affection, communicated through the language of the lines and especially through certain Janus-faced words that reflect the...

It’s a great pleasure to welcome Colin Thubron to the Asian Review of Books podcast. Travel writer and novelist, Colin has written countless books that bring faraway sights and peoples to English-speaking readers–many of which covered regions in China, Russia, Central Asia and elsewhere on the Asian continent. In this episode, Colin and I talk about The Amur River: Between Russia and China (Harper...

Bald: 35 Philosophical Short Cuts (Yale UP, 2021) brings together thirty-five essays, originally published in the Times, on a wide range of topics, from the dimensions of Plato’s academy and the mysteries of Eleusis to Philip K. Dick, Mormonism, money, and the joy and pain of Liverpool Football Club fans. Simon Critchley has been a strong voice in popular philosophy for more than a decade. In an e...

Did you ever hear the one about the elf, druid, and warlock that walk into—no, not a bar—but a trailer? Trailer Park Trickster (Blackstone, 2021), David Slayton’s follow up to White Trash Warlock, offers urban fantasy alternating with backwoods spookiness. If you’ve thought of warlocks as tall elegant fellows with a British accent and a swirling velvet cloak, think again. Adam Binder is a newly ma...

Lyndsey Ellis’s debut novel, Bone Broth (Hidden Timber Books 2021) tells the story of Justine Holmes, who is mourning her husband’s death and grappling with both societal and family tensions. It’s 2015, and the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri are still simmering after the fatal police shooting sparked a national debate about use-of-force law, militarization of police, and the relationship between t...

Erin Jessee of the University of Glasgow, with her Rwandan co-author Jerome Irankunda, and illustrator Christian Mugarura, and translator Sylvere Mwizerwa have published a graphic novel titled Nyiragitwa (Mudacumura Publishing House, 2021). It tells the story of Nyiragitwa, a Rwandan woman who is thought to have lived in the 17th century. The first in a series of graphic novels about Rwandans livi...

Today I talked to Bron Williams about her book I Have Seen the Moon: Reflections on Nauru (2017). Mary Anne Radmacher wrote, "I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." Have you ever looked at the moon from a different angle? I don't mean looking at it upside down as you might have done as a child, through your legs or hanging from the monkey bars. I mean, have y...

An interview with Joanna Rakoff, author of the memoir My Salinger Year (Vintage, 2014). Joanna and I discuss the power of a novelistic memoir, breaking open literary New York, what it was like replying to J.D. Salinger’s fan mail, and working in true collaboration on the film adaptation of her memoir. Joanna Recommends: Alice Elliott Dark, Fellowship Point Evan Hughes, The Hard Sell Sara Freeman, ...

Today I talked to Andy Choi about his novel Slow Hot (Schism Press, 2021).  "The principal narratives of Slow Hot (Schism Press, 2021) intersect, contrast, and complement one another like the panels in an intricate silk bojagi. Shards of text depicting our digital alienation and oversaturated connectivity in the age of apocalypse cut into a young Korean's journey home, the ghosts he encounters the...

Steven Tagle speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “Notes on Looking Back,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Steven talks about writing this essay, originally in Greek, as a way to explore his love of the language and the experience of learning, speaking, and writing in it. Steven first came to Greece several years ago as a Fulbright Fellow. He discusses his current writ...

“Why not just torture this main character and make his children completely disappear?” That’s the terrifying premise behind Deep Dive (Angry Robot, 2022), the debut novel by author Ron Walters, which sets a videogame developer on a thrilling virtual reality adventure which is equal parts Inception and Matrix, and perhaps a little Parenthood too. Creating a story that is a relentlessly thrilling an...

Two children stumble upon a mass grave in the forest outside of Minsk in Belarus where the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, buried tens of thousands of innocent victims of torture. The Singing Forest, by Judith McCormack (Biblioasis 2021) weaves the story of a low-rung enforcer of that torture in pre-WWII Belarus and a modern-day Canadian lawyer on the team prosecuting long-forgotten crimes. Stefan D...

As the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia and host the first annual gay pride in the Sinophone Pacific, Taiwan is a historic center of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture. With this blazing path of activism, queer Taiwanese literature has also risen in prominence and there is a growing popular interest in stories about the transgression of gender and sexual norms....

First place winner of the 2021 Elgin Award, The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee (Jaberwocky, 2020) is an epic fantasy about a young king who must defend his kingdom against a number of outside forces, both human and terrifyingly otherworldly. Lee draws from Chinese culture to create a legendary figure in King Xau, one of honor, nobility, and subtle magic. With light, clean, and lyrical languag...

Our second January Novel Dialogue conversation is with Caryl Phillips, professor of English at Yale and world-renowned for novels ranging from The Final Passage to 2018’s A View of the Empire at Sunset. He shares his thoughts on transplantation, on performance, on race, even on sports. Joining him here are John and the wonderful comparatist Corina Stan, author of The Art of Distances: Ethical Thin...