New Books in Literature

Fifth in the Henrietta and Inspector Howard Mystery Series, A Child Lost (She Writes Press, 2020) begins in 1935, with Henrietta’s younger sister, Elsie, falling in love with Gunther, a German refugee. He has come to America to locate Liesel, the mother of a little girl he’s been caring for, and has been working in maintenance at Elsie’s school. Elsie begs Henrietta and Clive to help find Liesel,...

An edgy and ambitious debut by a powerful new voice in contemporary literary fiction Monday, Kierk wakes up. Once a rising star in neuroscience, Kierk Suren is now homeless, broken by his all-consuming quest to find a scientific theory of consciousness. But when he's offered a spot in a prestigious postdoctoral program, he decides to rejoin society and vows not to self-destruct again. Instead of focu...

Talia Lakshmi Kolluri speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Good Donkey,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Kolluri talks about writing fiction from the perspectives of different animals, and where the inspiration for those stories comes from. She also discusses how being mixed race can complicate conversations about race and identity in the U...

Daniel Shapiro was a successful attorney in his early forties when his wife, Susan, suffered a brain bleed and a diagnosis that her future was uncertain. Stunned, and with three young children, the couple made the most of the few years that followed, before a massive second hemorrhage changed everything. Physically, Susan was badly compromised in her ability to speak, see, and walk. Mentally, she...

What would it feel like to wake up inside the head of someone who writes about science for a living? John Horgan, acclaimed author of the bestseller The End of Science, answers that question in his genre-bending new book Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science (MIT Press, 2020), a stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of his alter ego, Eamon Toole--a blogger, college professor, and d...

Gautam Bhatia’s debut novel The Wall (Harper Collins, 2020) is set in Sumer, a city enclosed in an impenetrable, unscalable barrier that seems sky high. To its inhabitants, whose ancestors have lived there for 2,000 years, the place is more than a city or even a country—it’s their universe. Sumer’s residents know something is on the other side but have no desire to explore beyond the wall. They ar...

This interview features a candid conversation with Greg Bailey, seasoned scholar of Sanskrit narrative Literature, on his multi-decade work on the Purāṇas and Mahābhārata, and on his new novel In Search of Bliss: A Tale of Early Buddhism (Vanguard Press, 2019). About the novel: Kshemapala is a monk from the North who has been tasked with an important scholarly mission: fill in the gaps in the hist...

Ron Nyren’s The Book of Lost Light—winner of Black Lawrence Press’s 2019 Big Moose Prize and finalist in the 2020 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction—tells the story of Joseph Kylander, whose childhood in early 20th-century San Francisco has been shaped by his widowed father’s obsessive photographic project and by his headstrong cousin Karelia’s fanciful storytelling and impu...

Guest Gina Warren discusses her newest book Hatched: Dispatches from the Backyard Chicken Movement, published May 2021 by University of Washington Press. Warren chronicles her experience in starting a backyard chicken flock from bringing home day old chicks, feeding and housing them, and eventually butchering and cooking them as meat. Rather than offering practical advice or a how-to-guide to rais...

I only ever asked you for one thing,' my father said, a quiver in his voice. 'Just this one thing.' It was as though I had smashed the Ten Commandments. 'Oh father,' I cried, grovelling at his ankles while my mother and siblings looked on. 'The one thing you asked of me - is everything.' Bani Adam has known all his life what was expected of him. To marry the right kind of girl. To make the House o...

In 2016, the German government announces a new prize for Hebrew writers around the world, the Berlin Prize for Hebrew Literature, which will return the Hebrew Literary Center to it. Chezi, an Israeli guy of Iraqi descent who came to Berlin following his love for his German wife Helena, is the first winner of the award - for his book "Staying in Baghdad". On the morning of the victory, while Helena...

Poet Ariana Brown searches for new origins in her debut book We Are Owed. (Grieveland Press, 2021). Brown has had over ten years of experience writing, performing, and teaching poetry that struggles towards freedom for all Black peoples. She identifies on her website as a “queer Black Mexican American poet” whose lived experiences within anti-Black cultures and societies have forced her to spin la...

Ravi Shankar speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his essay “The Five-Room Box,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Shankar talks about constructing this essay on identity, family, and fitting in from an excerpt of his memoir, Correctional, about his time spent in prison. He also discusses how that time changed the course of his academic work, what it’s like...

In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home (North Atlantic Books, 2017), leading edge thinker and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe embraces some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood. Creatively using memoir and the epistolary format, Dr. Akomolafe offers an engaging, thought-provoking look at a range of timely subjec...

Nebula, Locus, and Alex Award-winner P. Djèlí Clark goes full-length for the first time in his dazzling debut novel: A Master of Djinn (Tordotcom, 2021). Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha'arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she's certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer. So wh...

A Camera Obscura (Red Hen Press, 2021) by Carl Marcum is a lyrical exploration of external and internal worlds. The heavens described in these poems could be the stars glittering above our heads, the pathways of faith, or the connection between human beings. Playing with scientific understandings of the world, along with the linguistic conventions of the poetic form, A Camera Obscura is a compelli...

When her father dies after a drawn-out illness, the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest (One World, 2021) wonders how one grieves if a family never talks about feelings. The father is one of Hong Kong’s ‘astronaut’ fathers, who stays there to work after the rest of the family leave before the 1997 handover, when Britain returns the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China. The protagonist turns to her mo...

In a sense, those of us who love historical fiction live vicariously in the past. Many of us also fantasize about traveling in time—meeting our favorite writers in the flesh, hanging around with royalty, living the aristocratic lifestyle. We tend to forget or understate the very real benefits of the present, amenities we take for granted (indoor plumbing, central heat and air conditioning, refrige...

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about his new book, A Glossary of Urban Voids (2020). It's one of the more fascinating books I've encountered in some time. And I say "encountered" because it's not only a book, in the traditional sense of something you read, but also a keen intellectual and aesthetic experience: the very design of t...

This year, transgender liberation is at the forefront of Pride Month discourse, with a staggering number of conservative, religious, and gender critical-backed bills challenging trans people’s rights to use public restrooms, participate in organized sports, and even expect inclusive language at the doctor’s office. These would-be laws seek to legislate and restrict trans identity—especially that o...

Wyatt Townley speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her poem “Instructions for the Endgame,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. In this conversation, Townley talks about experiencing poetry in all parts of her life—in dance and yoga, in astronomy and physics, and in nature. She also discusses her time as Poet Laureate of Kansas, the pleasure of revising poems, and what it’s like s...

"Your problem is you have a Russian soul," Anna's mother tells her. In 1980, Anna is a naïve UConn senior studying abroad in Moscow at the height of the Cold War-and a second-generation Russian Jew raised on a calamitous family history of abandonment, Czarist-era pogroms, and Soviet-style terror. As Anna dodges date rapists, KGB agents, and smooth-talking black marketeers while navigating an alien...

It can be easy to forget amongst the glistening skyscrapers, bustling streets and neon lights, but the Pearl River Delta used to be a haven for banditry and piracy. As the authority of Imperial China waned, pirate fleets based out of Guangdong Province roamed the waves, raiding traders and taking captives. One of these captives, and later pirates was Cheng Yat Sou—the “wife of Cheng Yat”—who rose...

Where does DNA end and the soul begin? It’s a question that Evelyn Caldwell, the brilliant genetic researcher at the center of Sarah Gailey’s The Echo Wife, never asks as she develops her award-winning technique for human cloning, which takes DNA from “sample to sentience” in 100 days. In The Echo Wife, clones are tools, created for specific time-limited purposes—to serve as a body double to draw...

Today I talked to Karen Salyer McElmurray about her novel Wanting Radiance (UP of Kentucky, 2020). Fifteen-year-old Miracelle Loving hears the gunshot that kills her mother, and runs to hold her while she dies. She spends the next two decades roaming, fortune telling and picking up odd jobs. Then, as if in a dream, she hears her mother’s voice urging her to seek answers about where she came from....