New Books in Literature

At the dawn of the new millennium, Els Gordon finds herself adrift – she’s in mourning for her fiancé and her father, she’s lost the inheritance of her Scottish Highlands estate, her mother left when she was two-years-old but it her only living relative, she’s about to be unemployed, and she’s just bought an old plantation house on the island of Nevis in the Caribbean. It’s a little haunted by the...

Velocity Weapon (Orbit, 2019) by Megan E. O’Keefe centers on siblings: Biran, a member of an elite cadre that controls the interstellar gates by which humans travel among star systems, and his sister, Sanda, a gunner who finds herself waking 230 years after her last battle on an empty, enemy spaceship, believing she’s the last human alive. O’Keefe’s characters search for truth in a universe where...

Kathryn H. Ross has found a balance. Between past and present. Between self and ancestors. Between self-discovery and continuous growth. In her hybrid collection, Black Was Not a Label, Ross invites readers into a life unfurling. Through the lenses of natural hair, faith, and microaggressions, she lights a path to what it means to seek self while still honoring the past lives, personal and histori...

Jim, our narrator, experiences a crisis of conscience in the wake of the possible suicide of his girlfriend. He quits his high-paying job seizing assets for a loan company and moves to a small village near the seaside to get away from it all. With no plans to occupy himself, and a golden parachute from his company, Jim finds himself with a lot of time on his hands—time that he hopes will help him...

Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. The original Nick, who starts out working on an ostrich farm, is drawn to the Colorado Street Bridge and manages to meet some of the great personalities of the period: Teddy Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair and Adolphus Busch all meet Nick. He parlays an idea for lighting i...

The Hour of All Things and Other Plays (Intellect Books, 2018) collects four plays by Caridad Svich, a 2012 OBIE for Lifetime Achievement playwright. The plays take place in Venezuela, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Southwest Detroit, as well as cyberspace and the place of dreams. In these works, Svich interrogates themes of globalization and environmental collapse in language that is poetic, rough, hear...

"After I’d finished my rapid-fire history of self-justification he paused and then said, deadpan and rural-Australian-slow: 'Right. Ok. So how is that all working out for you?'" On Drugs (Giramondo Publishing, 2019) explores Australian philosopher Chris Fleming’s experience of addiction, which begins when he is a student at the University of Sydney and escalates into a life-threatening compulsion....

In a sad but loving tribute to his Sicilian-Italian heritage, Marco Rafala’s debut novel How Fires End (Little A, 2019) centers on the haunting legacy of WWII on the people of a small Sicilian village. It’s the summer of 1943 and an unexploded mortar shell kills 9-year-old Salvatore’s twin brothers. His faith is destroyed, and his family unravels, fueling fear that the Vassallo name is cursed. Sal...

Rude Mechs’ Lipstick Traces (53rd State Press, 2019) is Lana Lesley’s graphic novelization of Lipstick Traces by Austin-based theatre collective Rude Mechs, itself an adaptation of Greil Marcus’ classic book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. The graphic novel vibrantly recreates the experience of watching Rude Mechs perform: light and sound cues, costume choices, and actors’ f...

Laura Lam’s new book Goldilocks (Orbit, 2020) takes readers into space with an all-female crew bound for a distant Earth-like planet. The all-female crew isn’t the only twist; there’s also the fact that the five astronauts steal their spaceship. The crew aren’t mere bandits, but the spacecraft’s original crew, who’d been shoved aside by a reactionary patriarchy intent on confining women to home an...

It is well known that the novels of Jane Austen (1775–1817), which enjoyed at best a modest success during her lifetime, have become ever more popular in the last fifty years or so. They support a small industry of remakes, spinoffs, and retellings. As Janice Hadlow notes while discussing The Other Bennet Sister (Henry Holt, 2020), one reason for that interest lies with Austen herself. A genius at...

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube...

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administr...

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with t...

In this interview we discuss Fight Fight (Braveship Books, 2018), book 3 of the Raven One series. In Fight Fight, former aviator Kevin Miller explores the next big fight in the South China Sea when errors and miscalculations on the grandest scale drive the world’s greatest maritime powers into conflict. From aboard a nuclear powered super-carrier in the center of the maelstrom readers get a front...

After a decade spent protecting public officials, Nick Averose has the unique ability to think like an assassin. Now he works as a red-teamer, who tests security systems to find vulnerabilities. His latest assignment, to assess the security of a former CIA director’s home, goes horribly wrong, and Nick gets entangled in a vicious crime that rocks Washington D.C. He knows he’s been framed, and now...

Margaret Randall’s new memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was published by Duke University Press in March 2020. Randall, born in New York City in 1936, lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua as an adult, where she was involved in both creative movements and political activism. Known as a writer and oral historian, Randall focuses in this memoir on recreating the communities and...

The Houston Chronicle’s review of Sarah Adleman’s The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun 2019) praises that the book “dissects the feelings that have been a part of her since her mother's death with the precision and brutality of a poet and all the awful beauty of a perfectly performed major surgery...It's one of the most beautiful things you're likely to read.” Adleman’s collectio...

Mina completed a doctorate in Classics but can’t find a tenure track position. She earns money by teaching adjunct classes and tutoring in Latin. Mina’s husband, Oscar, who works for his distant father importing Japanese beer, hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will help with Mina’s depression. While they’re in London, she plans to work on a paper studying mythological women, only a...

dReed Katz is in many ways an ordinary guy. He shares an apartment in Tel Aviv with his best friend, Daphne, works in a coffee shop, crushes on Lee, a green-eyed man from abroad, and dreads family dinners with his nosy mother. Yet when Reed gets on a bus he has to stand in the white marked section, and he loses his job when the coffee shop gets bombed because of “people like him.” Not only is Reed...

One summer, Joni Griffith Wexler realizes that she hasn’t paid enough attention to her life. While her sons are at sleepaway camp and her husband immersed in his work, she rushes from one impulsive decision to the next, striving unsuccessfully for clarity. It takes her two closest friends, an unexpected girls' weekend, and the surprising wisdom of a psychic medium to give her the confidence to tak...

Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the boo...

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female autho...

Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton and O’Keeffe took art classes from the same teacher and had parallel careers in several ways, yet Pelton is relatively unknown despite a number of major exhibitions during her lifetime and one traveling...

Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in the face of a devastating disease. Cora, an enslaved child during the Civil War, flees the Yarbrough plantation after her family is murdered and finds refuge at the home of a big-hearted woman. Amadahy, a...