New Books in Literature

George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong sufferer from clinical depression. In How To Be Depressed (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Scialabba presents an edited selection of his mental health records spanning decades of treatment, fra...

The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich source of inspiration in Theravada Buddhism. In addition to these classical Jātaka, a number of other non-canonical Jātaka tales emerged in Southeast Asia and were widely circulated throughout the region. Collections of these tales are conventionally referr...

Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Carried in circles through the jungle on a stretcher, the narrator recalls how Reinhardt fueled himself with copious amounts of cocaine, built himself an outrageous castle with fake walls and trap doors, and ca...

In his novel The Shadow Wolves (Page Publishing, 2019), Jake Kaminski tells the story of Ethan Crowe, a Lakota Sioux tracker who spent a career with the Delta Forces and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Crowe's story begins in the hellish nightmare of Bosnia, where as a young scout for a Ranger company, he and two other Native Americans help track down the Skorpions, a Serbian militia committing g...

Ken Liu’s second collection of speculative stories explores migration, memory, and a post-human future through the eyes of parents and their children. Whether his characters are adjusting to life on a new planet or grappling with moral quandaries—like whether a consciousness uploaded to a server is still human—they struggle with the age-old task of forging identities that set them apart from the d...

In military thrillers, many authors attempt to create plausible conflicts and many come up short, but James Rosone and Miranda Watson's Rigged (Front Line ,2019), Book one of "The Falling Empire Series," is a chilling what if scenario that is all too plausible. Rigged paints a tale that appears to be ripped from tomorrow's headline. A former military interrogator and military intelligence speciali...

Today I interviewed Stephen Jenkinson. He’s not only an author, an activist, a musician, and the founder of a school, but also an inspired etymologist, a spiritual trickster, and a mythopoetic storyteller cracking sticks and tossing them into a low fire as the spirits in the embers rise with his words. He’s a sorcerer of sorts who disenchants us from some of our most habitual and destructive belie...

Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead, Ricardo found the end of his mortal life, and a new one, as a renegade vampire. For over five hundred years, Ricardo has upset the established order. He has protected his found family from marauding demons, teamed up with a legendary gunslinger, appointed himself the Master of Denver, and called upon a church buried u...

In Docile (Tor.com, 2020), the debut novel by K.M. Szpara, people pay off family debts by working as indentured personal assistants to the ultra-wealthy. Tor describes the book as a “science fiction parable about love and sex, wealth and debt, abuse and power.” Szpara describes the book as "really gay." As it turns out, both descriptions are true. Szpara could have kept the story relatively simply...

As Maya Rodale notes early in this interview, romance novels tend not to get the same respect as other categories of fiction, historical or otherwise. Here, and in her Dangerous Books for Girls, she argues persuasively that this bad reputation is an attempt by life’s insiders to undermine the central message of most romance novels: that outsiders, too, have the right to love, success, and happines...

Today I interview Berry Grass, an essayist with a powerful new collection of linked essays called Hall of Waters (Operating System, 2019). Grass’s aim is nothing less than to demythologize the American Midwest. Grass wants us to see something like the true history of the land and the culture from which the Midwest arose, one built on systemic racism, exploitation, marginalization, and violence. At...

Eliza Griswold writes in Snow in Rome, "we hate being human,/depleted by absence." In her latest poetry collection, If Men, Then (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), Griswold grapples with a world that is fracturing at its foundation. In this series of poems, all at once dark. humorous and questioning, the author moves from the familiar to the unjust to hope with a keen eye. She guides readers throu...

In Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), Sarah Abrevaya Stein weaves a narrative tapestry whose threads are drawn from the archives of one Sephardic family, with roots in the city of Salonica, then in the Ottoman Empire, now Thessaloniki in Greece. The story begins with one of the prominent Jewish citizens of that thriving port city, th...

Laura Waterman talks about her novel, Starvation Shore (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), which relies upon memoirs, letters, and diaries to reconstruct the life of the Greely Party as it attempted to survive impossible conditions. Waterman is a climber, conservationist, and author who has written many books with her husband Guy Waterman about mountain history, climbing and environmental ethic...

To catch the people who killed her environmentalist father, the main character of Karl Schroeder’s Stealing Worlds (Tor Books, 2019) disappears into a virtual world of overlapping LARPs—live action role-playing games. But Sura Neelin soon discovers that the LARPs are more than games. They’re also an underground economy that meets players’ needs for food, shelter, services and everything else the n...

An orphaned young woman disguises herself as a boy in order to escape the dangers of being alone in 1870’s San Francisco. A group of castoffs destroy the bird population of the Farallon Island by stealing and selling their eggs. A young woman raped in the 1980’s struggles to raise her daughter on her own while her unattached best friend becomes a field researcher for the government, counting and m...

In her new book Fat, Pretty, and Soon to Be Old: A Makeover for Self and Society (AK Press 2019), sociologist and storyteller Kimberly Dark considers what it means to look a certain way. Integrating memoir with cultural critique, Dark describes her experience navigating the world as a fat, queer, white-privileged, gender-conforming, eventually disabled, and inevitably aging “girl with a pretty fac...

How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McMaster University, provides a unique sociological analysis of how critics confront the different types of uncertainty associated with their practice. The book explores how reviewers get matched to books,...

Franny Choi’s book-length collection of poetry, Soft Science (Alice James Books 2019), explores queer, Asian American femininity through the lens of robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. As she notes in this interview, “this book is a study of softness,” exploring feeling, vulnerability, and desire. How can you be tender and still survive in a hard and violent world? What does it mean to h...

What does the future hold for the Midwest? A vast stretch of fertile farmland bordering one of the largest concentrations of fresh water in the world, the Midwestern US seems ideally situated for the coming challenges of climate change. But it also sits at the epicenter of a massive economic collapse that many of its citizens are still struggling to overcome. The question of what the Midwest is (a...

If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the rise—especially among young people—resources for addressing them remain scarce and stigmatized, and the conditions themselves remain poorly understood. Even doctors and scientists don’t have all the answers...

In the fantasy medieval land of Trea—a conservative society that despite its worship of the goddess Amur respects her human daughters only as wives and mothers—eighteen-year-old Berona has limited expectations for her future. Securing a handsome husband who will win her heart and teach her to dance seems like enough of a challenge, given that her father keeps presenting her with candidates who can...

Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel, Subduction (Red Hen Press, 2020), provides a lyrical exploration of cultural encounters in the Pacific Northwest. After a Latina anthropologist, Claudia, flees a fractured marriage in Seattle, she throws herself in her fieldwork on the Makah Indian Reservation. There she meets Peter, the community’s prodigal son, who has returned home in search of answers and...

In 1916, Adana Moreau’s parents are killed by American Marines. She flees to Santo Domingo and then to New Orleans. There, she marries a pirate, Titus Moreau, and gives birth to their son, Maxwell. While Maxwell wonders the streets, Adana spends hours at the library. She writes a book, Lost City, and it becomes a science fiction hit. Then she writes a follow-up book, which she and Maxwell definite...

When Nino Cipri entered the Dzanc Short Story Collection Contest, they had no expectation of winning, so when they won, they were shocked. The prize came with a publishing contract, and suddenly Cipri was scrambling for a literary agent, negotiating a contract, and reaching a wider audience. “I wasn't really planning on writing a short story collection for probably another decade,” Cipri says. “I...