New Books in Literature

Margo Catts’ new novel Among the Lesser Gods (Arcade Publishing, 2017) opens in 1978, as Elena Alvarez, a newly minuted physics graduate living in LA, discovers she’s pregnant.  She considers it to be just one more mistake in a lifetime of screw-ups.  Her mother abandoned her after she accidentally set a deadly fire as a child, and she was raised by her cold distant father. She felt loved only whe...

Douglas Elling has left his home town in England and made a name for himself in Charleston. It’s about twenty years before the US Civil War, and slavery is still very much an institution in South Carolina, but Douglas finds it abhorrent. He has promised his father-in-law to care for the family business, so he can’t simply pack up and go home. Instead he becomes involved in the nascent abolition mo...

For Inspector J.P. Dillal, the main protagonist in K. R. Richardson’s Blood Orbit (Pyr, 2018), the expression “I’ve got a lot on my mind” takes on new meaning when he allows his bosses to replace a good chunk of his brain with a mobile crime lab. What he gets in exchange for submitting to the risky surgery is a promotion that allows him to catapult to the top ranks of the Gattis Corporation’s poli...

There comes a time in every man’s life when he’s got to grow up. Personally, I found growing up very hard. I went to college and fell in love with it. And what’s not to love? You meet really interesting people (some very attractive, if you get my drift); you get to yak about really fascinating though useless stuff into the wee hours (and sleep late!); you can play pick-up basketball at nearly any...

Cat Rambo‘s Hearts of Tabat (WordFire Press, 2018) is rich in emotions and description, though it revolves around a murder mystery as well. We experience the imaginary port city of Tabat through the eyes of four narrators, two merchants and two siblings from a poor household.  Adelina, the secret publisher of a newspaper, and Sebastiano, a member of the Mages’ College who handles trade negotiation...

In a break with protocol, I decided to interview a novelist rather than a military historian. Nick Dybek, a creative writing professor at Oregon State University has written a terrific novel, The Verdun Affair: A Novel (Scribner, 2018). It’s protagonist is Tom, an American living in France after World War I, having served as an ambulance driver for the American Field Service. He has the macabre ta...

“Big boys, the story in this little book is told for you.” Thus begins the preface to Zhang Tianyi’s The Pidgin Warrior (Balestier Press, 2017), as translated by the wonderful David Hull. Not just for boys (big or small), The Pidgin Warrior is a moving, hilarious novel set in 1930s Shanghai during wartime. Hull’s translation is a sensitive and humane rendering of characters that are by turns laugh...

Where My Body Ends and the World Begins (Allium Press, 2017) imagines what it might have been like for one of the survivors of a tragic fire that took place on December 1, 1958, in a Catholic school on Chicago’s west side. The fire broke out just before the end of the day at Our Lady of the Angels School and went unnoticed for a critical amount of time. Ninety-two children and three nuns were kill...

Sumana Roy‘s first book How I Became a Tree (Aleph, 2017) is impossible to classify. Part-philosophical tract, part-memoir and part-literary criticism, the book is a record of her explorations in “tree-time.” Intrigued by the balance, contentment and rootedness of trees, Roy begins to delve into a corpus of human knowledge devoted to understanding the mysteries of plant life. Effortless and eclect...

In 1974, a two-year old Korean girl named Mi Jin Kim was sent from the country and culture of her birth to the United States, where she was adopted by a man and woman who would become her American parents and where she would become the artist and writer Mary-Kim Arnold. Her new book, Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018), is her attempt to grapple with that history and its aftermath, to u...

Sharon Solwitz‘s novel, Once, in Lourdes (Spiegel & Grau, 2017), is the story of four close friends in the fictional town of Lourdes, Michigan, who decide, during the summer before their senior year of high school, to make a suicide pact. The four friends are all struggling with something beyond normal adolescent angst–Kay is tormented by her weight and the new stepfamily she acquired after her mo...

The “artificial” in artificial intelligence is easy to understand. But the meaning of “intelligence” is harder to define. How smart can an A.I. get? Can it teach itself, change its programming, become independent? Can it outfox its human inventors, be guided by self-interest, have feelings? While companies like Google and Facebook are competing to develop A.I. technology, science fiction writers a...

“What should be wild” is really asking who should be wild? Simultaneously a plea against the domestication of women, a unique fairy tale, and impressive literary fiction, this novel explores the taming of women through the experiences of the modern Maisie and some of her female ancestors, who sought shelter in a magical forest. Maisie Cothay, whose story unfolds in the present, is frightened of he...

Sam J. Miller loves cities. He lives in one, has a day job dedicated to making urban life more humane and fair, and has set his new novel, Blackfish City (Ecco, 2018), in a teeming metropolis full of people who are grateful to be there. The fictional metropolis is Qaanaak, which floats in arctic waters like a massive 8-armed asterisk and serves as a refuge for those fleeing climate change, resourc...

“It begins with a house and it ends in ashes.” So opens Robert Goolrick’s rich, lyrical new novel, The Dying of the Light (Harper, 2018). The house is Saratoga, a colonial-era estate in Virginia that is at once a joy and a burden to the family that lives there, the Cookes. In particular, it determines the life trajectory of Diana Cooke, the eighteen-year-old heiress charged with saving her family...

In Heaven Was Detroit: From Jazz to Hip-Hop and Beyond (Wayne State University Press, 2016), M. L. Liebler curates an exhaustive collection of essays about Detroit music by a diverse group of music scholars, journalists, and musicians. Instead of relying on familiar narratives about Motown and rock and roll, this anthology engages a vast array of musical genres and sub-genres, while sharing the of...

If Tolstoy had written Spoonbenders (Knopf, 2017), he might have started it: “All happy families are alike; each family of psychics is unhappy in its own way.” Then again, who needs Tolstoy when you have Daryl Gregory, whose masterful family drama is tied together with telekinesis, astral traveling, and genuine mindreading magic. A Nebula Award finalist and an NPR Best Book for 2017, Spoonbenders...

If you’ve read the news or been on the internet at all this year, you’ve probably come across the hashtag #MeToo, the rallying cry of a movement aimed at calling out the harassment and abuse men in positions of power have perpetuated against mostly silent women for years without consequence. But what began as a takedown of some of the most powerful abusers in our country—the Bill Cosbys and Harvey...

Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, 2017) is a work of science fiction inspired by a real-world dystopia: a country with tens of millions of “extra” men who will never find spouses. The country is China, which in 1979 adopted its one-child policy in the hope of reducing its population of 940 million to around 700 million. The plan was intended to last only one generation, but it end...

What is it really like to have a family member with serious mental illness? Sandra Allen’s unique book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia (Scribner, 2018), addresses this question. In the book, a hybrid between memoir and third-person narrative, Sandra publishes excerpts from her schizophrenic uncle’s autobiography interlaced with her own narrative about her uncle and...

Jade City combines what its author, Fonda Lee, calls the 3 Ms: mafia, magic and martial arts. Lee’s talent for depicting complex characters struggling with both internal and external conflicts earned Jade City nominations for the Nebula and Locus Awards. The book is her first written for adults. (Her previous books, Exo and Zeroboxer, were written for young adults and both were shortlisted for the...

Most of us hear the Cinderella story in childhood: a mean stepmother favors her own daughters and controls her hapless husband, turning the sweet and innocent Cinderella into a scullery maid and refusing to let her attend the royal ball, only to be thwarted by a fairy godmother and Cinderella’s own beauty and charm. Cinderella marries Prince Charming and lives happily ever after, while the stepmot...

Today on the New Books in Music podcast James Cook discuses his book, Memory Songs: A Personal Journey into the Music that Shaped the 90s (Unbound, 2018). The book details the author’s own adolescent musical obsessions from The Beatles to John Barry from Led Zeppelin to The Waterboys that led him to form his own band Flamingoes with his twin brother, Jude, and move to London in the early 1990s and...

The technological “singularity” is a popular topic among futurists, transhumanists, philosophers, and, of course, science fiction writers. The term refers to that hypothetical moment when an artificial superintelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to runaway—and unpredictable—advances in technology. Among the biggest unknowns is whether or not the superintelligence will turn out to be be...

When Annie Rushton heads west to keep house for her older brother on his Montana homestead, she expects to leave marriage and motherhood behind her. After all, the husband she walked out on at twenty, after the birth of their daughter sent her into a spiral of panic and depression, has divorced her and forbidden contact with their baby, citing fears for his own and the child’s safety. In 1911, a r...