New Books in Literature

David B. Coe just finished a busy year in which he published three novels, two of which we discuss in this episode of New Books in Science Fiction and Fantasy. His Father’s Eyes (Baen, 2015) is the second book (the first, Spell Blind, was also published in 2015) to follow the adventures of P.I. Justis Fearsson, a weremyste whose investigations are interrupted once a month during the full moon when...

Every poet has their obsessions and for James Franco they are childhood, gender, sex, innocence, and the work place he knows best: the film industry. Within these poetic frames we’re introduced to various voices, landscapes nearly worn out with elegy, and a repertoire of imagery that is both tender and violent. Franco is our poet of earnest grotesquerie, favoring clarity to vagueness as he depicts...

J. Robert Lennon is a novelist, actually–better known for his longer work (Mailman, Familiar, Happyland). His most recent book, though, collects his short stories from the past 15 years: See You In Paradise (Graywolf Press, 2014): shorter glimpses into smaller headspaces, offshoots: sundries and etcetera from over a decade of writing fiction. This is sort of a long time, if you think about it. In...

In Lady of the Moon (Headmistress Press, 2015), the reader is graced not only with the poetry of Amy Lowell, but with sonnets in response and a scholarly essay on the poet’s life, love, and work. Amy Lowell lived and wrote in a time when she could not be entirely herself, could not fully claim her rightful space among the great writers of love poetry and celebrations of the beloved. She had to rev...

The reverberations of Henry VIII’s tumultuous reign continued to echo long after the monarch’s death. England teetered into Protestantism, then veered back into Catholicism before settling into an uneasy peace with the ascension of Elizabeth I. But for the survivors of the first two shifts, the approaching death of Mary Tudor in 1558 created great anxiety. No one knew, then, that Elizabeth would c...

Dynamite (Bull City Press, 2015) is transit distilled. Anders Carlson-Wee‘s poems employ movement as mechanism and movement as reverence in a journey that most dream of making yet few ever do. On a cross-country train trip, brothers Kai and Anders armed themselves with a video camera, a secret language of bird calls, and minds tuned to verse. Watch the coal-dust cook in the wind-eddies. Watch it l...

At a time when science fiction is more likely to portray ecosystems collapsing rather than flourishing, Jane Lindskold‘s Artemis series is an anomaly. Its eponymous planet is not an ecological disaster but rather full of so many wonders that it was once a vacation paradise for a now vanished society. Of course, like any good science fiction (or fiction, in general, for that matter) Lindskold’s Art...

Ryan Ridge‘s American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2014) is at odds with category: it doesn’t really fit neatly, or even at all, into any preconceived notion of what prose fiction should read like, or effect in the reader. Ridge’s novella-length work is something more like a Lonely Planet travel guide, or the recovered fragments of some distant, arcane encyclopedia. But even Ridge isn’t qu...

What do the jobs of opera singer, lawyer and science fiction writer have in common? Answer: Melinda Snodgrass. The author of the just published Edge of Dawn‘s first ambition was to sing opera. But after studying opera in Vienna, she came to the conclusion that “I had a nice voice, [but] I didn’t have a world-class voice.” She then went to law school and worked for several years as a lawyer. Unfort...

In her first novel, The Lovers and the Leavers (Fourth Estate, 2015), Abeer Hoque undertakes a literary challenge that I suspect even the most seasoned writer would find daunting: how do you tell the stories of those people, old and young, cosmopolitan and rural, living throughout the world in the South Asian diaspora? She meets this challenge through a series of interconnected stories, in which t...

For his second novel, James L. Cambias chose one of the most challenging settings for a science fiction writer: the near future. Unlike speculative fiction that leaps centuries or millennia ahead or takes place on other planets, a book about the near future presents a world that varies only incrementally from the present. The risk, of course, is that the author’s vision will all-too-quickly be pro...

There’s far more to Swedish literature than Pippi Longstocking and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s the message Anna Jakobsson Lund and Oskar Kallner are trying to send the English-speaking world through their contributions to Waiting for the Machines to Fall Asleep (Affront Publishing, 2015), a collection of short stories by Swedish authors. Until recently, the world of science fiction in...

Porochista Khakpour moved to an apartment with large picture windows in downtown Manhattan shortly before September 11, 2001, giving her a painfully perfect view of the terrorist attacks. “The big event of my life was of course 9/11,” Khakpour says. “I experienced a lot of post traumatic stress from it and think about it constantly.” It’s no surprise that the assault on the Twin Towers features pr...

If you’re a reader, then you know the joy of discovering books. You also know that some of those discoveries stand out. Yes, there’s the pleasure of finding a good book. And there’s even those rare occasions where you find the right book: the right book at the right time in your life, the one that somehow shapes or bolsters who you are. And then there are those other moments, where the book you fi...

Ferrett Steinmetz first built an audience as a blogger, penning provocative essays about “puns, politics and polyamory” (among other things) with titles like “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Awesome Sex” and “How Kids React To My Pretty Princess Nails.” In recent years, he has drawn accolades as an author of speculative fiction, writing short stories and earning a Nebula nomination in 2011 for his...

Despite the odds, Meg Elison did it. First, she finished the book she wanted to write. Second, she found a publisher–without an agent. Third, she won the Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction, a stunning achievement for a first-time author with a small, independent press. The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press, 2014) is set in the American West after an epidemic has kill...

Short story writing, novel writing, and translating require a variety of skills and strengths that are hardly ever found in a single person. Ken Liu is one of those rare individuals who has them all. He is perhaps best known for short stories like The Paper Menagerie, which (according to his Wikipedia entry) was the first work of fiction to earn Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards. But this yea...

Despite being Germany’s most famous literary lion, in 1786 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had to jump on a mail coach incognito to begin his travels to Italy (of course, he asked permission first from his patron the duke Karl August). InThe Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany (Princeton University Press, 2006), Michael Gorra takes the reader on a reverse journey, for it is by slipping in “...

David Hull‘s new translation of Mao Dun’s Waverings (Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014)(Research Centre for Translation, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014) is both a beautiful literary work and a boon for scholars and teachers working in the field of modern Chinese studies. Waverings is the second work in the Eclipse trilogy, three books that were published serially in The Short Story Maga...

Jennifer Marie Brissett‘s first novel, Elysium, or the World After (Aqueduct Press, 2014), portrays a fractured world, one whose seemingly irreversible destruction does nothing to dampen the survivors’ collective will to live. Brissett showed similar determination in writing the book, whose non-traditional structure places it outside the mainstream. Fortunately, her approach has been validated, fi...

While science fiction often seeks to imagine the impact of new science on the future, Rod Duncan explores an opposite: what happens when science remains frozen in the past. In The Bullet-Catcher’s Daughter‘s alternate history, the Luddites prevailed in their protests 200 years ago against labor-replacing machinery, leaving science and culture stuck for generations in a Victorian-like age. Against...

It’s no surprise that when scientists in Ben H. Winters‘ The Last Policeman series declare that a 6.5-mile asteroid is going to destroy life as we know it on October 3, civilization starts to unravel. Governments collapse. People quit their jobs and abandon their families. Survivalists stock up on guns and food, imagining there’s a way to outsmart the impending holocaust. Fatalists sink into hedon...

Kameron Hurley has been honored for her mastery of numerous forms. Her first novel, God’s War, earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschy Award for Best Debut Novel. Her essay “We Have Always Fought”–about the history of women in conflict–was the first blog post ever to win a Hugo Award. And although her tweets haven’t won awards (yet), she is also an animated and arti...

This week’s podcast was an experiment. Rather than record the conversation with author Alex London over Skype, I decided to take the subway to Brooklyn and meet with him face-to-face in a coffee shop. I found it liberating to be unchained from an Internet connection, which has been known to fail mid-conversation, but the price of having a barista nearby is boisterous background noise. London’s nov...

Astronomy and astrology once went hand in hand: people studied the location and motion of celestial bodies in order to make astrological predictions. In the seventeenth century, the paths of these two disciplines forked so that today astronomy is a well-established science while astrology is allowed only as close to the word “science” as the suffix “pseudo-” allows. Lydia Netzer, in How to Tell To...