New Books in Literature

Juliet McShannon speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Rescue,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows a woman on her search for a lost dog through a neighborhood very different from her own, and explores ideas of loss, class, community, and healing. Juliet also discusses how her childhood in Apartheid South Africa, and young adulthood practicing law during the time of tr...

Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, ...

In an ancient kingdom, a princess takes inspiration from a visiting young woman to challenge her father's views and reach for leadership-and then discovers her muse is a man. The goddess mother of Greek mythology's most famous warrior, Achilles, will do anything to prevent her son's fated early death. In a desperate move, she hides Achilles, against his will, on an island-disguised in a girl's bo...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Matthew D. Del Papa, one of the editors of SuperCanucks: An Anthology of Canadian Small-Town Superheroes (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2026). SuperCanucks features eleven stories that explore the usual superhero tropes while shining a spotlight on the unique corners of Canada. Not your typical big city superhero, but those who live in and around Cana...

Annakeara Stinson's Nerve Damage: A Novel (Knopf, 2026) is a riotous revenge novel about a woman’s quest to escape her stalker ex-boyfriend—by stalking him herself. Clarice’s breakup with P.T. began the usual way—she discovered he was cheating. Then came the constant texts, the nonstop emails from burner accounts, countless phone calls from dozens of different numbers. He showed up outside her apa...

L.L. Madrid's My Lips, Her Voice (Creature Publishing, 2025) takes place in Copper City, a town who's bloody history is steeped in ghost stories and whispers of serial killers, but three girls have caught the attention of something far more sinister. A grandmother tormented by visions tried to warn the town, but no one listened. Now, a haunted inheritance has passed to her granddaughters, Audrey a...

In this debut story collection Patchwork Dolls (Blair, 2026), Ysabelle Cheung weaves an eerie fabulism with tales that cross continents, technology, and time. Set in Hong Kong and America--between the present day and an uncannily altered future--this story collection warps the familiar rules of our world to ask: what does it mean to be Asian and a woman--living under the specter of state and tech...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with David Ly about his novel, Not All Dragons (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).What is it that you are, Rhys? In a land of magic and myth, Rhys awakens on the shore of Lanilia with mysterious wounds on his back and no memory of his life before. Disoriented, he stumbles on the Mernese estuary protected by the mermaid Delia, who is quickly intrigued by this male...

Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and b...

Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with YA author Emily De Angelis about her acclaimed novel, The Stones of Burren Bay (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2024). In a tragic car accident, 15-year-old Norie loses her father while her distant mother is injured. Her prized possession, an antique artist’s box that traveled from Ireland with her great-great-grandmother, is destroyed along with her de...

In Crown City (A Japantown Mystery)" (Soho Crime, 2026), Ryunosuke “Ryui Wada is orphaned at 18, with no family or path left in Japan. He’s lucky when merchants from the states pay for him to get to Pasadena to work in their store selling authentic Japanese merchandise. It’s 1903, and although he’s lonely and confused by American customs, he’s committed to his new life. He thinks he’s starting to...

In Other Lives Our Own (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025) Jason Weiss reflects on travel, language, memory, identity, and the stories we inherit and create. This conversation explores how we inhabit each other's stories, tracing how movement across places and languages reshapes our understanding of self and belonging. Drawing on experiences in New York, Paris, Mexico, California and beyond, Weiss reflects on...

Loretta Chefchaouni's debut The Lustrous Dark (Peachtree Teen, 2026) follows protagonist Shay.Orphaned as a baby, Shay has spent her life training as the midwife’s apprentice. Her role grants her stability, yet Shay has always yearned for more. Namely, motherly affection and answers regarding her mysterious birth—neither of which the midwife deems practical to provide.After Shay discovers her birt...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Wendy J. Fox about her novel, The Last Supper, published by Sante Fe Writer's Project, 2026.  As stay-at-home mom Amanda turns forty, she faces a reckoning. She' s doing her best at parenting eight-year-old Toby, who only wants to eat orange-colored food, and almost-four-year-old Blake, who really should be in pre-school but is home doing YouTub...

Romance novels—especially historical romance novels—thrive on heroes and heroines who don’t match in terms of social class. There must be conflict, after all, or the novel would end before it began. But not even George Bernard Shaw’s mismatched couple in Pygmalion (later My Fair Lady) can claim quite as much distance as Shana Galen’s Tamsin Archer and the Honourable Garret Kildare, the main charac...

New York Times bestselling author Kimberly McCreight delivers a tour de force of character-driven suspense with her latest novel, Someone Else's Husband (Knopf, 2026), the story of two women whose secrets and desires entrap them in a deadly love triangle. You had to rely on the power of love. That he loved you enough not to do the thing that would break your heart. It was paper-thin ice on which t...

From author Justin C. Key comes The Hospital at the End of the World: A Novel (Harper, 2026), set in a near future where artificial intelligence runs the world, involving a young medical student who must unravel family secrets to uncover the truth of his father’s mysterious death. In a time not so far from our own, society is run by a global AI system controlled by an all powerful corporation. Th...

Ro Skelton speaks to Emily Everett about her essay “Naow’s Boutique,” which appears in The Common’s Spring issue. The essay explores Ro’s time living and working in Dakar, where she formed a friendship in her neighborhood that eventually led to a sense of community, and then a community garden, and then a lifelong friendship. Ro also discusses how the essay fits into her focus as a writer – writin...

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet Earth, poor Earth, reduced to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life and love persist, even in the most unexpected, inhospitable places.Two women meet on a beach of artificial sand. One was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other may or may not be a robot. Their love—or any lov...

In 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite’s invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, Charlie is immediately captivated by the Black opulence of L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.”Settling in at a local actress’s energetic boarding house, Charlie discovers a different way of life—one brimming with opp...

With thanks to “forever” plastics, the earth has reverted to sand and dust. Dylan has been raised by her scientist mother, in a pod under the sea, and longs to escape the loneliness of being confined. The only friend she ever had was a pen pal from Mars, who disappeared. With great effort, she’s escorted onto land, to the place of her mother’s employment where she becomes the groundskeeper. Unoffi...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with editor, poet, and author, Terese Mason Pierre about As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories (Spiderline, 2025). A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy. Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology...

Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over ma...

With Taiwan Travelogue winning the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese literature in translation has achieved new heights of visibility in the Anglosphere. In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with writer and translator Kevin Wang about his English language rendition of Spent Bullets (HarperCollins, 2025), another Taiwanese novel that Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King her...