New Books In Literature

After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing. Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility. Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against th

Margaret Nowaczyk’s Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery is a touching collection of personal essays exploring the impact of genetics, ancestry, and immigration on our lives. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery talks to Margaret, who is best-selling Polish-Canadian author and pediatric clinical geneticist. In Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery Margaret Nowaczyk explores different facets of her life, from listening to the radio dramas of her childhood in Communist Poland to her work now as a pediatric clinical geneticist. These are beautifully crafted essays, full of hard-won truths and insights, generously shared with the reader. Whether struggling with English as a teenaged refugee or documenting the process of permanent hair dye, Nowaczyk moves seamlessly between scientific and personal writing, bridging the gap between these two areas with elegance and humour. Marrow Memory is an invitation to readers to explore the ways in which our experiences and identities are entangled with our ancestral history. “

Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. He was inspired by her musicality, her poetry, and her willingness to defy musical conventions. Nearly every one of her songs spoke to him in some way. As a budding songwriter whose music was widely performed in churches around the country, he was motivated by her superb tunings, phrasing, and melodies. Later, he focused more on lyrics and prose, hers and his own, eventually earning a master’s in creative fiction and working in the world of professional writing. He continued to follow Joni’s career and never got tired of her music, which helped him navigate the ups and downs of his life. Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell (HarperOne, 2025) is a beautiful memoir about the struggle of a gay writer intertwined with the life and career of the magnificent Joni Mitchell. Paul Lisicky grew up in southern New Jersey but has lived most of his adult life in Massac

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a darkly humorous thriller set in modern America's age of anxiety, by New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin. In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jason about his rambunctiously thrilling and thought-provoking novel. About I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom: Outside Los Angeles, a driver pulls up to find a young woman sitting on a large black box. She offers him $200,000 cash to transport her and that box across the country, to Washington, DC. But there are rules: He cannot look inside the box. He cannot ask questions. He cannot tell anyone. They must leave immediately. He must leave all trackable devices behind. As these eccentric misfits hit the road, rumors spread on social media that the box is part of a carefully orchestrated terror attack intended to plunge the USA into civil war. The truth promises to be even stranger, and may change how you see the world. About Jason Pargin: Jason Pargin is a New York T

Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing. Gray also discusses how they started writing poetry, how they approach drafting and revision, and how their work in public health fits with and complements their work in poetry. We also hear a reading of Gray’s first poem in The Common, “November 19, 2022,” about the Club Q nightclub shooting in Colorado Springs. Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, transfemme writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, ONLY POEMS, Frontiers in Medicine and elsewhere. They have received fe

Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents' volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis. As Jo and Bernie's imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents' realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne--free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence--rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she's learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world. With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafte

Today I talked to Lisa F. Rosenberg about Fine, I'm a Terrible Person (Sibylline Press, 2025). The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter. Born in the 500-year-old Jewish community of Rhodes, she mixes Judeo-Espanol (Ladino) aphorisms into her speech and thinks she speaks Spanish, but few can understand her. With an expired license and an ancient car, she drives to Los Angeles hoping to find a treasure after the death of her father’s last wife. Aurora’s daughter Leyla is also affected by her father’s abrupt departure and spends her life seeking perfection, trying not to let her mother make her crazy, and striving to fit into their wealthy San Francisco community. When she learns that her husband might be having an affair, she takes her two young sons for a madcap weekend in Los Angeles where she’ll have to bend a few rules, grapple with her mother, sneak into her husban

NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Tim Blacket about his award-winning debut short story collection, Grandview Drive (Nightwood Editions, 2024). Grandview Drive won two Saskatchewan Book Awards—the Fiction Book Award and the First Book Award. This is a pensive and darkly stunning collection that investigates the strange and unexpected intersections of loneliness and connection. From his car, a lonely, heartbroken man secretly watches strangers going about their lives in the comfort of their own homes; when caught, he wrecks his car in an attempt to escape. A man hears a car wreck outside his home and has a wild night of romance with a strange woman he meets at the scene. A reclusive old writer starts to believe he is becoming his own characters as he writes. A college student looks to his girlfriend's diary for pointers on how he should act. A mother confronted with her estranged son's death by car wreck organizes a memorial service for a list of attendees she has never met. This collection of sixteen connec

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet. Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and

Adoption is often painted as a happy, inspirational act—a baby finds a family and lives happily ever after. But the truth is that adopted children experience displacement and rupture from their mother and that trauma can impact an individual for a lifetime. Adoption can lead to feelings of loss and grief not just for the adoptee, but for the biological and adoptive parents as well. This startling fact comes vividly to life in Janet Sherlund’s heartbreaking memoir, Abandoned at Birth: Searching for the Arms that Once Held Me (Worth, 2024). In her literary debut, Janet Sherlund explores the complex issues so many adoptees and their parents grapple with, including the complicated emotions of rejection, loss, grief, denial, and shame. Sherlund, who was given up for adoption within days of her birth, shares her journey to fulfill her lifetime longing for connection with her family of origin, her instinctive ache for connection with her birth mother, and what it was like to have a “borrowed identity.” In poignant d

As Nazi tanks roll toward Leningrad in August 1941, an unmarried nineteen-year-old ballerina gives birth to twin girls in the soon-to-be besieged city. Bereft of hope, the dancer—once a rising star at the Kirov—slashes her wrists, but her babies survive, rescued by the devoted friend who arrives just too late to save their mother. The friend, too, is a dancer with the Kirov, and her tutelage and self-sacrifice ensure that the girls, Maya and Natasha, become students at the Vaganova Academy after the Siege of Leningrad is broken. We meet the twins as they enter their senior year in 1958. At once inseparable and competitive, Maya and Natasha have developed quite different personalities, with Natasha the leader and future star, Maya her loyal follower. But as they turn seventeen, various factors pull them apart: boys; the changing climate of Khrushchev’s USSR; and the approaching end to their schooling, which even in a state-run economy doesn’t guarantee anyone a specific place in the world. But it’s when the st

After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children. Sienna and her little brother Siddhartha grow up in a Miami Beach mansion without schools, doctors, or attention. It’s the 1980s and their dad uses the mansion, with its dock on the water, as a base for his drug dealing and to house the seekers and lost souls who follow his lackadaisical cult, leaving Sienna and Siddhi to raise themselves. Their dotty grandmother and distant occasionally picks up some slack but won’t take responsibility for her son’s failings as a father. Sienna realizes that she and Siddhi have to raise themselves in this intriguing and unusual story about siblings helping each other survive a dysfunctional family. Janna Brooke Wallack’s stories have been published by literary publications such as Hobart, Upstreet, Glimmer Train Press, American Literary Review, and more. Her short story "Campaigning" was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Short Fiction. N

NBN host Hollay Ghadery interviews Toronto author Caroline Topperman about her new book, Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family's Search Across History for Belonging (HCI, December 17, 2024). Your Roots Cast a Shadow explores where personal history intersects with global events to shape a family’s identity. From the bustling markets of Baghdad to the quiet streets of Stockholm, Topperman navigates the murky waters of history as she toggles between present and past, investigating the relationship between migration, politics, identity, and home. Her family stories bring history into the present as her paternal grandmother becomes the first woman allowed to buy groceries at her local Afghan market while her husband is tasked with building the road from Kabul to Jalalabad. Topperman’s Jewish grandfather, a rising star in the Communist Party, flees Poland at the start of WWII one step ahead of the Nazis, returning later only to be another Jew rejected by the Party. Topperman herself struggles with new cultural expec

Ethereal, soul-stirring, and playful, Baby Cerberus (Buckrider Books, 2024) by Natasha Ramoutar traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives. Flitting from myths and folklore to video games to imagined futures, each piece asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures, and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in each section with the riddles as two lost souls try to find each other through time. These poems tug on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here. While Baby Cerberus centers fun and nostalgia with allusions to video games, internet lore, and Tamagotchis, there are still heavy themes throughout which address misogyny, racism, and colonization. The unique integration of literary topics with some of the more pop culture references will distinguish the book in the minds of readers and expand what we can ask of poetry. More about Natasha Ramoutar: Natas

After her husband Jonah asks for a divorce, Hailey Gelman’s difficult life in Binghamton turns into six weeks of litigation and custody battles in Tova Mirvis’s new novel, We Would Never (Avid Reader Press 2025). After she files a motion to move with their young daughter to Florida, the tension escalates, and Jonah is suddenly murdered. Hailey is the prime suspect. Hailey’s father, who had to rebuild his life after his academic advisor took credit for his work is dying of Parkinsons; her mother, whose reason for living is to make sure her family is safe, makes reckless decisions, her brother Nate, the troublemaker who managed to graduate from medical school and works in his father’s dermatology practice. tries to protect his sister, and her other brother Adam, can’t stand their mother’s interference, moves to Maine, and refuses to participate in family events of any kind. Based on a true story, We Would Never is about family loyalty, the damage of divorce, and the fierceness of parents’ love for their childre

On this NBN podcast, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed author Ayelet Tsabari about gorgeous debut novel, Songs for the Broken Hearted (Random House, September 10, 2024). Many people know of Ayelet from her memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. Songs for the Broken Hearted tells the story of a young Yemeni Israeli woman who learns of her mother’s secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter. This is a salient exploration of the cost of secrets and the power of women’s voices. "In her new novel, Ayelet Tsabari’s craft is at its apex. Her characters are alive, the story skillfully structured, and the tragic, hidden history of Yemenite Jews expertly woven into the lives of people you will laugh with and

When the nobility and gentility of England are at their wits end, they send a discrete note to Miss Vivienne Clarke’s Governess Bureau. Only accepting the very best clients, their governesses are coveted, with every governess following three rules: 1.You must have an impeccable record. 2.You must bring a special skill to the table. 3.You must never fall in love… In this interview with Dr. Miranda Melcher, Emily E K Murdoch takes listeners behind the scenes to explore the historical research that went into the six-book Governess Bureau series (Dragonblade) published by Dragonblade from 2021 to 2022. They also discuss how the novels bring together the genres of historical fiction, mystery, and romance, how the series is structured and why, and much more. If you’ve ever been interested in how series are created and genres are smashed - this is the conversation for you! This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiati

“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.” Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld: A Novel (Knopf, 2025) is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immers

River, Diverted is a wild and wonderfully dark and campy novel by Jamie Tennant, published by Palimpsest Press in 2022. River Black found cult success writing slasher flicks but has grown increasingly disillusioned and unhappy. When a mysterious book appears in her mailbox, her life is turned upside down. River returns to Nagano, Japan, where the book originated, hoping to pay respects to old friends and revisit her past. Instead, she finds her memory is duplicitous, her reality is porous, and the mysterious book is more alive than she could have believed. River, Diverted is a dark fairy tale that explores the trickery of memory, the delicacy of friendship, the nature of creativity and the deliverance of hope. Filled with pop culture references and a deep love of monster movies, River, Diverted is both a light-hearted and subtly serious read that will captivate readers. About Jamie Tennant: Jamie Tennant is a writer and radio program director based in Hamilton, ON. A long-time music enthusiast, James has cove

Today I talked to Saad T. Farooqi about his new novel White World (Cormorant Books, 2024). Allah has burned the sky away. A mysterious snow falls over everything. Is it an endless winter? Is it the result of a nuclear exchange with India? A celestial impact? Now a barren wasteland, what little is left of Pakistan is heavily segregated along religious lines. For Avaan, a gun in the hand feels as natural as breathing. An apostate pariah living under martial law and religious bigotry, violence has become a way of life. What respite he had from this terrifying world — his brother, his family, and Doua, the love of his life — was snatched away in military raids. Now broken, Avaan finds himself involved in a civil war that poisons everything he’s ever believed in. The army shadows his every move, a mob boss wants him dead, and a legendary resistance leader has taken a keen interest in him. But there is a ray of hope: Avaan discovers that Doua is alive. Obsessed with finding her, he takes a stand against the army, t