New Books In Literature

Today I interview Martin Shaw. In Shaw’s new book, Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2020), he writes, “Here’s a secret I don’t share very often. Myths are not only to do with a long time ago. They have a promiscuous, curious, weirdly up-to-date quality. They can’t help but grapple their way into what happened on the way to work this morning, that video that appalled you on YouTube. Well, they are meant to; if they didn’t they would have been forgotten centuries ago.” In our interview, Shaw invites us to consider the power of myth to guide us not only toward new ways of seeing our current moment—one in which we’re witnessing an unprecedented global pandemic—but also new ways of seeing itself. For Shaw, a mythologist who’s designed courses at Stanford University and who directs the Westcountry School of Myth in the U.K, myths reveal unseen possibilities in our own lives and overlooked chances to reunite with our natural world. The old stories can lead us forward if only we learn how to hear the

Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of scholarly essays devoted solely to the histories and legacies of this subject on North American campuses and in their Atlantic contexts. Gathering together contributions from scholars, activists, and administrators, the volume combines two broad bodies of work: (1) historically based interdisciplinary research on the presence of slavery at higher education institutions in terms of the development of proslavery and antislavery thought and the use of slave labor; and (2) analysis on the ways in which the legacies of slavery in institutions of higher education continued in the post–Civil War era to the present day. The collection features broadly themed essays on issues of religion, economy, and the regional slave trade of the Caribbean. It also includes case studies of slavery’s influence on specific institutions, such as P

In this interview we discuss Fight Fight (Braveship Books, 2018), book 3 of the Raven One series. In Fight Fight, former aviator Kevin Miller explores the next big fight in the South China Sea when errors and miscalculations on the grandest scale drive the world’s greatest maritime powers into conflict. From aboard a nuclear powered super-carrier in the center of the maelstrom readers get a front row seat to the action as well as the planning and deliberation that goes into waging war. In Fight Fight the reader experiences the angst of a pilot about to catapult into the night sky and the frustration of being at the end of a long decision-making whip. Captain Miller also successfully paints the fog of modern war where near instant communications and extremely effective sensors give the decision-makers the illusion of knowledge. As an avid fan of military fiction, I have had an itch for this particular type of book since the Late Tom Clancy left the literary field. Consider the itch scratched. In the interview

Endless Song (Oxford University Press, 2019) is Dr. Archana Venkatesan’s exquisite translation of the Tiruvaymoli (sacred utterance), a brilliant 1102-verse ninth century tamil poem celebrating the poet Nammalvar’s mystical quest for union with his supreme lord, the Hindu great god Viṣṇu. In this interview we discuss the sophisticated structure and profound content of the Tiruvaymoli, along with the translator’s own transformative journey rending into English the meaning, emotion, cadence and kaleidoscopic brilliance proper to this Tamil masterpiece. For information on your host Raj Balkaran’s background, see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Margaret Randall’s new memoir, I Never Left Home: Poet, Feminist, Revolutionary was published by Duke University Press in March 2020. Randall, born in New York City in 1936, lived in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua as an adult, where she was involved in both creative movements and political activism. Known as a writer and oral historian, Randall focuses in this memoir on recreating the communities and historical moments in which she lived. Randall especially emphasizes how her encounter with feminist thinking reshaped how she understood not only her own life, but also the Latin American revolutions she saw up from up close. In the interview, she speaks about her work founding and editing the bilingual literary journal El Corno Emplumado in 1960s Mexico, her experiences connecting with artists and revolutionaries in 1970s Cuba, and her perspective on the 1979 Sandinista revolution from her years living in Nicaragua. Randall talks about the nature of memory and shares some details of her everyday life in extraordin

After a decade spent protecting public officials, Nick Averose has the unique ability to think like an assassin. Now he works as a red-teamer, who tests security systems to find vulnerabilities. His latest assignment, to assess the security of a former CIA director’s home, goes horribly wrong, and Nick gets entangled in a vicious crime that rocks Washington D.C. He knows he’s been framed, and now they’re out to kill him. But who are they, and what do they want? Today I spoke with Matthew Quirk about his new book Hour of the Assassin (William Morrow, 2020). Quirk is the New York Times bestselling author of The 500, The Directive, Cold Barrel Zero, and Dead Man Switch. He studied history and literature at Harvard College and spent five years at The Atlantic reporting on crime, private military contractors, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. His first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award, and he lives in San Diego, California. When he is not writing, he spends his time hiking, skiing, and surfing

The Houston Chronicle’s review of Sarah Adleman’s The Lampblack Blue of Memory: My Mother Echoes (Tolsun 2019) praises that the book “dissects the feelings that have been a part of her since her mother's death with the precision and brutality of a poet and all the awful beauty of a perfectly performed major surgery...It's one of the most beautiful things you're likely to read.” Adleman’s collection, a gorgeous hybrid of poetry and memoir, is a journey through grief and forgiveness. The author’s debut book uses both the personal and the informative to examine and preserve the loss, grief, and cleansing set in motion by her mother’s death. She honors her mother not only in the crafting of these shared memories, but also in the actual formatting of the text itself. Adleman gives her mother voice by including her own work interwoven throughout the retelling. The author does not shy away from the heaviness of absence, her personal reaction to the events, and especially not the profound changes to her father. She u

Mina completed a doctorate in Classics but can’t find a tenure track position. She earns money by teaching adjunct classes and tutoring in Latin. Mina’s husband, Oscar, who works for his distant father importing Japanese beer, hopes that leaving New York City for a few months will help with Mina’s depression. While they’re in London, she plans to work on a paper studying mythological women, only a few of whom survived. Mina wonders if she is one of the ones who is going to win the battle. Today I talked to Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Staring Days (The Overlook Press, 2020). She received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her first novel, Harmless Like You, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and NPR Great Read. She is the editor of the GO HOME! Anthology, and her work has appeared in Granta, Guernica, the Guardian, and the Paris Review. When not writing or teaching, she spends her time painting, snacking on nut-butter or dried seaweed, and walking her dog.

dReed Katz is in many ways an ordinary guy. He shares an apartment in Tel Aviv with his best friend, Daphne, works in a coffee shop, crushes on Lee, a green-eyed man from abroad, and dreads family dinners with his nosy mother. Yet when Reed gets on a bus he has to stand in the white marked section, and he loses his job when the coffee shop gets bombed because of “people like him.” Not only is Reed a person who feels emotions strongly, he’s actually an empath, who can manipulate other people’s emotions, preferably at their invitation, and project feelings into books. His circle of friends includes a seer, Daphne, and his ex, a pyro. They’re all considered sorcerers and feared by most norms. A secretive group, the Sons of Simeon, disrupt the peaceful marches that Reed and his friends participate in, targeting sorcerers for murder in a bid to take power for themselves. Daphne fears that Reed’s continuing presence in the movement will put him in harm’s way. Her visions tell her that Reed may die soon. But Reed, u

One summer, Joni Griffith Wexler realizes that she hasn’t paid enough attention to her life. While her sons are at sleepaway camp and her husband immersed in his work, she rushes from one impulsive decision to the next, striving unsuccessfully for clarity. It takes her two closest friends, an unexpected girls' weekend, and the surprising wisdom of a psychic medium to give her the confidence to take control of her life. Until a shocking event threatens to undo everything. Joni's story as recounted in Then She Woke Up will resonate with anyone who's ever thought, "How did I get here?" A life long writer, Jaime Baum’s background is in journalism and her prior work has appeared in magazines and newspapers such as Better, Living Without and the Sun-Times news group. She studied Journalism and History at Indiana University and spent the majority of her career in public relations. When she’s not reading or writing, Jaime loves to be outdoors walking, hiking, biking and gardening. She is a wife, mother, stepmom, daug

Tyler Hayes's The Imaginary Corpse (Angry Robot, 2019) offers an escape from the unending stress of the Covid-19 pandemic with three simple words: plush yellow triceratops. Nothing could be farther from our collective coronavirus nightmare than the Stillreal, where Hayes’ protagonist, Tippy (the aforementioned triceratops), runs the Stuffed Animal Detective Agency. Which is not to say that the book doesn’t have its own nightmares or traumas; they’re just softened by the fact that all the characters are imaginary friends created by people (“actual people, out there in the real world,” as Tippy explains) who are forced to abandon them after suffering a horrible trauma (domestic violence, child molestation, and fatal car accidents, to name a few). So even though Tippy is a cheery sunflower yellow, his nature is informed by a violent incident that led his creator, eight-year-old Sandra, to surrender him to the liminal world of the Stillreal. There, he solves crimes that happen to other imaginary friends, like his

In Octavia Cade's brilliant collection of poetry Mary Shelley Makes a Monster (Aqueduct Press, 2019), the famous author of Frankenstein crafts a creature out of ink, mirrors, and the remnants of her own heartbreak and sorrow. Abandoned and alone after Shelley’s death, the monster searches for a mother to fill her place. Its journey carries it across continents and time, visiting other female authors throughout the decades — Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, and others. Pulling from the biographical accounts of these amazing authors, these poems beautifully examine the nature of art and creation, reading and consumption, and how monsters are really reflections of ourselves. The monster has no heart. Mary has two. There is the one she keeps in her bureau— wrapped up in silk and parchment, burnt about the edges and stinking of salt. It is the heart of the man who was her lover and it is less damaged than the heart inside her chest. That is a mangled and un-pretty thing, but she t

Like the better-known and perhaps luckier Georgia O’Keeffe, the American painter Agnes Pelton also found her unique vision in the western desert. As Mari Coates details in our conversation, Pelton and O’Keeffe took art classes from the same teacher and had parallel careers in several ways, yet Pelton is relatively unknown despite a number of major exhibitions during her lifetime and one traveling the United States even as this interview airs. But Pelton’s time in the California desert is only a small part of the captivating story traced in The Pelton Papers (She Writes Press, 2020). Born in Germany, where her ex-pat parents connected while escaping family scandals and tragedies, Pelton came to New York at the age of seven. A sickly girl in a dark and brooding house, she survived her childhood with a deeply religious grandmother, an absent father, a strong-minded mother who supported the family by giving music lessons, and no social life to speak of by losing herself in colors and paint. That set her on a path

Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in the face of a devastating disease. Cora, an enslaved child during the Civil War, flees the Yarbrough plantation after her family is murdered and finds refuge at the home of a big-hearted woman. Amadahy, a Cherokee of the Wolf Clan in 1663, loses her child and husband, leaving her with a surviving child and a psychotic mother. A sacred, maternal talisman connects the three women as they search for lasting peace. It’s an emotional journey for these three women, who meet at the river. U.S. Navy veteran Shelly Hoover is the author of Timeless Sisters: Peace at the River. She earned an Ed.D. in Education from Cal State, Sacramento and retired as a public-school administrator in 2013 after being diagnosed with ALS, a terminal motor neuron disease. But physical limitations have not stopped Shelly from educating and advocatin

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, framed by an introduction and an interview with renowned podcaster Christopher Lydon. The book also includes a wry and ruminative collection of "tips for the depressed," organized into something like a glossary of terms—among which are the names of numerous medications he has tried or researched over the years. Together, these texts form an unusual, searching, and poignant hybrid of essay and memoir, inviting readers into the hospital and the therapy office as Scialabba and his caregivers try to make sense of this baffling disease. In Scialabba's view, clinical depression amounts to an "utter waste." Unlike heart surger

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 referred to as the Paññāsa Jātaka, or the “Fifty Jātaka”. Once considered minor and apocryphal, the Paññāsa Jātaka are now recognized as the lifeblood of the region’s literature and an important source of traditional culture. Chris Baker and Pasuk Pongpaichit have translated twenty-one of the best-known tales from the Thai collection of the Paññāsa Jātaka in their recently published book From the Fifty Jātaka: Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka (Silkworm Books, 2019). In addition to the elegant and approachable translations, Baker and Phongpaichit have included an insightful introduction on the Paññāsa Jātaka and have

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 cared nothing for the safety of those those around him, including Ulrich the dog killer, Sonja the one-legged former prostitute, and the unnamed narrator himself. The only thing that really mattered to Reinhardt, according to his amanuensis, was his search for the essence of melancholy. Mark Haber is the author of Reinhardt's Garden (Coffee House Press, 2019). He was born in Washington DC and grew up in Florida. His first collection of stories, Deathbed Conversions, was translated into Spanish in a bilingual edition as Melville’s Beard. His debut novel, Reinhardt’s Garden was longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award

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 genocide on the local populace. The action shifts to the present and the southern border of the United States. Powerful Mexican cartels are utilizing vast stretches of the border to send billions of dollars in illegal drugs into the US. Powerful drug lords preside like kings over their empires, secluded and untouchable in their remote mountain fortresses. Killing fields are being found on both sides of the border. Homeland Security needs a solution. General Darren Evans has been asked to form a special team of Native American trackers to combat the cartels where they are most vulnerable in the Arizona borderlands. The

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 definitions and limits imposed by society, biology—or their parents. “We all have the experience of not wanting to be labeled, of being put into categories that we naturally feel a sense of resistance to,” Liu says. On the episode, he discusses several of the stories in The Hidden Girl and Other Stories (Gallery/Saga Press, 2020) and talks about the art of translation and the role Liu has played in introducing English-speaking readers to some of today’s great Chinese science fiction writers. Liu was on New Books in Science Fiction in 2015 to discuss the first book in his epic fantasy trilogy The Dandelion Dynasty. Rob

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 specialist, Rosone’s experience is evident in every page of the book, from portraying the interrogation of high value threats to situation room sequences full of suspense. In Rigged, an international shadow organization’s plot to unseat a controversial American President unfolds with disastrous consequences. Rosone and Watson weave a tale across years to assemble a world on the edge of the next great conflict. Invoking striking imagery and heart pounding action, Rigged is full of accounts that paint with accuracy the events of a plausible global crisis. As the truth of foreign involvement in American elections lands on headl