New Books In Literature

From the mind of acclaimed reporter Gary Baum comes In Pursuit of Beauty (Blackstone, 2025), a striking debut novel that examines the nature of truth and allure in our modern world. What would you endure to fulfill your dreams? What would you do to have the perfect body? For Dr. Roya Delshad, the answers are anything and everything. A sought-after Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, Roya is also the highest example of her craft. She's had every inch of her own body sculpted, one procedure at a time. All to escape a painful and lonely past. But when Roya gives the gift of beauty to those who can't afford the cost, the media labels her "the Robin Hood of Roxbury Drive," and she soon finds herself pleading her case from inside a prison cell. Hoping to resurrect her reputation and obscure a trail of unhappy clients, Roya tells her story with the help of the blithely handsome Wes Easton, a journalist and failed screenwriter who agrees to ghostwrite her memoir. In a twistingly tense pas de deux, Wes struggles to tell fa

What if our society’s deepest prejudices weren’t about race, gender, or sexuality—but height? In his groundbreaking allegorical novel, acclaimed Jordanian author and activist Fadi Zaghmout imagines just such a world, crafting a powerful meditation on discrimination and desire that speaks directly to our contemporary debates about identity and inclusion. The Man of Middling Height (Syracuse University Press, 2025) follows a short dressmaker whose life is upended when she meets Tallan, a man whose middle height places him outside the rigid tall/short binary that governs their society. As their forbidden romance blossoms, they must navigate a world where height determines everything from social status to romantic possibilities. Through their story and those of surrounding characters—including a short person in a polyamorous relationship with two tall partners, and a tall activist who scandalously loves another tall person—Zaghmout deftly reframes contemporary discussions about gender identity and sexuality thro

It’s the early 1900s and Brigid is restricted by straightlaced Irish society and a difficult stepmother, but her father is loving and supportive. She and her cousin Molly dream of life in Yankeeland, a.k.a. America, but only Brigid gets the chance once she’s married, and a lifetime of correspondence follows. While Molly thrives back in Ireland, Brigid’s dream of having a child leads to unexpected problems in a society that values women for their childbearing capabilities. With little to no help available for the problem of infertility, her mental health suffers. Irish author Lacy Fewer based this moving historical story on the letters she inherited from her great-aunt who emigrated in 1908. Lacy Fewer is the recipient of the Literary Titan Book Award for her debut novel Yankeeland, a powerful story of family secrets and societal change. Fewer, born and raised in Ireland, has nearly three decades of experience working in the financial services sector. She earned numerous degrees and certifications, including:

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alexis von Koniglow about her new novel, The Exclusion Zone (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).  About The Exclusion Zone:  She would harness fear. And this terrifying place would help her do it. Renya, a scientist who studies how people react to fear, flees a troubled marriage to conduct research on the scientists working in the “exclusion zone” around Chernobyl. In the eerily silent forests surrounding the research station, she finds more is haunting her than the dangers of radiation exposure. As she gathers data from her colleagues and probes historical records of the Chernobyl disaster, unsettling questions rise to the surface. Who is funding her research? Why are all the scientists’ findings off? And what do those who stalk the ruins of the abandoned city nearby want? In this atmospheric tale, Alexis von Konigslow deftly weaves the struggles of women in science with the impact of politics, both past and present, on people and on the environment. Part ghost story

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alpha Nkuranga about her deeply powerful and unforgettable memoir, Born to Walk: My Journey of Trials and Resilience (Goose Lane Editions, 2024). “My grandparents used to tell me Rwanda is a country unlike any other, and I knew they spoke the truth. Blessed with majestic mountains and breathtaking valleys, it is a sacred and spiritual land. And yet Rwandan men drenched the land in blood in acts of hate so horrific that the stains of those three years will not fade in one hundred lifetimes.” At the age of eight, Alpha Nkuranga made a fateful decision. With war raging around her, she grabbed the hand of her younger brother, Elijah, and ran from her grandparents’ home. When they came to a swamp, they hid until it was safe to escape. Weeks later, they joined a group of refugees, who were fleeing to Tanzania. “If I kept walking,” Alpha remembers thinking, “I could tell my story.” Nkuranga emigrated to Canada more than a decade later. She now works with women

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.How to Dodge a Cannonball (Henry Holt, 2025) is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future―as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler―until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate―until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slav

The year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction--detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance--was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention. This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virt

Jesse Browner is the author of the novels Sing to Me (Little Brown, 2025) The Uncertain Hour and Everything Happens Today, among others, as well as of the memoir How Did I Get Here? He is also the translator of works by Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, Rainer Maria Rilke, Matthieu Ricard and other French literary masters. He lives in New York City. Recommended Books: Cormac McCarthy, The Road Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires Susanna Clarke, Piranesi Dezso Kosztolanyi, Skylark Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

After Gwin Gilmore loses her adjunct teaching job, mother, and boyfriend, she leaves the south and heads for the cottage she’s just inherited on the Maine coast. It’s in the town her family visited every summer, people still remember her, and she has some old friends there, but it’s also filled with terrible memories of her sister’s drowning. And the old houses are slowly giving way to ugly condos and mini mansions. Anna grapples with a teenage runaway, a realtor trying to condemn her cottage, a handsome artist, and the ghosts of previous tenants who make their presence known. This is a beautiful novel about overcoming past failures, finding a community, and moving forward. Libby Buck earned her BA in English from the University of Virginia, her MA in art history from Columbia University, and PhD. in art history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While her general area of expertise is Nineteenth Century France, her dissertation focused upon the Gustave Moreau museum and its challenge to tr

 Nightshining (Milkweed, 2025) Jennifer Kabat is the author of The Eighth Moon, her writing has also appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, and The Believer. She teaches at the school of Visual Arts and the New School. An Apprentice herbalist, she lives in rural Upstate New York and serves on her volunteer fire department. Recommended Books: Hélène Bessette, Lily is Crying Jean Craighead George, My Side of the Mountain Majula Martin, Last Fire Season Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Lindsay Zier-Vogel about her new novel, The Fun Times Brigade (Book*hug Press, 2025).  From acclaimed author Lindsay Zier-Vogel comes an insightful and heart-rending exploration of motherhood, grief, and the search for identity. Amy is a new mother, navigating the fog of those bewildering early days and struggling with a role she feels ill-prepared for. It’s the first time in a decade that she hasn’t been living the busy life of an acclaimed children’s musician, and her sense of self is unravelling. To make matters worse, her bandmates have seemingly abandoned her. In flashbacks, we see Amy’s journey to success—her stumblings as a solo singer-songwriter and her eventual rise to fame as a member of the Fun Times Brigade. But as the novel progresses—and Amy grapples with a devastating loss—we come to understand how precarious definitions of artistic success can be. The Fun Times Brigade examines the enduring challenges of reconciling being an artist with

Tochi Onyebuchi’s novel Harmattan Season: A Novel (Tor Books, 2025) follows Boubacar, a veteran and private eye living in French occupied West Africa, as he begins a reluctant journey to discover what happened to the bleeding woman who stumbled onto his doorway and vanished soon after. That mystery quickly drags Bouba into exactly the kind of violence and political intrigue he had been working so hard to avoid. In this interview, Onyebuchi describes finding Boubacar’s voice and the different noir tropes he was most excited about. We discuss fiction as a way to examine colonialism, magic as a tool for social exploration as well as engaging set pieces, and the joy of fast-paced novels. We also talk depictions of violence, world-wise urchin kids, and experimentation and growth throughout a writing career. Harmattan Season is a compelling and thoughtful adventure and it was so much fun discussing it with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a p

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Bianca Marais about her delightful and highly entertaining new book, A Most Puzzling Murder (Harper Collins, 2025),  How do you solve a murder that hasn't happened yet?Destiny Whip is a former child prodigy, world-renowned enigmatologist and very, very alone. A life filled with loss has made her a recluse, an existence she’s content to endure until a letter arrives inviting her to interview for the position of Scruffmore family historian. Not only does an internet search for the name yield almost nothing, it’s a role she never applied to in the first place!She decodes the invitation's hidden message with ease, and its promise to reveal her family secrets proves too powerful a draw for the orphaned Destiny, who soon finds herself on Eerie Island. It’s a place whose inhabitants are almost as inhospitable as the tempestuous weather. The Scruffmores themselves turn out to be not much better, a snarled mess of secrets and motives connected by their mistrust for

Hello, my name is Eric LeMay, a host on New Books in Literature, a channel on the New Books Network. Today I interview Jennifer Kabat. Kabat is writer I've followed and admired for decades. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it." Kabat has a mind so sweeping, so generous that no detail escapes it. She writes of history, ecology, art, science, time, place, and epochs with a painter's attention and a poet's heart. Her latest book is called Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods (Milkweed, 2025). She is also the author of The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and Rebellion. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, BOMB, The New York Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta and The White Review, among many others. Today, she takes us from the first trees to appear on our plant to the aspirations of scientists amid the Cold War to the floods that ravaged her hometown, where she also serves on her local fire department.

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with John Devore about his phenomenal memoir, Theatre Kids: A True Tale of Off-Off Broadway (Applause, 2024). Friendship. Grief. Jazz hands. In 2004, in a small, windowless theater in then-desolate Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an eccentric family of broke art-school survivors staged an experimental, four-hour adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying inside an enormous wooden coffin that could barely fit the cast, much less an audience.The production’s cast and crew—including its sweetly monomaniacal director—poured their hearts and paychecks into a messy spectacle doomed to fail by any conventional measure. It ran for only eight performances. The reviews were tepid. Fewer than one hundred people saw it. But to emotionally messy hack magazine editor John DeVore, cast at the last minute in a bit part, it was a safe space to hide out and attempt sobering up following a devastating loss.An unforgettable ode to the ephemeral, chaotic magic of the theatre an

Pria Anand speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “The Elephant’s Child,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The piece is a vivid retelling of a Hindu myth, the origin story of the elephant-headed god Ganesh. Pria talks about the process of writing and revising many versions of this ancient myth, why she felt inspired by it, and how her literary writing intersects with her career as a neurologist. Pria also discusses her debut book, The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains, out this month from Simon & Schuster. The book explores how story and storytelling can illuminate the rich, complex gray areas within the science of the brain, weaving case study, history, fable, and memoir. Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric, out from Simon & Schuster in the U.S. and Little, Brown in the U.K. Her stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York T

Naomi Xu Elegant’s debut novel, Gingko Season (W. W. Norton: 2025), stars Penelope Lin, a young Chinese woman living in New York in the faraway year of 2018. With difficult parents and a bad break-up, she works for a museum’s exhibition on bound feet, with a gaggle of other, somewhat clueless friends. But a meeting with Hoang, a researcher at a cancer lab, forces Penelope to rethink what she wants with her life. Naomi joins me today to talk about her book, her choice of characters, how she wanted to approach tropes like the meet-cute—and why 2018 now feels like ancient history, even to young-ish millennials. Naomi Xu Elegant is a writer and journalist living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Monocle, Fortune, Atlas Obscura, and elsewhere. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickr

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kay Sohini about her graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City: A Graphic Memoir (published by Ten Speed Graphic, 2025). A vibrant graphic memoir of a woman—an immigrant, a survivor, a writer, a foodie, and, ultimately, an optimist—who rebuilds her life in New York City while recovering from the trauma of an abusive relationship. “An intimate portrait of the city not only as a place of dreams, but as a vital source for healing and self-discovery.”—Nick Sousanis, Eisner Award–winning author of Unflattening On her first night in New York City, Kay Sohini sits on the tarmac of JFK Airport making an inventory of everything she’s left behind in India: her family, friends, home, and gaslighting ex-boyfriend. In the wake of that untethering she realizes two things: she’s finally made it to the city of her literary heroes—Kerouac, Plath, Bechdel—and the trauma she’s endured has created gaping holes in her memory. As Kay begins the work of piecing herself back

Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challenging hypocrisy, unlike the older Anjing, whose memories of a turbulent past remind her of the perils of going against the grain. When Anran is gifted a stylish red shirt that becomes the talk of their sleepy hometown, adolescent delight is construed by her cynical teachers as another act of defiance. As they decide the young firebrand’s future, certain lessons can’t be avoided. Should Anjing shield her sibling from life’s hard truths, or will she let her blaze her own path? First published in China in 1984, Tie Ning’s bestselling coming-of-age novella My Sister's Red Shirt (Sinoist Books, 2025), translated into English by Dr. Annelise Finegan, depicts the loss of innocence and the challenges of being true to yourself in an era of unpredictable transformation. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integra

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Kathryn Mocker about her wildy acclaimed award-winning collection of hyrbrid fiction/prose poetry/autofiction, Anecdotes (Book*hug Press, 2023).  With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse. Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings. “We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls. “This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, dia