New Books in Literature
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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1751
Ashaki Jackson, “Language Lesson” (Miel Books, ...
How do we mourn those we’ve lost? What are the rituals and rites that allow us to understand our loss? To feel the measure of it? To heal, if we need healing? To reach closure, if we need closure? For any of us who have had a loved one die,...
37 min
1752
Gail Ashton, ed. “Medieval Afterlives in Contem...
Dilapidated thirteenth-century walls as a playscape for today’s children, medieval relics made as fetish objects for twenty-first century enthusiasts, tourism at “the birthplace of King Arthur,” Harry Potter’s pageantry, Game of Thrones‘ swordplay,
32 min
1753
Scott Bruce, ed., “The Penguin Book of the Unde...
Like so many Americans, I’m a big fan of the undead. I look forward to a night of nail-biting when a new episode of The Walking Dead airs and I get excited when Hollywood gears up for the next big-budget film featuring zombie hordes.
36 min
1754
Mary Chapman, “Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fict...
Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing of Edith Maude Eaton (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) is a collection of works–previously published and newly discovered–produced by Edith Eaton,
56 min
1755
Kathryn Kleppinger, “Branding the Beur Author: ...
Kathryn Kleppinger’s Branding the Beur Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France, 1983-2013 (Liverpool University Press, 2015) examines the “paradox of ethnic minority writing” in the work of multiple authors of North African descent over a thir...
59 min
1756
Scott Donaldson, “The Impossible Craft” Literar...
Admiring books that appeal to our hearts and souls, rather often we want to know more about the writers who create them. If a book is a dialogical and communal entity–as readers we also participate in interpreting what we read,
55 min
1757
Daniel Moran,”Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her C...
Daniel Moran’s Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers (University of Georgia Press, 2016) provides a compelling investigation of how O’Connor’s initial reputation of a Southern female writer over the years evolved into her...
43 min
1758
Kate Partridge, “Intended American Dictionary” ...
We commonly think of Walt Whitman as the great American poet, the gray-bearded bard who captures the democratic music of our country with, as he called it, his “barbaric yawp.” And, sure enough, Whitman thought of himself this way.
45 min
1759
Jonathan Lethem, “A Gambler’s Anatomy” (Doubled...
Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, A Gambler’s Anatomy (Doubleday, 2016), traces the existential crisis of an international backgammon hustler who thinks he’s psychic and who, while plying his trade in Berlin,
69 min
1760
Kristen Case, “Abdication: Emily Dickinson’s Fa...
Emily Dickinson is no ordinary poet. Her intelligent and profound work inspires a fierce attachment in those who love it. I know this first-hand. My wife began reading Dickinson soon after we first met and took to the poems so deeply that,
45 min
1761
Eric Gardner, “Black Print Unbound: The Christi...
Eric Gardner’s new study Black Print Unbound: the Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford University Press, 2015) explores the development and voice of the Christian Recorder during the years leading up to and im...
62 min
1762
Kristin Stapleton, “Fact in Fiction: 1920s Chin...
Kristin Stapleton’s new book opens onto a political crisis in China, and into a spirit of reform touched off by student demonstrations on May 4, 1919. Ba Jin was a teenager from a well-off family in Chengdu during this period.
64 min
1763
Martha Conway, “Sugarland: A Jazz Age Mystery” ...
It’s 1921, and Prohibition is in full swing, but you wouldn’t know it from the nightclubs and speakeasies of Chicago, where bathtub gin mingles with homemade bourbon distilled from trainloads of corn sugar shipped up from Southern farms.
53 min
1764
Mark R. Andryczyk, “The Intellectual as Hero in...
In The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (University of Toronto Press, 2012), Mark R. Andryczyk takes his readers to an intriguing territory of dense narratives, arising from a complex network of literary, political,
46 min
1765
Jan Schwarz, “Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Cul...
In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust,
38 min
1766
Ellen Widmer, “Fiction’s Family: Zhan Xi, Zhan ...
Ellen Widmer’s new book tells a story of the life and work of a literary family in China, in order to open out into a fascinating discussion of the ramifications of that story for how we understand and produce relationships between fiction and history....
61 min
1767
Isabelle Hesse, “The Politics of Jewishness in ...
In The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, reads a wide range of novels from post-war Germany to I...
22 min
1768
Robert K. Elder, et. al. “Hidden Hemingway: Ins...
Before the war, before the novels, before the four marriages and the safaris, the plane crashes and the bullfighting fascination, Ernest Hemingway was simply a young boy growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Author Robert K.
57 min
1769
John Jodzio, “Knock Out” (Soft Skull Press, 2016)
John Jodzio, oft and rightly compared to George Saunders, is lauded by Chuck Klosterman as “the best best kind of modern fiction writer: a thematic traditionalist who feels totally new.” It’s no wonder this hilarious and profound Minneapolis writer has...
51 min
1770
Amy Wright, “Cracker Sonnets” (BrickRoad Poetry...
My grandmother, who’s now ninety-eight, lived most of her life in a little town in Southwestern Ohio called Waynesville. The town has reinvented itself in the last few years as a destination for antiquers wiling to pay top-dollar for what she might cal...
47 min
1771
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld, “Demonic Warfare: Daoism...
Mark R. E. Meulenbeld’s new book looks closely at the relationship between vernacular novels and vernacular rituals in Ming China. Focusing on a particular novel called Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi),
60 min
1772
John Alba Cutler, “Ends of Assimilation: The Fo...
In Ends of Assimilation: The Formation of Chicano Literature (Oxford University Press, 2015), John Alba Cutler provides a literary history of Chicano/a literature that tracks the fields formation and evolution from the 1960s forward.
62 min
1773
Bert Ashe, “Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles” (...
What’s missing from contemporary discussions of aesthetics and representation within the natural hair movement? Bert Ashe generously offers a response in Twisted: My Dreadlock Chronicles, an unprecedented account of black male identity as seen through ...
40 min
1774
Fox Frazier-Foley and Erin Elizabeth Smith, “Po...
Readers gather around: Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity (Sundress Publications, 2016) is an anthology for a new era. As Cathy Park Hong states at the end of her New Republic essay,
49 min
1775
Pi-Ching Hsu, “Feng Menglong’s ‘Treasury of Lau...
The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence.
58 min