New Books In Literature

When we think of World War II, we envision a catastrophe of massive proportions: millions killed in concentration camps, on the battlefield, during bombing raids and in the nuclear explosions that ended the war. But World War II can also be seen as a vast collection of small catastrophes—a dozen executions or experiments here, a casual act of antisemitism or cruelty there—committed by otherwise ordinary people who either had no moral compass to start with or lost their bearings in an environment that brought out the worst in them. That insight drives The Huntress (William Morrow, 2019), Kate Quinn’s fast-moving, compelling mystery about Nazi hunters in the decade after VJ Day.Ian Graham, a British war correspondent, is chasing an escaped Nazi known only as die Jaegerin, the Huntress. He is determined to see her tried for her crimes, and his motives are both professional and personal: she murdered his younger brother, as well as a dozen Polish children. With the help of the intrepid Nina Markova, former lieute

Today, I’m talking with Nicole Walker, who’s just published a new book about sustainability. In fact, that’s its title: Sustainability, A Love Story (Ohio State University Press, 2018). Now if some part of you is groaning at the possibility of hearing another gloom-and-doom sermon about the destruction of the planet and everything you haven’t been doing to prevent it. And if some part of you is inclined to skip this interview because, well, you’re driving down the road by yourself, not carpooling, not in an electric car, with the heater or the air conditioning turned up a little too far, don’t skip it and stop groaning. Walker’s book is not that kind of book. She’s been there and, in some ways, is still there, trying to figure out how to live sustainably when it seems so impossible, when the demands of family and work and everything else press in on us in this great mess that is our lives and, damn, if we didn’t forget our re-useable shopping bags. And yet we’d still really like to see our planet not die and

Basic Programming ( Lavender Ink, 2018), the latest collection by Megan Burns, is an exercise in balance. Between grief and healing. Between humanness and technology. Between examination and acceptance. Building from her brother's death and journeying through her grieving process, Burns guides readers into her heart and back out the other side, all of us changed and inquisitive after learning just what it means to be who we are both as people and programs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though most renowned for his award-winning Tibetan films, Pema Tseden, is also a prolific author and translator. Enticement(State University of New York Press 2018) is a collection of Pema Tseden’s short stories edited and translated by Patricia Schiaffini-Vedani and Michael Monhart, with assistance from Southwest University’s Carl Robertson and INALCO’s Francoise Robin. Along with a translator’s introduction and author’s preface, the 10 short stories selected with input from the author himself range from the realistic to the fantastic.  For the more realistic stories, lovingly playful descriptions of everyday Tibetan life bring a relatively apolitical look at contemporary Tibetan experience that defies simplistic interpretation. In the more fantastic stories, some of the same issues appear through descriptions that are stubbornly not realistic. Throughout the stories a narrative style and thematic influences from Tibetan oral traditions, his portrayal of media within media, and his tendency to use concl

James Rollins’ books are usually categorized as thrillers, but most of them could easily be labeled science fiction. An instant bestseller, his latest novel, Crucible, is no exception, revolving around the effort to control Eve, an artificial super-intelligence. On one side of the conflict is a secret sect, the Crucibulum. The spiritual descendents of the Spanish Inquisition, the members of the Crucibulum consider female scientists—like Eve’s inventor, Mara Silviera, a Portuguese graduate student—to be heretics and witches. On the other side is Sigma Force, a group of former soldiers working for the Defense Department’s research and development arm. This is Collins’ 14th novel featuring Sigma Force. When the Crucibulum steal Eve and order her to destroy Paris, the only way Sigma Force can hope to prevent disaster is by unleashing Eve’s equal: a second Eve. The two Eves represent the risks and rewards of the singularity, Rollins says. The bad Eve is a super-intelligence run amok, one who will do anything—inclu

An 8-year-old awaits her father’s return from the war. A young man returns home to northern Minnesota for his sister’s funeral. A woman struggles to survive in New York City. Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s award-winning collection of short stories is peopled with characters who leave home, return home, or dream of home. The stories alternate between sweet, thoughtful, and sad, all expressing a universal longing for family, friendship and connection.To Lay to Rest our Ghosts (Fornite Press, 2017) won Silver in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, was selected for 35 Over 35’s annual 2017 list, and was named a Pulpwood Queen Book Club Bonus Book. It is also the winner of the fourth annual Phillip H. McMath Post Publication book award. Summie, who earned an MFA at Colorado State University, is the co-founder/owner of a book marketing firm and is online at caitlinhamiltonsummie.com.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you read a lot of nonfiction, you may be familiar with what some call the “memoir quandary”—the complaint that memoir and autobiography are too narrowly focused on the writer’s life to be of real interest to anyone but themselves. To avoid this criticism, many nonfiction writers attempt to achieve greater relatability and universality in their writing. But is this appeal really more desirable than the art of telling a good story? While there’s nothing wrong with seeking common ground, one of the magical qualities of writing is how it can not only transport the reader to new places and experiences, but also introduce them to perspectives they might not have considered before.As a recent entry in the University of Nebraska Press’ award-winning American Lives Series, Micah McCrary’s Island in the City (2018) challenges us to consider both personal and political implications of one man’s life experiences through intimately intersectional prose. As a black and queer-identifying man, McCrary examines these ident

Although World War II has long been a favorite subject in both literature and history, a new interest seems to have developed in the multiple roles played by women during the war. In The Lost Girls of Paris (Park Row Books, 2019), Pam Jenoff examines from three different fictional perspectives a little-known, real-life British secret service called the Special Operations Executive (SEO). Originally developed to send male saboteurs and radio operators behind enemy lines in France, the SEO had to change its focus when unexpectedly high casualties revealed that men had become so scarce in rural France that its agents were instantly identifiable as people who did not fit in. The director then chose to recruit and send women instead.The novel opens from the perspective of Grace Healey, detoured into Grand Central Station on her way to work. Grace discovers a suitcase sitting by itself under a bench and, while she’s trying to find out where it belongs, extracts a set of photographs. When she goes to replace them, t

The Night Tiger (Flatiron Books, 2019) is much more than just a fantasy novel—it’s also a mystery, a historical novel, and a love story. Yang-Sze Choo accomplishes all this in one deft package. Set in Malaysia in the 1930s, in the state of Perak, The Night Tiger closely follows three narrators, mysteriously interlinked by their names. There is a clever orphan named Ren who works as a houseboy, a spunky and funny young beauty, Ji Lin, and a British surgeon, William Acton.Though the novel is grounded in mundane concerns, such as Ji Lin’s effort to pay back her mother’s gambling debt before her step-father discovers it, there are also numinous aspects, such as the waking-dream states that Ji-Lin and Ren enter, during which they communicate with Ren’s dead brother. Even as Ji Lin tried to cope with the restricted options available to a woman of that time period, and surgeon William Acton grapples with his lusty urges, a shimmer of the supernatural imbues the narrative, and a sense of transcendent beauty weaves it

Tom Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World (G.P. Putnam Son's, 2018) tells the story of Navy investigator Shannon Moss, who travels to the future to solve present-day crimes.The book opens with a brutal murder and a search for a missing girl, and maintains the pace of a chilling page-turner. But Sweterlitsch’s second novel is also an exploration of questions about consciousness, identity, and reality.The idea of using time travel to solve crimes emerged from a conversation the author had with his brother-in-law, a real-life special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.“A lot of his investigations are essentially solved when a victim or someone who knows a criminal tells the investigators what happens and why, but if people don’t talk, the investigation becomes very difficult and sometimes impossible to solve,” Sweterlitsch says. “And so [my brother-in-law] was musing that if he could go forward in time, he could talk to a lot of the witnesses after the emotions had cooled, and they might be more willing

Dayne has the highest respect for the order he’s joined, the Tarians. The Tarian warriors adhere to a chivalrous code of honor, though they live in a time period vaguely suggestive of post-Renaissance Europe during the Age of Discovery. When Dayne, a Candidate, returns to the order’s home in the city of Maradaine, he finds events of the past year prevent him from advancing to the level of Adept. Despite Dayne’s best effort, the boy he was to rescue from a criminal’s trap died when Dayne failed to protect him. Now the boy’s relatives are determined to block his ascent in the Tarian order, which means that Dayne will not be allowed to stay for good.Though Dayne is saddened about his pending departure, he still takes the way of the shield and sword seriously. The shield, which appears in the title of the book, symbolizes protection, while the sword should only be drawn as a last resort. Dayne believes that protecting lives doesn’t mean taking other lives, though he is always willing to sacrifice himself, if need

Minneapolis environmental attorneys Nick Ward and Lena Grant are no longer partners in law or marriage, but their lives are still strongly intertwined. Nick and his puppet can charm his psychiatrist, his attendant at the psychiatric facility, his supervisors at his mandatory community service, and his former students, but he just keeps breaking Lena’s heart. She tries to protect him as Nick pursues ever-wilder animal rescue schemes, until it seems like everything is starting to unravel.Stephen Evans is a playwright and the author of several books, including The Marriage of True Minds, A Transcendental Journey, Painting Sunsets and The Island of Always (Time Being Press, 2019). He attended Georgetown University, and when not reading, writing or acting, works as a technical writer and systems analyst.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Olivia Givens and her family leave Ireland in 1819, they have no idea that they are distant victims of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia four years before. They know only that the crops are failing and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars have led to the loss of their family property. Fifteen-year-old Olivia has a special reason to want to stay: her first crush on a local boy. But no one listens to a young girl in love, and soon Olivia is standing on the shores of the Ohio River with the rest of her Ulster Protestant family. The city of Cincinnati has just come into being, and that, combined with the illness of Erasmus, the family’s youngest child, convince the Givens to end their journey west in Ohio.Before long, Olivia’s mother has died in childbirth and her father has abandoned his three surviving children to head south on a paddle boat. James, the eldest son, takes responsibility for his brother and sister. But it’s not the easiest job in the world: Olivia has too much independence of thought to fit n

The Eurovision Song Contest has launched careers (think ABBA and Celine Dion), inspired outrageous costumes, and generated spinoffs. The campy competition also led a fan to dare author Catherynne M. Valente on Twitter to create a science fictional Eurovision, resulting in the publication of Space Opera (Saga Press, 2018) two years later.Shunning science fiction’s typical seriousness, Space Opera strives to be as ridiculous—and funny—as possible. “You can’t play ‘Eurovision in space’ straight,” Valente says, and proves her point by turning Eurovision’s 50 nations and 100 million viewers into a competition that extends across the universe, attracting billions of viewers and outrageous alien performers—everything from sentient viruses and talented wormholes, to creatures that look like red pandas—but can travel through time—or like Microsoft’s much-maligned animated office assistant Clippy.Space Opera’s intergalactic song contest was founded following the devastating Sentient Wars to promote amity among species

The poetry and prose in Ivy Johnson’s Born Again (The Operating System, 2018) beautifully dives into the ecstatic expression of religious experience. With its confessional style, this collection gives power to the female voice, rending open that which would be hidden behind closed doors. The work blends sensuality and spirituality, merging the grounded reality of existing a physical body in the world with a sense of worship, prayer, and spell casting.I submerge my hands in ink and smear them across the wallI cover my body in rich purple paint and rub against white paperI place a sticker of the Virgin Mary on my bedroom window next to the fire escapeShe hurts with the glow of blue frostI race down the stairs to make snow angels in the dog-pissFill the silhouette of my body with marigolds— from “Take a Moment to Gather Yourself”Ivy Johnson is a poet and performance artist in Oakland, CA. Her book, As They Fall, is a collection of 110 notecards for aleatoric ritual and was published by Timeless, Infinite Light i

An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states.  An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. They’re good people, the law is on their side, and it’s hard not to root for them, but we’re forced to ask ourselves - what defines parenthood? Is it the biological connection or is it the daily grind of feeding, changing diapers, and tending to all their needs? In addition to a mother’s love, Lucky Boy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) deals with immigration, undocumented workers, the struggle between haves and the have-nots, infertility, survival, and love.Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories ha

The twelfth-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen was a remarkable woman by any standards. Known for her musical compositions and mystical prayers, Hildegard was also Germany’s first recognized female physician. The daughter of minor nobility, she entered the convent in childhood as a tithe from her parents. Excited by the prospect of acquiring an education, then a goal unattainable for girls outside a convent, Hildegard suffers a setback when she confronts the strict seclusion imposed on nuns by the anchorage of St. Disibod and its ascetic magistra, Jutta of Sponheim. But relief comes from the company of Volmar, a fellow oblate who like Hildegard loves to sneak out of the abbey and walk in the nearby woods, and Brother Wigbert, the monastery’s infirmarian. It’s through the teaching of Brother Wigbert that Hildegard discovers her affinity for medicine.Alas, not every member of the abbey hierarchy believes that young women should spend time outside the walls of the anchorage, and as political threats from

The pandemic in Peng Shepherd’s debut novel, The Book of M, starts with magic—the disappearance of a man’s shadow.The occurrence, broadcast worldwide, is greeted with delight until more and more people lose their shadows. People start losing their memories as well—while gaining an ability to change the world with the power of their imaginations.As society collapses, the landscape becomes as beautiful as it is terrifying: deers have wings, clouds tinkle like bells, lakes appear overnight, flowers bloom in winter.The Book of M has garnered widespread praise, earning recommendations from The Today Show and USA Today, and making Amazon’s list of Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2018. A reviewer on Bustle called it a “post-apocalyptic masterpiece.”In a world of vanishing memories, Shepherd finds an unlikely hero: a patient with classic amnesia. Unlike the “shadowless”—who eventually forget everything, including how to speak or eat or breathe—the amnesiac never forgets how the world works. This allows him

It’s 1999, and Ann is a guitar-playing thirty-year-old preschool teacher who dreams of having children even though she was born without a uterus. As Laura Catherine Brown's novel Made by Mary (C and R Press, 2018) opens, Ann and her husband Joel have been rejected as adoptive parents, and their plan to host and pay medical expenses for a pregnant teen goes terribly wrong. Then Ann’s 49-year-old mother Mary, a jewelry-designing, goddess-worshipping, lesbian hippie, offers to carry her daughter’s baby. Brown’s debut novel, Quickening, was published by Random House and featured in Barnes & Noble’s "Discover Great New Writers" series. Her short stories have appeared in several literary journals, including The Bellingham Review, Monkeybicycle, Paragraphiti and Tin House; and in anthologies with Seal Press and Overlook Press. She received her BA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and supports her writing habit by working as a graphic designer. Her writing education came through many writing workshops inclu

This 2018 reprint of Little Man, Little Man exemplifies communal and collaborative textual production. The story was written by James Baldwin and illustrated by French artist Yoran Cazac. It was published in 1976 and then went out of print. In this new edition, scholars Nicholas Boggs and Jennifer DeVere Brody write the introduction, while Baldwin’s nephew and niece, Tejan Karefa-Smart and Aisha Karefa-Smart write the foreword and afterword respectively. In Little Man, Little Man, which Baldwin alternately described as a children’s book for adults and an adults’ book for children, we see a slice of a Harlem neighborhood through the eyes of young TJ. The story presents a complex and multifaceted vision of black childhood in America and nudges the contemporary reader to think critically about what it means to see through the eyes of a child and to be seen by those in one’s world.Nicholas Boggs was an undergraduate at Yale when he discovered James Baldwin's out-of-print "children's book for adults," Little Man,