New Books In Literature

In the Shadow of Dora: A Novel of the Holocaust and the Apollo Program (Stephen F. Austin UP, 2020) spans two very different decades from the Nazi concentration camp of Dora-Mittelbau to the coast of central Florida in the late 1960s; the book tells the story of the real life intersections between the horror of the Third Reich's V-2 rocket program and the wonderment of the Apollo missions. Eli Hessel, a brilliant young Jewish mathematician, finds himself deep beneath a mountain where he is forced to build Nazi rockets. When he is finally freed from this secret underground concentration camp, he immigrates to New York, studies astrophysics, and is recruited by NASA to help build the largest rocket ever to rise above a launch pad: the Saturn V. To his shock, though, he will be under the command of former Nazi scientists Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, both of who were at Dora. As America turns to the moon and cheers for rockets that lance the sky, Eli is swallowed up by the past and must cope with memorie

Kevin Dean speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Patron Saints,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. Kevin talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which follows a young American trying to find his place in Cairo, while the city roils with political uncertainty after the Arab Spring uprising. Kevin also discusses how it feels to write from memory, what he tries to capture when writing about place, and what projects he’s working on now.  Kevin Dean is a writer currently based in Seattle, Washington. Previously, he lived in Cairo, Egypt, where he worked as an editor and studied Arabic. His writing has been published in The Common and The Rumpus. He co-authored a theatrical adaptation of the novel Taxi, by Khaled Al-Khamissi, which was performed live in Cairo in 2013 and published in Tahrir Tales: Plays from the Egyptian Revolution. He is at work on his first novel.  ­­Read Kevin’s story “Patron Saints” in The Common at thecommononline.org/patron-saints. Follow

It takes a certain gall to update one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring and most beloved tragedies. Anyone who has survived an English literature class at a US high school or college knows that neither Romeo nor Juliet lives to old age; and those few who have not read the play, for pleasure or under duress, have probably seen one of the screen versions. All the more kudos, then, to Christina Dodd for pulling off this updated and reimagined version of that classic play. This first book in a new series called Daughter of Montague features Rosaline, nicknamed Rosie—the eldest daughter of Verona’s most famous and still passionate couple. Rosie has at best a jaundiced eye toward love and marriage, having spent her entire life observing life on an emotional seesaw. Yet this is fifteenth-century Europe, and “wife” is the only acceptable destiny for a woman. When her famous parents finally make a match for her, Rosie’s fate seems to be sealed. Then things go wrong in ways even Rosie could not have anticipated. T

A postman struggles to deliver the last letter on his last day of work. A prostitute elopes with the auto rickshaw driver who arranged clients for her. An inspector discovers the dead body of the boy he had an altercation with the previous evening. In Nocturne Pondicherry (Hachette India, 2024), Ari Gautier peels back the layers of human emotions until glimpses of greed, anger and lust can finally reveal themselves. Unsettling and irresistible, Nocturne Pondicherry is an all too realistic collection where mundane situations - featuring common people, ill-fated street dwellers and hapless immigrants - pull readers in and fling them into the abyss. Arnab Dutta Roy is Assistant Professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina. Jackie Jessup is a con-artist, always working a scheme, always taking what she wanted, and she taught Kate to do the same. Now she’s dying, and Kate is estranged and living far away in Boston. Kate, her mother, and a third woman, Maribel, have either alienated, given away, or otherwise lost their children. It’s 2006, and Jackie has hatched a dubious plan for Kat to drive down to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, pretend she’s the mother of Maribel’s children, and sneak them back over the border into the states. Kate needs to figure out what’s in it for her mother, because with Jackie Jessup, there’s always a price to pay. This is a novel about class, inheritance, and flawed people making mistakes, taking risks, or trying to survive. Sara Johnson Allen was raised (mostly) in North Carolina. A recipient of the Marianne Russo Award for Emerging Writers by the Key West Literary Semina

When three people in Philadelphia inhale dust developed by a scientist who has discovered parallel universes, they are transported into an interdimensional no-man's-land that is populated by supernatural beings. From there, they go on to an alternate-future version of Philadelphia—a frightening dystopian nation-state in which citizens are numbered, not named. How will they escape? In The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories (MIT Press, 2024), introduced by Dr. Lisa Yaszek, you will find this world-bending story as well as five others written by Francis Stevens, the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett, a pioneering science fiction and fantasy adventure writer from Minneapolis who made her literary debut at the precocious age of 17. Often celebrated as “the woman who invented dark fantasy,” Bennett possessed incredible range; her groundbreaking stories—produced largely between 1904 and 1919—suggest that she is better understood as the mother of modern genre fiction writ large. Bennett's work has anticipated ev

Daniel is a worldly and urbane journalist living in London. His relationships appear to be sexually fulfilling but sentimentally meager. A young gay man with no relationships outside of sexual ones, he can seem at once callow and, at times, cold to the point of cruel with his lovers. Emotionally distant from his elderly, senile father, Daniel nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Following his father's death, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man's will: he will only inherit his half of his father's considerable estate once he has spent time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn't seen since they were boys, who lives on the old family farm in the Free State. Once there, Daniel discovers that the young son of the woman Theon lives with is seriously ill. With the conditions bearing on Daniel's inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel with the boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever. S.J. Naudé's mast

When evil stalks the land, who can you trust? Autumn 1314. In the aftermath of the Scottish victory at the Battle of Bannockburn, the villagers of Warcop wait desperately for the return of loved ones. When brothers Wat and Rob Dickinson bring news of the death of their companion, Adam Fothergill, as they fled home, there is no one to mourn him. But when a monstrous figure is seen in the hills nearby, it seems Adam has returned from the dead to wreak revenge. But for what? Three miles away, young Fran Hilton is mourning the death of his father and wrestling with the responsibilities of becoming lord of the manor. When he catches sight of the Revenant, he is terrified, but the mystery of Adam’s death fascinates him. With a motley band of Hilton’s young people, Fran sets out to confront Adam. As terror turns to murder, Fran realises the truth has been buried deep within a pack of lies – and he, too, harbours a secret of his own, the revelation of which could mean losing everything and everyone he loves most. Lie

Anne Enright, writer, critic, Booker winner, kindly made time back in 2023 for Irish literature maven Paige Reynolds and for John Plotz in his role as host for our sister podcast, Novel Dialogue. In this conversation, she reads from The Wren, The Wren and says we don’t yet know if the web has become a space of exposure or of authority. We can be sure that the state of diffusion we all exist in is “pixilated”–though perhaps we can take comfort from the fact that “Jeff Bezos…is not as interested in your period as you might think.” Anne speaks of “a moment of doom” when a writer simply commits to a character, unlovely as they may or must turn out to be. (Although The Wren The Wren harbors one exception: “Terry is lovely.”) She also corrects one reviewer: her characters aren’t working class, they’re “just Irish.” Asked about teaching, Anne emphasizes giving students permission to write absolutely anything they want–while simultaneously “mortifying them…condemning them to absolute hell” by pointing out the need to

Today I talked to Scott Nadelson's novel Trust Me (Forest Avenue Press, 2024).  After his divorce, Lewis moves into the cabin he bought as a vacation home towards the end of his marriage. It’s in the foothills of the Cascade mountains, a forty-five-minute drive from his twelve-year-old daughter’s school and his tedious government job in Salem, Oregon. In fifty-two short stories that alternate between Skye and her father’s viewpoint, we learn about a challenging, sometimes difficult year of hiking, fishing, reading, foraging for mushrooms, and cooking meals without television, computers, or cellphones to distract them from nature or each other. Their relationship changes over the months, but the love between father and daughter pulls them through the tragedy that changes everything. Scott Nadelson is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Trust Me and the short story collection While It Lasts. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, Harvard Review, and The Best American Short Stor

Creation Lake (Scribner, 2024) is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. "Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"--making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is no

Nicholas Molbert's Altars of Spine and Fraction (Curbstone Press/Northwestern UP, 2024) follows its protagonist through the joys and dangers of childhood on the rural Gulf Coast, through familial loss, and into adulthood. Refusing to romanticize what has been lost, Molbert instead interrogates how nostalgia is most often enjoyed by those with the privilege to reject or indulge it. Violent hurricanes sweep across the landscapes of the poems, and Molbert probes the class inequalities that these climate crises lay bare. Moving from outdoor rural spaces in its first half to indoor domestic spaces in its second half, the collection explores family history, generational trauma, and the toxic masculinity that is shouldered by the boys raised in the Deep South. Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction: Poems (Northwestern University Press / Curbstone Books, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) a

In this episode I'm joined by Dalkey Archive's editorial director, Chad W. Post. We discuss the republication of the late Marguerite Young's cult-classic work of fiction, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling (Dalkey Archive Press, 2024). A colossal novel of over 1,000 pages, a kaleidoscopic cast of characters, permanent opium-induced hallucinations, a sprawling sense of scope, and a truly distinct and lyrical prose style--it's a doozy. I haven't finished yet myself, having stopped and restarted multiple times over the years, but that's the beauty of it; it's challenging, wandering, dense, at times utterly absurd, but always rewarding. Chad painstakingly walks us through the book's editorial legacy, and the gargantuan task of excavating this text and introducing it to new generations. Chad W. Post is the publisher of Open Letter Books and Editorial Director for the Dalkey Archive Press. He also writes a Substack called "Mining the Dalkey Archive." Marguerite Young, a descendant of Brigham Young, was born in Indiana in 1

Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about publishing but were too afraid to ask. Before and After the Book Deal: A Writer’s Guide to Finishing, Publishing, Promoting, and Surviving Your First Book (Catapult, 2020) by Courtney Maum is a funny, candid guide about breaking into the marketplace. Cutting through the noise, dispelling rumors and remaining positive, Before and After the Book Deal answers questions like: are MFA programs worth the time and money, and how do people actually sit down and finish a novel? Should you expect a good advance, and why aren’t your friends saying anything about your book? Before and After the Book Deal has over 150 contributors from all walks of the industry, including international bestselling authors, agents, editors, film scouts, translators, disability and minority activists, offering advice and sharing anecdotes about even the most taboo topics in the industry. Their wisdom will help aspiring authors find a foothold in the publishing world and navigate the challenges of

Macau was supposed to be a sleepy post for John Reeves, the British consul for the Portuguese colony on China’s southern coast. He arrived, alone, in June 1941, his wife and daughter left behind in China. Seven months later, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Hong Kong, and made Reeves the last remaining British diplomat for hundreds of miles, responsible for refugees streaming in from China. Peter Rose uses Reeves as a jumping off point for his newest work of historical fiction, The Good War of Consul Reeves (Blacksmith Books, 2024). Using Reeves’ own unpublished memoir and research in the national archives, Peter tells a tale of how Reeves—a largely unremarkable man—managed to hold things together in the Portuguese colony until Japan’s defeat in 1945. Peter Rose is a graduate of the George Washington University and the Yale Law School. He first practiced law in Washington DC. It was during a posting in Hong Kong with Goldman Sachs as its Asian Head of Public Affairs that he started to visit Macau and be

Zohara flies from New York to Israel for her mother’s funeral. She’d already been through a tough year; a divorce from her American husband and trouble getting started on her doctoral dissertation at NYU. As she clears out the house where she grew up, Zohara finds tapes of her mother singing Yemenite songs in Arabic, and evidence of a secret romance. During her first thirty days of mourning, Zohara has conversations with her mother’s longtime friends, joins her mother’s Yemenite women’s choir, and rekindles old friendships. Songs for the Brokenhearted (Random House, 2024) is a beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself. Ayelet Tsabari is an Israeli Canadian writer born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. Her book of stories, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literatu

The Booklover's Library (Hanover Square Press, 2024) has one of the most dramatic openings I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of novels. It’s 1931 in Nottingham, England, and seventeen-year-old Emma, ensconced in her father’s bookshop, is engrossed in her favorite novel, Jane Austen’s Emma, when she realizes the building around her has caught fire. With her father’s help, she stumbles into the street, only to watch him collapse and die as the bookstore implodes. In just a few pages, Emma has lost her sole family member, her home, and her source of income. By the time we meet her again, eight years later, she has married, too young and unhappily, lost her husband to a car crash, and struggles to support herself and their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, on her widow’s pension. In 1930s Britain, companies were legally barred from hiring married women or widows with children, so although Emma has barely passed twenty-five and would gladly work, she can’t apply for a job because of the marriage ban. But nor can

In her stunning debut short story collection, The Goodbye Process (Zibby Books, 2024), Mary Jones uses her distinctive voice to examine the painful and sometimes surreal ways we say goodbye. The stories--which range from tender and heartbreaking to unsettling and darkly funny--will push you out of your comfort zone and ignite intense emotions surrounding love and loss. A woman camps out on the porch of an ex-lover who has barricaded himself inside the house; a preteen girl caught shoplifting finds herself in grave danger; a Los Angeles real estate agent falls for a woman who helps him detach from years of dramatic plastic surgery; a man hires a professional mourner to ensure his wife's funeral is a success. Again and again, Jones's characters find themselves facing the ends of things: relationships, health, and innocence. Arresting, original, and beautifully rendered, this story collection packs a punch, just the way grief does―knocking us off our feet. Mary Jones’s work has appeared in Electric Literature’s

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she'll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering "expats" from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible--for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time. She is tasked with working as a "bridge" living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as "1847" or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin's doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he's a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as "washing machines," "Spotify," and "the collapse of the British Empire." But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts. Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomf

Today I talked to Chelsea Biker about her novel Madwoman (Little, Brown, 2024). Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. But when she receives a letter from a women's prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?