Episoder
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Anthony Di Renzo's Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023) is the most audacious guide to Rome you will ever read. Pasquino, the city’s witty talking statue, will introduce you to the gallant heroes and grotesque villains, humble peddlers and flamboyant nobles, whores and saints and movie stars who have reigned throughout its turbulent history. Life in Rome is a carnival! Let its joy melt in your heart like gelato.
Anthony’s previous books include Trinacria: A Tale of Bourbon Sicily, Dead Reckoning: Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America, and Bitter Greens: Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.
Recommended Books:
John Keahey, Following Caesar
Chris Holmes writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is forthcoming 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.
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John Kuligowski is a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at Prairie Schooner and also currently a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He worked as an assistant editor for volumes 392 and 394 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography and has published in a number of venues both online and in print. Zainab Omaki is likewise a Nonfiction Assistant Editor at the magazine and has writings in Callaloo, The Rumpus, LA Review and elsewhere. Her novel-in-progress has funding both abroad and from the Nebraska Arts Council. Like John, she’s a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Prairie Schooner has a long legacy, stretching back to 1928, making it arguably the country’s longest continuous literary magazine. In this episode, the focus is on essays from two recent issues, beginning with “Summer Blues” by Hantian Zhang. For anyone who ever read William Gass’s medication, On Being Blue, this will serve as an interesting sequel. The theme or mood is signaled by the Portuguese word “saudale,” a desire for something absent, for the essay is set in Lisbon. In “Holden Caulfield Builds a House” by Andrew Erkkila, the setting jumps to Jersey City and the renovation of a house whose previous owner was a Viet Nam vet who painted the names of fallen colleagues in blood and excrement. Suffice to say, it’s a monumental tasks that nearly undoes the couple funding the upgrade. In “On grief, sex, and kidneys,” Afton Montgomery explores surgery’s impact on one’s psyche and even more identity. Finally, in “On the Move, or Looking to Settle Down,” Maya Marshall makes a road trip as an African-American woman traveling the South, knowing that danger can always lurk and yet mustn’t become an excuse for limiting oneself. Still, it’s not easy when, for instance, the sight of a dead deer makes her identify with it due to sharing a common color and the risks inherent in motion.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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Jim Hicks is the Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at UMass Amherst, and a translator of literature from Italian, French, Spanish, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. His latest book is Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer. Shailja Patel is the Public Affairs Editor of the Massachusetts Review, a poet, essayist, and theatre and visual artist. She is the author of Migritude.
The Massachusetts Review generally focuses on the world at large, versus personal essays. Indeed, as Shailja Patel says in this episode, the magazine is about “freedom writing” that necessarily creates some discomfort in readers as tough topics get tackled. In this case, that billing fits well “An Introduction to Exile” by Oz Johnson, where religious conversion means we’re hearing from a Filipina Jew teaching herself about the Arab-Israeli conflict in ways her rabbi wishes she wouldn’t. In turn, in “Roe: Telling the Tale” by Joyce Avrech Berkman, we encounter a historical framing that shows that reproductive rights were common in America until the period following the Civil War, which was of course about slavery and seeking to control others in ways that still echo in the battle over abortion. How to address injustice and abuse? Amba Azaad has a proposal in “Fire to the Grass,” which might at first glance appear to be an ecological essay but quickly proves to be about using Radical Unforgiveness to create a community response that challenges abuse. Finally, this episode touches on “Thirty-Two Eulogies” by Dan Leach, where understanding what the Male Gaze entails is part of the author’s evolution as he reflects on sexual dynamics, power and control, as vividly represented by the infamous rape scene that Leach remembers from watching the movie Deliverance with his dad long ago.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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Daughters of Shandong (Berkley Books, 2024), the author’s first and based on the life of her grandmother, follows the fortunes of a mother and three daughters abandoned by their wealthy family in soon-to-be Communist China. It is 1948, and Chairman Mao’s forces have moved into Shandong Province, driving the Nationalist Army into retreat. Although the town of Zhucheng is small and rural, the Ang family owns a palatial estate, built by generations of government officials and scholars.
Even before the war turns against them, the family has little use for its eldest daughter-in-law, Chiang-Yue, who has produced three daughters but no sons. The family lives by the ancient Chinese proverb “Value men and belittle women,” so even though its second son does have a male heir, that child’s existence cannot redeem Chiang-Yue in her in-laws’ eyes.
When the Communists approach, the other family members, including the girls’ father, flee. The narrator, Li-Hai, stays behind with her mother and sisters—ostensibly to keep either the People’s Army or impoverished local farmers from confiscating the Angs’ palatial home. Of course, this doesn’t work. Soldiers take over the estate the first day. They haul Li-Hai, only thirteen, before an impromptu tribunal as a stand-in for her missing male relatives. She barely escapes with her life. Only Chiang-Yue’s history of treating the villagers kindly saves her and her daughters—first from execution, then from starvation.
Despite the family’s cruel treatment, Chiang-Yue insists that duty requires her to rejoin her husband. Thus begins their trek across China, from Zhucheng to the local hub of Qingdao, then south to Guangzhou (Hong Kong), and eventually across the strait to Taiwan. Hiding in the bushes, scrounging homeless in the streets, surviving a refugee camp—the Ang women and girls are, in their own stubborn way, relentless. And I swear, you will root for them every step of the way.
Eve J. Chung is a Taiwanese American lawyer and women’s human rights specialist. She has worked on a range of issues, including torture, sexual violence, contemporary forms of slavery, and discriminatory legislation. Her writing is inspired by social justice movements and the continued struggle for equality and fundamental freedoms worldwide. She currently lives in New York with her husband, two children, and two dogs. Daughters of Shandong is her debut novel.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels, including The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams. Her next novel, Song of the Steadfast, is due early in 2025.
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Einstein’s Dreams (Vintage, 1992) by Alan Lightman, set in Albert Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, is a novel about the cultural interconnection of time, relativity and life. As the young genius creates his theory of relativity, in a series of dreams, he imagines other worlds, each with a different conceptualization of time. In one, time is circular, and people are destined to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, time stands still. In yet another, time is a nightingale, trapped by a bell jar.
Translated into over thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians and artists around the world. In poetic vignettes, Alan Lightman explores the connections between science and art, creativity and the rhythms of life, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.
This conversation includes Alan Lightman (MIT), Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera and Annette Martínez-Iñesta, of the Departamento de Humanidades at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (UPRM), and Joshua Chaparro Mata, a UPRM graduate and doctoral student in Applied Physics at Yale. They discuss dreaming as a scientific and creative resource; the importance of Berne, Switzerland, in the thought of Einstein and Lightman; Lightman’s precise and harmonious poetics; the role of technology in contemporary life; and the course Lightman’s life, experiences and creative process.
This is the second of two episodes about Einstein’s Dreams. The first, in Spanish, appeared on the New Books Network en español. The series is sponsored by the Lenguaje focal group at Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at UPRM, a group of scholars who consider how translanguaging can provide unique dimensions to knowledge.
This episode and the Instituto Nuevos Horizontes at the UPRM have been supported by the Mellon Foundation. The conversation is part of the “STEM to STEAM” project of the “Cornerstone” initiative, sponsored by the Teagle Foundation, which stresses the importance of integrating humanistic perspectives in the sciences.
Books, scholars, articles and podcasts mentioned in this conversation include:
In Praise of Wasting Time, Alan Lightman.
Mr g, Alan Lightman.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino.
Cities I’ve Never Lived In, Sara Majka.
“Academic Life without a Smartphone,” Inside Higher Ed, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera.
The Hemingway Society Podcast.
Carlos Alberto Peón Casas.
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1893. Henry Nettleblack has to act fast or she’ll be married off by her elder sister. But leaving the safety of her wealthy life isn’t as simple as she thought. Ambushed, robbed, and then saved by a mysterious organisation – part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch – a desperate Henry disguises herself and enlists. Sent out to investigate a string of crimes, she soon realises that she is living in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems.
When the net starts to close around Henry, and sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward. Is the world she’s lost in also a place she can find herself?
Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack (Cipher Press, 2022) by Dr. Nat Reeve is a subversive and playful ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness – particularly transness – as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you’re struggling for words.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.
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A missing boy. A corrupt system. A case that could change everything...
When young queer dancer Wilbess "Bessy" Mulenga is arrested by corrupt police, fresh-from-the-village rookie lawyer Grace Zulu takes up his cause in her first pro bono case. Presented with a freshly beaten client, Grace protests to the police and gets barred from accessing Bessy, who then disappears from the system--and the world--without a trace. As she fights for justice for Bessy, Grace must navigate a dangerous world of corrupt politicians, traditional beliefs, and deep-seated homophobia.
With the help of a former freedom fighter and the head of her law firm, who's rallying for one last fight as AIDS takes its toll on him, Grace brings together a coalition of unions, students, and political opposition to take on the corrupt administration of President Kaunda. But will justice prevail in the face of such overwhelming odds?
The Lions' Den (Graydon House, 2024) is a gripping and enduring novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end. With unforgettable characters and a thrilling plot, Iris Mwanza has announced herself as a major new talent in fiction.
Iris Mwanza is a Zambian American writer. As deputy director of the Gender Equality Division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, she leads strategy and investment for the Women in Leadership portfolio, and she has previously worked as a corporate lawyer in both Zambia and the US. Mwanza holds law degrees from Cornell University and the University of Zambia, and an MA and PhD in international relations from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In addition to her work at the foundation, Mwanza serves on the supervisory board of CARE International and on the board of directors of the World Wildlife Fund-US.
Recommended Books:
Fi, Alexandra Fuller
Greenland, David Santos Donaldson
Foster, Clare Keegan
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract 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.
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Somota is society divided by change, and by memories. When A. arrives in the protectorate shortly after the first world war, he is unsure of what to expect. Employed by the government as a linguistic anthropologist, he is tasked with documenting the benefits of the new order and reporting them to the Reverend G. But what are these benefits? In his travels throughout the region, A. finds only the physical and emotional scars of conquest, and of routine colonial administration. Yet, even as the indigenous culture is being reduced to mere fragments, he also learns of a sublime literature responding to those historical traumas. One storyteller in particular, Kehinta, begins to reveal to A. just how much has been lost. A People Without Shame (Blackwater Press, 2024) is a profoundly beautiful novel commenting on the horrors of colonial oppression, trauma, love, and the power of story.
Patrick Colm Hogan is the author of The Death of the Goddess: A Poem in Twelve Cantos (2014), a book-length, narrative poem based on Hindu Goddess myths, as well as lyric poems and short fiction, published in such outlets as minnesota review, The Journal of Irish Literature, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. A Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, he is the author of over twenty scholarly and interpretive books, most of which treat postcolonial or world literature. Hogan regularly teaches courses in postcolonial literature (often with a focus on Africa), as well as courses on the pre-colonial and postcolonial literary traditions of India and China. In keeping with these interests, he has worked to acquire at least some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Mandarin, and Sanskrit. A People Without Shame is his first novel.
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Today’s book is: We Take Our Cities With Us (Ohio State UP, 2022), by Sorayya Khan. After her mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where she finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.
Our guest is: Sorayya Khan, who is the author of the novels City of Spies, Five Queen’s Road, and Noor. The daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, she was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in Ithaca, New York, with her family. She is a Visiting Fellow at Cornell University. Find her at sorayyakhan.com.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history which she uses to explore which stories we tell (and why), and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also enjoy discussions of these memoirs:
The Translator's Daughter
The Things We Didn't Know
Secret Harvests
Whiskey Tender
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. You can help support our show by sharing episodes of the Academic Life.
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For years, fans have been clamoring for novels about the Horus Heresy - the bloody civil war that set Space Marine against Space Marine and nearly spelled the end of mankind at the hands of the traitor Horus. False Gods takes the epic story onwards as Horus struggles to keep his armies in line and the seeds of his downfall are sown.
Join us as we speak with Graham McNeill about one of his several contributions to the Horus Heresy series, False Gods!
Graham McNeill, currently a freelance writer, has written for Games Workshop and for Riot Games in Los Angeles. His Horus Heresy novel, A Thousand Sons, was a New York Times bestseller, and Empire, the second novel in the Sigmar trilogy, won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award for best fantasy novel. You can visit Graham’s website here: https://graham-mcneill.com/
Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus, and Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus, and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption, and Numbers 1-19, Numbers 20-36. He can be reached at [email protected]
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Molly Giles remembers when her father came back after WWII in 1945. Her memoir, Life Span (WTAW Press, 2024) opens when she is three years old, sitting in the front seat of a moving van as her father drives from San Francisco to their new home in Sausalito. Well-known editor and author of four story-collections and two novels, Giles referenced the journals she began writing at age nine to create a memoir filled with moments and thoughts from her eight decades so far. The Bay area is the backdrop for much of her life, although she spent fourteen years teaching in Arkansas. She delves into family relationships, husbands and lovers, siblings and children, teaching and editing, and the struggles of a being a single mother before women were accepted into the work force. In brutally honest prose, Molly dissects her life with a critical eye, never sugar-coating her failures or glorifying her successes, of which there were many.
Molly Giles’s first collection of short stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Four subsequent story collections—CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES and WIFE WITH KNIFE, have also won awards, including the San Francisco Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and, twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (three times), and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. Molly Giles has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece, and has edited many published writers, including Amy Tan.
Molly enjoys cooking, but she doesn’t love it, what she loves is reading cookbooks in bed, licking salt off her fingers after a light supper of Fritos. She also enjoys gardening (the watering part not the weeding) and watching the resident fawns graze what’s left of her lawn. Molly is a passionate reader and though she often forgets both keys and wallet, she never travels without a book in her purse. She lives in Woodacre, CA.
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Dana Elmendorf’s novel In The Hour of Crows (Mira Books, 2024) takes place in small town Appalachia and follows Weatherly Opal Wilder, a young woman with the ability to talk death out of the dying. Our story begins shortly after the death of her cousin, Adaire, as Weatherly struggles to find justice for her cousin and to navigate small town politics in a place where her family is treated with increasing distrust.
In this interview, Elmendorf describes the evolution of her novel from a romance to a murder mystery and the role that death and grief play in the story. She discusses Appalachian folk magic, abusive family structures, and shapeshifting crows. We also talk about poverty and rural healthcare systems, and the intermingling of the interpersonal and supernatural in contemporary fantasy.
In the Hour of Crows is an empathetic, dream-like book and it was so much fun discussing it with the author.
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Today I talked to Emma Copley Eisenberg's novel Housemates (Hogarth, 2024).
After Bernie’s former photography professor, the renowned yet tarnished Daniel Dunn, dies and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie to his home in rural Pennsylvania, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document America through words and photographs.
What ensues is a journey into the heart of the nation, bringing the housemates into conversation with people from all walks of life—“the absurd dreamers and failures of this wide, wide country”—as they try to make sense of the times they are living in. Along the way, Leah and Bernie discover what it means to chase their own ideas and dreams, and to embrace what they are capable of both romantically and artistically.
Warm and insightful, Housemates is a story of youth and freedom—a glorious celebration of queer life, and how art and love might save us all.
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What’s the truth and what’s a lie? What’s a memoir, what’s a novel, and what if both are just a series of “prose blocks”? This conversation between Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question.
Mentions:
By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers
Hilary Mantel
Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand.
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
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Joanna Lowell is known for her witty historical romances set in late Victorian England, a period both undergoing and resisting dramatic social change. Her previous novels in this series pair a young artist from the East End with her tortured muse, a duke; a runaway duchess with an admirably calm young man convinced she is a plant lover like himself; and a reluctant, poverty-stricken art forger with an art critic who is alienated from his aristocratic family. A Shore Thing (Berkley Books, 2024) follows the romantic fortunes of Kit Griffith, a former painter who now makes his living selling bicycles, and Muriel Pendrake—the intrepid, intelligent, world-traveling botanist impersonated in book 2.
Muriel has traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, to collect seaweed—not because that is her own preference, beautiful as some of it is, but because the stodgy male chauvinist in charge of a forthcoming talk that Muriel has agreed to present in New York has declared that no other topic is acceptable for a woman. She travels in the company of her old friend James, a doctor with a secret, and they are returning to their hotel when a near-accident involving a bicycle leads to Muriel’s dramatic encounter with a semi-conscious Kit.
It’s 1888, and most of the bicycles in town are the old-fashioned penny farthings, with a huge front wheel and a tiny back one. One thing leads to another, and soon Muriel—who has never mounted a bicycle in her life, not even the kind that Kit rides, which we would now consider standard—agrees to accompany this devastatingly handsome young rake (or so she thinks) on a cycling trip around the Cornwellian coast.
Joanna Lowell lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. She is the author of four interconnected historical romances set in late Victorian England—most recently, A Shore Thing. She writes in other genres as Joanna Ruocco.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels—including The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next novel, Song of the Steadfast, will appear early in 2025.
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Real Americans (Knopf, 2024) begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance--a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
Rachel’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a cookbook about eggs, called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district; she retired from that role in 2021.
Recommended Books:
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract 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.
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Award winning author and short fiction writer, C. J. Spataro's debut novel, More Strange Than True (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) takes us in to a world of faeries and what happens when wishes do come true. After an epically shitty day, Jewell Jamieson unknowingly eats a magic-spiked meal and happens also to make a certain wish-and that's why she awakes the next morning to discover her beloved dog Oberon has been transformed into a beautiful naked man in her bed. Conflict ensues when Titania, the impulsive Queen of the Faeries, decides she wants Oberon for herself. Is Oberon simply a man who used to be a dog, or is he somehow something more? When Jewell discovers the answer, she will be faced with a devastating choice. Will she choose to save the man she's grown to love by giving him up, or will she honor his wishes and watch him die?
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Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children’s book author. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. In 2020, he published The Forger’s Daughter, which the New York Times named a “Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 selection.” His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, will be released early next year.
Three essays from the Ways of Water issue are discussed today: Kristin Posehn’s “The Wave Readers” about Marshall Island natives using their intuitive, sensory skillset to navigate far-flung islands that sit only about seven feet above water; Ryan Habermeyer’s “A North American Field Guide to Glaciers,” a futuristic short story with the inklings of being a work of speculative nonfiction; and Heather Altfeld,’s “With Their Feet in the Water and Their Heads in the Fire” about dealing with intense heat, scorpions, and more, in Morocco. In each case, the climate poses unique challenges and lyrical narrative prose responses in kind with often poignant insights. A final essay covered here is Alyssa Pelish’s “The Four Notes,” a narrative discourse that displays a profound knowledge of classical music.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and--most heartbreaking of all--her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.
When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine--long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in--and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?
Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024) is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction--a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of We Were the Universe, a novel the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power,” and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.
Recommended Books:
Chelsea Bieker, Mad Woman
Ryan Chapman, The Audacity
Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries
Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract 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.
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Giulia is an orphan who has been cloistered since she was a baby. In 1584, the powerful Medici family demands a test of virility from the Grand Duke of Mantua before his marriage to Eleanora de Medici. Giulia, who knows nothing about the world of men, is offered a dowry and husband in exchange for one night with the prince. She doesn’t know what that night entails, or that the lecherous minister who arranges it will never set her completely free. The Maiden of Florence (Fairlight Books, 2024) is based on a true story.
Katherine Mezzacappa is an Irish author currently living in Carrara, northern Tuscany. She holds a BA in History of Art from UEA, an MLitt in English Literature from Durham and a master’s in creative writing from Canterbury Christ Church University. Her debut novel (writing as Katie Hutton), The Gypsy Bride, made the last fifteen in the Historical Novel Society’s 2018 new novel competition. Her short fiction has been short- and longlisted in numerous competitions, and she has been awarded residencies at Cill Rialaig Artists village by the Irish Writers Centre in 2019 and at Hald Hovedgaard by the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators in 2022. When she is not writing, Katherine volunteers with a second-hand book charity of which she is a founding member. She also sews dresses and is learning Irish and German.
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