Episodios

  • Aysegül Savas, "The Anthropologists" (Bloomsbury, 2024)

    Aysegül Savas, "The Anthropologists" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
    Jul 30 2024
    Asya and Manu are looking at apartments, envisioning their future in a foreign city. What should their life here look like? What rituals will structure their days? Whom can they consider family? As the young couple dreams about the possibilities of each new listing, Asya, a documentarian, gathers footage from the neighborhood like an anthropologist observing local customs. "Forget about daily life," chides her grandmother on the phone. "We named you for a whole continent and you're filming a park." Back in their home countries parents age, grandparents get sick, nieces and nephews grow up-all just slightly out of reach. But Asya and Manu's new world is growing, too, they hope. As they open the horizons of their lives, what and whom will they hold onto, and what will they need to release? Unfolding over a series of apartment viewings, late-night conversations, last rounds of drinks and lazy breakfasts, The Anthropologists (Bloomsbury, 2024) is a soulful examination of homebuilding and modern love, written with Aysegül Savas' distinctive elegance, warmth, and humor. Aysegül Savas is the author of the acclaimed novels Walking on the Ceiling and White on White. Her work has been translated into six languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, and elsewhere. She lives in Paris. Recommended Books: Hugh Raffles, The Book of Unconformities Alisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    31 m
  • Ruchama Feuerman, "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist" (Open Road Media, 2024)

    Ruchama Feuerman, "In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist" (Open Road Media, 2024)
    Jul 30 2024
    In Ruchama Feuerman's novel In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist (Open Road Media 2024), Isaac, a lonely, heartbroken New York haberdasher, moves to Jerusalem after he’s jilted by his bride-to-be and his mother dies. He stumbles into a job as the assistant to a famous kabbalist and spends his days helping the elderly man and his wife dispense wisdom and soup to the troubled souls who come into their courtyard. Isaac crosses paths with Tamar, a newly religious young American woman desperate to find a spiritually connected husband, and Mustafa, a physically deformed Arab janitor who works on the Temple Mount. Isaac doesn’t realize that simply being kind to the janitor will change both their lives. Because of that kindness, Mustafa gifts Isaac with an ancient, discarded piece of pottery that he found in the garbage pile on the Temple Mount. His gift lands Isaac in jail and puts Mustafa in danger. Tamar is the only person Isaac knows who can help avert a disaster. First published in 2014, In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist has just been reissued with an intriguing afterward. Ruchama Feuerman is the author of Seven Blessings (St. Martin's Press), and several books for children and young adults. She is grateful to the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Christopher Isherwood Fellowship which allowed her the time and means to devote herself entirely to her writing. Her prize-winning stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Lilith, Tablet, and other publications. She has written and ghostwritten books for children, young adults, and adults, and helps people create their own novels, memoirs, stories and books of non-fiction. Her dream is to return to Israel, the setting for both her novels, where she lived and taught Torah for ten years. It's a place, she finds, where extraordinary stories are handed to you daily. Researching her latest novel led Ruchama to kabbalists, Israeli ex-convicts, Arab laborers, archeologists, Temple Mount police men, connoisseurs of Israeli prison slang, and soup kitchens, among other places. One of the most transformative experiences was her time spent at a Jewish funeral home in New Jersey where she observed a ritual purification for a scene she was writing. Afterward, she volunteered at the Hevra Kadisha burial society for three years and wrote about the experience for the New York Times. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    24 m
  • Naomi Westerman, "Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures" (404 Inklings, 2024)

    Naomi Westerman, "Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures" (404 Inklings, 2024)
    Jul 26 2024
    Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something deeply personal. She became fascinated by the concept of loss and grief, the multiple ways we experience it across cultures, history, and art. Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures (404 Inklings, 2024) is part memoir, part meditation on the many faces of death – from sprinkling ashes across the globe, to the power of horror movies, the complexities of engaging in true crime entertainment, and the vital communities of peer support groups – Happy Death Club is a frank, curious and darkly humorous look at one person’s journey through grief, and what lies beyond. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    52 m
  • A. J. Rodriguez, "Papel Picado," The Common Magazine (2024)

    A. J. Rodriguez, "Papel Picado," The Common Magazine (2024)
    Jul 26 2024
    A. J. Rodriguez speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his story “Papel Picado,” which appears in The Common’s most recent issue. A.J. talks about the process of writing and revising this story, which explores a fraught moment in the life of a Latino high schooler struggling under the pressures of family, friendship, and expectation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A.J. also discusses how his writing has changed over time, and why he’s always writing toward not just a specific character’s experience but also the complex community of a place. A. J. Rodriguez is a Chicano fiction writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and The Kerouac Project. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades, judged by Jonathan Escoffery. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. He is the forty-third annual Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C. ­­Read A.J.’s story “Papel Picado” in The Common at thecommononline.org/papel-picado. Follow A.J. on Instagram and Twitter @soyajrodriguez. The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Twitter @CommonMag. Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. Her debut novel is forthcoming from Putnam Books. Her stories appear in the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House Online, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    48 m
  • "Alaska Quarterly Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Ronald Spatz

    "Alaska Quarterly Review" Magazine: A Discussion with Ronald Spatz
    Jul 25 2024
    Ronald Spatz is the editor-in-chief and co-founding editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. A formal National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Mr. Spatz has been recognized with Alaska State Governor’s Awards in Humanities and the Arts. He is currently a full professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he also served as the founding Dean of the University Honors College and Undergraduate Research & Scholarship and as the Director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. Ronald Spatz’s abiding goal for Alaska Quarterly Review is to be innovative, risk-taking, and truth-seeking, all virtues born out during this interview and by the four essays discussed here. In “Hungry Ghost” by May-lee Chaie, a cascading series of misogynistic and racist acts within the family have contributed to a devastating degree of low self-esteem. The essay confronts the emotional abyss that plagues all concerned. In “Once” by Michael Bogan, the fairy-tale like qualities of a teenage romance become exposed to the harsh realities of mutual betrayal, and a marriage that ultimately crumbles. In “Mother Matter” by Meil Sloan the point of view shifts between the first- and second-person as the author deals with a suicidal, autistic son whose tribulations cause his mother to dip into her inner resources while at the same time seeking answers from physics as to how the world works. Finally, in “The Cave” by Debbie Urbanski an intrusive narrator transforms a short story into a hybrid piece, with meta-commentary about the act of writing and the search for what really was going on beneath the surface during a family outing gone wrong. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    41 m
  • Christian J. Collier, "Greater Ghost" (Four Way Books, 2024)

    Christian J. Collier, "Greater Ghost" (Four Way Books, 2024)
    Jul 22 2024
    In Christian Collier's debut poetry collection, Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), this extraordinary Black Southern poet precisely stitches the sutures of grief and gratitude together over our wounds. These pages move between elegies for private hauntings and public ones, the visceral bereavement of a miscarriage alongside the murder of a family member, and the specter of police brutality. With a profound awareness of literary tradition, Collier enters into the American canon and dialogues with Black Southern noir--a poem like "Beloved," whose title expresses not only a genuine tenderness in its term of endearment but invokes Morrison, contextualizes this book within the legacy of racial injustice in the U.S., presenting again the prolific losses and disproportionate Black mortality across time, and yet remembers the resilience of love and transformative possibility of self-actualization from inside tragedy. Christian J. Collier is a Black, Southern writer, arts organizer, and teaching artist who resides in Chattanooga, TN. He is the author of Greater Ghost (Four Way Books, 2024), and the chapbook The Gleaming of the Blade, the 2021 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, Poetry, December, and elsewhere. A 2015 Loft Spoken Word Immersion Fellow, he is also the winner of the 2022 Porch Prize in Poetry and the 2020 ProForma Contest from Grist Journal. Instagram: @ichristian3030 Twitter: @ichristian3030 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    1 h y 1 m
  • Kendra Sullivan, "Reps" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)

    Kendra Sullivan, "Reps" (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024)
    Jul 19 2024
    Kendra Sullivan's latest book of poetry, Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. From deep within a narrowly constrained relational data set sometimes defined as memory, sometimes identity, and sometimes collectivity, Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds. Kendra Sullivan is a poet, public artist, and activist scholar. She is the Director of the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she leads the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research and coleads the NYC Climate Justice Hub. She is the publisher of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative and the co-editorial director of Women’s Studies Quarterly. Kendra makes public art addressing waterfront access and equity issues in cities around the world and has published her writing on art, ecology, and engagement widely. She is the co-founder of the Sunview Luncheonette, a cooperative arts venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; and a member of Mare Liberum, a collective of artists, activists, and boatbuilders. Her work has been supported by grants, awards, and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Waverley Street Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Montello Foundation, the Engaging the Senses Foundation, the Rauschenberg Foundation, the Blue Mountain Center, and the T.S. Eliot House, among many others. Her books include Zero Point Dream Poems (Doublecross Press) and Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse). Tyler Thier is a faculty member and administrator in the Department of Writing Studies & Rhetoric at Hofstra University. He regularly writes and teaches cultural criticism, and his scholarship is concerned with malicious rhetoric and dangerous media—specifically, extremist manifestos. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    57 m
  • Anthony Di Renzo, "Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue" (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023)

    Anthony Di Renzo, "Pasquinades: Essays from Rome's Famous Talking Statue" (Cayuga Lake Books, 2023)
    Jul 18 2024
    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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
    Más Menos
    43 m