Podcast
New Books in Literature
Hosted by Marshall Poe · EN
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field.
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77episodes
Episodes
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Kyra Davis Lurie, "The Great Mann" (Crown, 2025)
Yesterday01:02:24Tap to summarizeIn 1945, Charlie Trammell steps off a cross-country train into the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles. Lured by his cousin Marguerite’s invitation to the esteemed West Adams Heights, Charlie is immediately captivated by the Black opulence of L.A.’s newly rechristened “Sugar Hill.”Settling in at a local actress’s energetic boarding house, Charlie discovers a different way of life—one brimming with opportunity—from a promising career at a Black-owned insurance firm, the absence of Jim Crow, to the potential of an unforgettable romance. But nothing dazzles quite like James “Reaper” Mann.Reaper’s extravagant parties, attended by luminaries like Lena Horne and Hattie McDaniel, draw Charlie in, bringing the milieu of wealth and excess within his reach. But as Charlie’s unusual bond with Reaper deepens, so does the tension in the neighborhood as white neighbors, frustrated by their own dwindling fortunes, ignite a landmark court case that threatens the community’s well-being with promises of retribution.Told from the unique perspective of a young man who has just returned from a grueling, segregated war, The Great Mann (Crown, 2025) is a poignant reimagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby set amongst L.A.’s Black elite weaves a compelling narrative of wealth and class, illuminating the complexities of Black identity and education in post-war America. You can find Kyra on Instagram, Threads, and TikTok. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Deb Olin Unferth, "Earth 7" (Graywolf Press 2026)
Yesterday00:24:38Tap to summarizeWith thanks to “forever” plastics, the earth has reverted to sand and dust. Dylan has been raised by her scientist mother, in a pod under the sea, and longs to escape the loneliness of being confined. The only friend she ever had was a pen pal from Mars, who disappeared. With great effort, she’s escorted onto land, to the place of her mother’s employment where she becomes the groundskeeper. Unofficially, she begins studying sand. After a few years, the company sends her on a vacation and she meets Melanie, possibly a robot. Love flourishes on the floundering planet, but death is never far, and Dylan’s pen pal returns too late in Earth 7 (Graywolf Press 2026), a dystopian novel about the frailty of the planet, the ongoing need for scientific research, and the human struggle for survival. Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Barn 8 and Vacation, the memoir Revolution, finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, two story collections, and the graphic novel I, Parrot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in over fifty magazines and journals, including Harper’s, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Fellowship for Innovative Literature, fellowships from the MacDowell, Yaddo, and Ucross residencies. She’s a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches for the Michener Center, the New Writers’ Project, and she also directs the Pen City Writers, the prison creative-writing program at a south Texas penitentiary. Unferth founded and directs the Pen City Writers, a creative writing program for incarcerated men at a maximum-security prison in south Texas. The program has been running for ten years, and the students regularly win writing awards from Pen America and the Insider Prize. Their work has appeared in many places, including Vice, StoryQuarterly, the Texas Observer, the Stranger's Guide, and the Marshall Project. Deb and her friend, Lucy Corin, have gone on several research and writing trips together, including to the Sahara Desert for the sand; in 2024, they spent a month in the Arctic to see ice, trying to get as close to the North Pole as possible, and reaching the 82nd parallel. Last year, they rented two pods in a scrub desert Dark Sky area of the US to see darkness. Originally from Chicago, Unferth lives in Austin with philosophy professor Matt Evans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Terese Mason Pierre, "As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories" (Spiderline, 2025)
2d ago00:41:40Tap to summarizeIn this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with editor, poet, and author, Terese Mason Pierre about As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories (Spiderline, 2025). A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy. Edited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother's fourth funeral, only to encounter family she's never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire--all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures. Featuring stories by:Trynne Delaneyfrancesca ekwuyasiWhitney FrenchAline-Mwezi NiyonsengaChimedum OhaegbuSuyi Davies OkungbowaChinelo OnwualuLue PalmerTerese Mason PierreZalika Reid-Benta TERESE MASON PIERRE (she/her) is a writer, poet, and editor whose work has appeared in the Walrus, ROOM, Brick, Quill & Quire, Uncanny, and Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her work has been nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award, Best of the Net, the Aurora Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Ignyte Award. She is one of ten winners of the Writers’ Trust Journey Prize and was named a Writers’ Trust Rising Star. Terese is the chief programming officer at Augur, a speculative arts nonprofit, and co-director of AugurCon, Augur’s biennial speculative arts conference. Terese lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)
6d ago00:54:35Tap to summarizeAmrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh bring into English for the first time a long-inaccessible masterpiece of South Asian literature Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband (2025). Composed in the late seventeenth century by Upendra Bhanja — the Odia prince-poet hailed as Kavi Samrat, the Emperor of Poets — the work is a Ramayana that privileges shringara, the erotic sentiment, over martial heroism. Rama-the-lover overshadows Rama-the-warrior, and his conjugal life with Sita takes center stage in a poem dense with puns, classical ragas, and chitrapadya — word-arrangements that resolve into wheels, chariots, and arrows on the page. Famously, every verse begins with the letter ba, and the text has long been considered untranslatable. With a preface by Wendy Doniger, Chowdhury and Ghosh's decade-long translation preserves the strangeness and sensuality of the original while opening it to a new readership. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Terao Tetsuya and translated by Kevin Wang, "Spent Bullets" (HarperVia, 2025)
1w ago00:58:54Tap to summarizeWith Taiwan Travelogue winning the 2026 International Booker Prize, Taiwanese literature in translation has achieved new heights of visibility in the Anglosphere. In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with writer and translator Kevin Wang about his English language rendition of Spent Bullets (HarperCollins, 2025), another Taiwanese novel that Taiwan Travelogue’s translator Lin King herself recommended to English-language readers. Written by a former Google engineer using the pen name Terao Tetsuya, Spent Bullets contains nine interconnected stories about a group of Taiwanese men as they journey through Taiwan’s most prestigious schools to Silicon Valley’s hottest tech companies. Despite being the “elite”, these characters find themselves mired in a swamp of nihilism, resorting to suicide attempts and sadomasochism as outlets for their constantly oppressed psyches. The novel represents a darkly humorous take on Taiwan’s omnipresent achievement culture, as well as another critically celebrated example of the island’s burgeoning body of queer literature. Other works that Kevin mentions in the podcast: Kink: Stories — by R.O. Kwan and Garth Greenwell Overfitting — by Terao Tetsuya, still pending translation Mobu’s Diary —by Kathy Lam, translated by Kevin Wang and Cindy Ko Kevin's recent interview by Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, in which he discusses communities in Taipei in greater detail Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Martha Conway, "We Meet Apart" (Regal House Publishing, 2026)
1w ago00:22:11Tap to summarizeIt’s 1940 and Gaby’s parents and sister succumb to Typhus after staying in France to care for Gaby and Sabine’s dying grandmother. The war is in full swing and Gaby can’t get home to Poughkeepsie, NY. Her aunt lives in Ireland, which stayed neutral during WWII, so she heads there. But the aunt has just died, and 18-year-old Gaby makes her way to the remote manor of her aunt’s husband’s relatives, where she’s hired as a servant. In a different reality, 17-year-old Sabine is the sister who survived. She also finds her way to Ireland, but Germany has invaded, so she’s in hiding. Then Sabine gets to the same remote manor where for one hour at dusk, a mystical time according to Irish legend, she and Gaby meet and talk. We Meet Apart (Regal House Publishing, 2026) is about family, resilience, and survival in the face of war, death, and the world of ghosts. Martha Conway grew up in northern Ohio and earned her B.A. in English and History from Vassar College. She received a master’s in English: Creative Writing, from San Francisco State University. Her previous novels include The Underground River, which was a New York Times Book Editor’s Choice, and Thieving Forest, which won the North American Book Award for Historical Fiction. Her short fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, Carolina Quarterly, Missouri Review, Folio, and other journals. She is a recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship, and she teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Writing Certificate program. When Martha is not writing or reading, she's playing at being a flaneuse—a city stroller—or traveling to Italy to see Roman ruins with her husband, a former archeologist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Mackenzi Lee, "Masters of the Universe: Teela: Daughter of Eternos" (Mattel, 2026)
1w ago00:43:08Tap to summarizeMackenzi Lee's Masters of the Universe: Teela: Daughter of Eternos (Mattel, 2026) is a young adult tie-in for the Masters of the Universe (2026) film. A FALLEN KINGDOMFour years after Skeletor decimated the kingdom of Eternos, Teela and the scattered refugees of Eternia survive by never staying in one place for long. When a brutal storm of acidic rain deep within the Evergreen Forest leaves their camp ravaged and hope at its thinnest, some, like Teela’s friend Locke, begin to plan for a future beyond Eternia. But Teela knows her father Duncan, the once-mighty Man-At-Arms, won’t survive leaving the land he swore to protect.A FORBIDDEN ALLIANCEDesperate to save her people, Teela ventures to Darksmoke to bargain with the ancient dragon Granamyr. He bestows upon her a vial filled with a mysterious, powerful elixir—and no instructions on its use. Enter Evil-Lyn, Skeletor’s ruthless second-in-command, who intercepts Teela with a dangerous proposal: an alliance. In exchange for the vial’s secrets, Teela and the Heroic Warriors must someday help the sorceress overthrow Skeletor himself.A MAGIC THAT COULD SAVE—OR DESTROY—THEM ALLThe vial heals the sick and brings food back to empty tables—until the forest around the camp begins to change. Rivers vanish. Trees peel to bone. Creatures flee. As the land around them withers at an ever-increasing pace, Teela must confront an impossible question: Has the very magic she used to save her people doomed Eternia instead? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →chaun webster, "Without Terminus: untraining an archive" (Greywolf, 2026)
2w agoTap to summarizeIn his first work of nonfiction, poet chaun webster blends memoir, archival research, visual poetics, and cultural criticism to trace the ways structural anti-Black violence has shaped his inheritance, and grapples with the question of how to know—and mourn—the kin he was never able to meet.webster is particularly drawn to his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a Pullman porter, who was denied rest while his labor enabled rest for others, and who died without receiving a pension before webster was born. Returning to the figures of Reginald and the train, webster explores the relationship between comportment and confinement, speaking in tongues in the Pentecostal church, the ancestral meeting place of dreams, his fraught relationship with his mother, and moments with his own child. Throughout, webster also reflects on nonbiological kinship, tethering his and his predecessors’ lives to those of several historical Black figures—Harriet Jacobs, John Henry, Henry “Box” Brown, and Henry Dumas, a writer who was killed by New York City police while riding the subway.Attempting to exhaust the possibilities of the sentence and the grammar of anti-Blackness, webster riffs and rails on the debris within reach. Part elegy, part archival detective story, and part visual poem, Without Terminus: untraining an archive (Greywolf, 2026) is a philosophically rigorous and deeply moving text that takes us beyond the archive of loss. You can find the works chaun references during our conversation, as well as a further discussion about literary form, at the Additions to the Archive Substack. Follow chaun webster on Instagram. Subscribe, like, follow, and rate Additions to the Archive with Sullivan Summer on Instagram, Substack, and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →Elina Penner, 'Nightberries" (CMU Press, 2026)
2w ago00:42:50Tap to summarizeIn this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Elina Penner about her translated novel, Nightberries (CMU Press, 2026, translated by Bradley Schmidt). Where is your husband?Nelli doesn’t seem to be in crisis—or does she? The quiet youngest daughter in a noisy, tangled German Mennonite family who fled from Russia in the 1990s, does she even know where she belongs? Marriage, loyalty, faith, family: memory can be deceiving. Or are memories like nightberries? Nightberries taste good, with sugar, when ripe. But sometimes nightberries are dangerous, and you need to understand when that transformation happens. A tense situation boils over in this darkly entertaining psychological novel of contemporary German life. Elina Penner was born in 1987 as a Mennonite German in the former Soviet Union and moved to Germany in 1991. Plautdietsch is her mother tongue. After years in Berlin and the US, she lives with her family in East Westphalia and is a successful personal essayist and blogger. Nachtbeeren was her debut novel, in 2022. In 2025, her second novel, Die Unbußfertigen, will be published in Germany. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
Transcribe →An Interview with Senior Literary Agent Stephen Fraser
3w ago00:49:15Tap to summarizeStephen Fraser is senior literary agent with The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, after having worked as an editor for over 25 years before becoming an agent. He represents children’s books in a wide range of genres. We talked about his experiences in the worlds of editing and agenting, his do's and don'ts for submissions, his thoughts on the current state of children's literature, and the importance of the story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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