New Books in Literature

"Honoured Investors, As Zhongfu Group enters its eighth decade, we are pleased to announce the acquisition of two famous coal mines. These assets further demonstrate our steadfast commitment to promoting the interests of local government and the people of Jingzhou. While the recent death of a Discipline Inspection Committee member has been regrettable, rest assured that any accusations of accounting irregularities or missing wages are unfounded, used by rumourmongers to incite valued employees to down tools. To assuage any possibility of misconduct, Qi Ben’an along with his siblings Shi Hongxing and Lin Manjing will be promoted to oversee these new assets with immediate effect. They will ensure the operations are run according to company values without deviation. Nothing can stop this bright era of unprecedented prosperity. We thank you for your continued support - The Board of Directors, Zhongfu Group.” Find out more in Property of the People (Sinoist, 2025) by Zhou Meisen, translated by James Trapp. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, 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

Cameron Sullivan’s novel The Red Winter (Tor Books, 2026) follows Sebastian Grave, a centuries old monster hunter, recounting events that occurred in largely the woods of Gévaudan during the years leading up to the French Revolution. The story centers around a terrible beast that hunts the local people and has not been stopped by even the resources of the French crown itself. Sebastian is drawn in not just by the promise of slaying the creature, with whom he has something of a history, but also by his attraction to a young aristocrat, Antione, who Sebastian, for all his experience and better judgement, cannot quite seem to get over. In this interview, Sullivan describes building a magic that feels deep and rooted to our world, the shadow of the French Revolution, and the challenges and excitement of turning historical legend into fantasy. He discusses the research process, queer relationships over time, and what we can and can’t know about the past. We also chat about the joys of footnotes and the importance of humor in the face of the horrific. The Red Winter is a lush and complex novel full of longing and regret and it was so much fun discussing it with the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

When a young reporter comes to interview Margaret Kenyon, the oldest practicing nurse in the Texas panhandle, she tells him that he’ll have to listen to her story before she answers any questions. It’s 2000, but her story begins in 1925, with Frankie, a beautiful 15-year-old who has never known anything other than violence, hunger, and fear. Frankie grabs the opportunity to escape her home with a charismatic gambler who shows her the world of bootlegging and uses her beauty for his own ends. After being violently abused, Frankie finds solace in a quite hospital laundry room and begins to rebuild her shattered life. Today we're discussing Far From Uncertain: One Woman’s Life of Crime and Other Righteous Deeds (Stoney Creek, 2026). Since completing a graduate degree in creative writing in 2012, Teddy Jones has made creating fiction her full-time occupation. She’s had six novels—including A Family of Good Women, which first introduced readers to Frankie—and a collection of short stories published and collected some prizes along the way. Jackson’s Pond, Texas was finalist in the Women Writing the West Willa Award for contemporary fiction in 2014, and one of her short stories won the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition first prize medal in 2015. Marva Cope, another novel, was named finalist for the Sarton Award in 2024. Jones earned a degree in nursing and a doctorate in education, worked as a family nurse practitioner and was founding dean of the School of Nursing at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. She focused on rural health promotion and was a monthly columnist for The Farmer Stockman for thirteen years. When she and her husband decided in 2001 to leave their “real jobs” and begin farming, opportunity presented itself. “If you’re going to write fiction, now’s the time,” she told herself. She’s been at it ever since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

n this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Alison Gadsby about her collection of short fiction, Breathing is How Some People Stay Alive (Guernica Editions, 2026). Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive blurs the lines between horror, catastrophic speculative fiction, and psychological realism in a collection that might best be described as weird fiction. These connected stories offer dark reconstructions of lives brimming with desperate loneliness. They allow us to bear witness to the life-altering love of sisters, brothers, mothers... the life-altering love that buoys them as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of childhoods they merely survived. Alison Gadsby writes in Tkaronto/Toronto where she lives in a multigenerational home that includes several dogs. Her writing has appeared in various literary journals, including Blank Spaces, The Temz Review, The Ex-Puritan, Blue Lake Review and more. She is the founder/host of Junction Reads, a prose reading series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Why did Langston Hughes's translations of Mexican and Cuban stories go unpublished for nearly a century? A landmark book—the first complete publication of Langston Hughes’s translations of thirty-three stories by eighteen Mexican and Cuban writers In late 1934, Langston Hughes, already established as a leading voice of literary Black America, traveled to Mexico City, where he stayed for more than five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories, as he wrote to a friend, explore “the revolutions and uprisings, sugar cane, Negroes, Indians, corrupt generals, [and] American imperialists,” and are “mostly all left stories, because practically all the writers down here are left these days.” But when Hughes proposed publishing the stories as a book, to be titled Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba as Translated by Langston Hughes (Princeton University Press, 2026), his agent discouraged him from further pursuing the project and it remained unpublished, until now, with only a handful of the translations making their way into contemporary magazines. This volume presents Hughes’s translations of these stories together for the first time as he originally envisioned. Edited by Ricardo Wilson, the book also features an introduction and brief biographies of the included writers. Troubled Lands features thirty-three stories by eighteen writers, including Rafael Felipe Muñoz, Nellie Campobello, Lino Novás Calvo, Luis Felipe Rodríguez, Germán List Arzubide, Pablo de la Torriente-Brau, and Juan de la Cabada. The collection depicts Mexico in the wake of its revolution and Cuba in the years between the brutal regimes of Machado and Batista. Hughes was a noted translator of poetry, but his commitment to translating fiction is less well known. Troubled Lands provides a window into this important dimension of his work and illuminates his deep interest in Mexico and Cuba. Ricardo A. Wilson II is a creative writer and scholar. He is associate professor of English at Williams College and founder and executive director of The Outpost Foundation. Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Can a novel with a singular voice also be a chorus? Can it reject the conventions of the novel and still be a novel? Poet, essayist, and novelist Billy-Ray Belcourt tells critic Matt Hooley how his desire to write a novel that “would sound like something else,” led him to produce A Minor Chorus, his experimental debut novel. Together they consider how Billy-Ray’s vulnerable, first-person narrator makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires of a community.” Billy-Ray discusses how his influences— queer theory, indigenous novelists, and contemporary autofiction—harmonize in his search for a new form. While author and critic trace the circuits of grief and melancholy that run from Roland Barthes to Billy-Ray, their conversation is joyful, reminding listeners that romance and intimacy sustain us and that beautiful sentences matter. His answer to this season’s signature question attests to the way that even the classroom can be refashioned, like the novel, into a chorus. Mentioned in this episode By Billy-Ray Belcourt: A Minor Chorus A History of My Brief Body This Wound is a World Also mentioned: The Summer Day “Arundhati Roy Sees Delhi as a Novel” Rachel Cusk, The Shakespeare and Company Interview “The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis” “100 Things About Writing a Novel” Mourning Diary Ann Cvetkovich Joshua Whitehead Mourning and Melancholia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Daniel Poppick is a poet and novelist. He is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Description, selected for the National Poetry Series, and The Police. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Drift, Harper's, BOMB, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and other journals. The recipient of awards from MacDowell and Yaddo and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Victoria University (New Zealand), Coe College, and the Parsons School of Design. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a copywriter and coedits the Catenary Press. Recommended Books: Joy Williams, Pelican Child Leah Flax Barber, The Mirror of Simple Souls Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Much of history has revolved around the journeys, challenges, and relationships, of men, but Serrah, daughter of Asher describes the teachings of her mother, grandmother, and all the women who shared their skills, compassion, hopes, and dreams. She’s mentioned once in passing in Genesis and again in the Book of Chronicles, but in Song of the Bluebird (Row House 2026), she’s known as Blue, who lives for generations, always a hard-working presence as the ancient Twelve Tribes of Israel grow in numbers, follow Joseph into Egypt, suffer as slaves, follow Moses across the sea, wander in the desert for forty years, and finally exult in freedom in the Land of Israel. Song of the Bluebird is a sweet and filling journey through the eyes of a wise and ageless woman. Esther Goldenberg was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where both her parents told her stories and she spent a lot of time daydreaming. As the daughter of an elementary school teacher, Esther spent more time in the classroom than the average child. She studied child development in college and went on to become a teacher. Esther spent a lot of time reading books to students and, over time, began writing books of her own. She has helped many children write stories and many adults write stories for children. She was the editor of a New York Times bestselling children's book (A Day With No Words). Esther considers herself an educator first, even though she is also an editor and writer. Two of Goldenberg's non-fiction books, Resistant to Reading: Tricks and Tips for Parents of Reluctant Readers and A Story Every Week: Torah Wisdom for Today's World were Amazon bestsellers in their categories, and her debut adult fiction novel The Scrolls of Deborah won the 2024 Foreword Indies gold medal for Religious Adult Fiction. That book is the first installment in The Desert Songs Trilogy of novels that retell the story of the Bible. These books highlight the everyday lives of the women, the relationships between family members, and the (sometimes surprising) similarities between life in modern times and life in ancient times. When not reading, writing, or leading workshops, Esther enjoys the process of making art -- regardless of the end-product. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Janice Hadlow about her fascinating novel, Rules of the Heart (Henry Holt & Company, 2026). A beautifully evocative historical novel about the perils of all-consuming love, inspired by a real-life eighteenth-century love affair, from the bestselling author of The Other Bennet Sister“When I love at all, it is with my whole soul—my heart must be torn to pieces before it can forget or resign the objects of its affections.”England, 1794. Now in her thirties, Lady Harriet Bessborough, already the veteran of several liaisons, finds herself pursued by a much younger man. This isn’t unusual in her circle, where married women often take younger lovers. No one minds much, provided they follow the rules of the game: Don’t embarrass your husband, maintain complete discretion at all times, and never ever make the mistake of falling in love.So when Harriet meets Lord Granville—brilliantly handsome, insistently ardent, and twelve years younger than her—she’s confident she can manage their affair. Until she finds herself falling uncontrollably under his spell.As she’s plunged into an all-consuming passion, Harriet’s worldliness and sophistication desert her. With each besotted step, she finds herself edging ever closer to exposure and ruin. She knows she should leave Granville but can’t bring herself to do it—she loves him far too deeply now to escape the scandal that threatens to engulf her. Janice Hadlow worked as a television producer and commissioner for most of her career. She graduated with a first-class degree in history from King’s College London and has always been fascinated by the eighteenth century. She is the author of A Royal Experiment, a family biography of George III, Queen Charlotte, and their children. The Other Bennet Sister, her fiction debut, was named a best book of 2020 by Library Journal, NPR, and The Christian Science Monitor. It is currently in production as a drama for BBC television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author and retired paramedic and fire captain, Sean Paul Bedell, about his novel, Shoebox (NoN Publishing, 2025).In this gritty and emotional exploration of the human condition, Steve Lewis, a dedicated paramedic, faces the devastating aftermath of a fatal accident that casts a dark shadow over his once-passionate commitment to saving lives. Plagued by guilt and grief, he finds his career, family, and very existence hanging in the balance as he navigates the complexities of trauma both personal and professional. As Steve grapples with the high stakes of his job amidst the scrutiny of a community that admires yet questions him, each life he saves rekindles his passion for his work, reminding him of the profound connections he can forge through compassion and care. A compelling and visceral journey of personal redemption and triumph over adversity, Shoebox explores the human spirit's capacity for healing. Author of the novel Somewhere There’s Music, Sean Paul Bedell has been writing and publishing for more than 30 years. A longtime paramedic and captain with the fire service, he lives with his wife Lisa in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature