Épisodes

  • Somia Sadiq, "Gajarah" (GFB, 2025)

    Somia Sadiq, "Gajarah" (GFB, 2025)
    Dec 14 2025
    With stunning lyricism, Somia Sadiq's Gajarah (GFB, 2025) tells the story of a fearless woman torn between two worlds-Pakistan and Canada-whose life is upended by sexual violence. Emahn is big haired, mischievous, and larger than life. Born in the Arabian Gulf, she spends extended summers with her grandparents, aunties, and cousins on the rooftops of Lahore. But tucked away beneath her spirited exterior, Emahn carries the weight of childhood trauma. When she marries and moves to Canada, she quickly learns the art of navigating multiple realities and compartmentalizing memories of the world she left behind, even as she clings to the stories of her home. She is resilient; she is driven; she is unbreakable. Almost. When tragedy strikes, Emahn must draw upon the deepest wells of her ancestral strength to survive, even if it means revisiting her gutting past. Braided together with prose, poetry, and mythical parables, Gajarah confronts the realities of forgiveness and justice, and asks what it means to belong to a land that so forcefully pushes one away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    38 min
  • Stephanie Reents, "We Loved to Run" (Hogarth, 2025)

    Stephanie Reents, "We Loved to Run" (Hogarth, 2025)
    Dec 12 2025
    At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls’ chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin’s confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run (Hogarth, 2025) deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination. Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recommended Books: Marisa Crane, A Sharp Endless Need Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional 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/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    50 min
  • Daria Lavelle, "Aftertaste" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

    Daria Lavelle, "Aftertaste" (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
    Dec 9 2025
    In Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster, 2025) Konstantin Duhovny’s father died when he was young, and his mother is too anguished to raise him, so he raises himself, but not very well. After a sad breakup, he advertises for a roommate and finds a chef who becomes his best friend. Kostya starts to realize that although he doesn’t see ghosts, he can taste the food they once loved. He figures out how to prepare special dishes that unite people with their dead loved ones, and in hopes of helping people, decides to really learn how to cook. But he falls in love with someone who has an inkling about the afterlife and she wants to stop him from feeding ghosts. This is a beautiful but crazy novel about New York’s food scene, the most esoteric and expensive foods, ghosts, finding a soulmate, and losing one’s soul. Daria Lavelle is a speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, Dark Matters, and elsewhere, and her debut novel, Aftertaste, was published by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025, and is currently being translated into thirteen languages. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and can often be found in a coffee shop, inventing new worlds or distorting this one. When she's not writing, she enjoys opera, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and Escape Rooms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    24 min
  • Caitlin Galway, "A Song for Wildcats: Stories" (Dundurn Press, 2025)

    Caitlin Galway, "A Song for Wildcats: Stories" (Dundurn Press, 2025)
    Dec 8 2025
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Caitlin Galway about her short fiction collection, A Song for Wildcats (Dundurn Press, 2025). An arresting, vividly imaginative collection of stories capturing the complexity of intimacy and the depths of the unravelling mind.Infatuation and violence grow between two girls in the enchanting wilderness of postwar Australia as they spin disturbing fantasies to escape their families. Two young men in the midst of the 1968 French student revolts navigate — and at times resist — the philosophical and emotional nature of love. An orphaned boy and his estranged aunt are thrown together on a quiet peninsula at the height of the Troubles in Ireland, where their deeply rooted fear attracts the attention of shape-shifting phantoms of war.The five long-form stories in A Song for Wildcats are uncanny portraits of grief and resilience and are imbued with unique beauty, insight, and resonance from one of the country's most exciting authors. Caitlin Galway is the author of the novel Bonavere Howl. Her work has been published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets throughout Canada, and she has won or been nominated for numerous prizes. She lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    45 min
  • Michael Kardos, "Fun City Heist" (Severn House, 2025)

    Michael Kardos, "Fun City Heist" (Severn House, 2025)
    Dec 2 2025
    Mo Melnick has perfect pitch, which didn’t help him in his career as a drummer, but he used to be in a rock band and now his job is sitting on the Jersey Shore renting out chairs and beach umbrellas. When the singer from his old band shows up and begs Mo to reunite for a final gig at the beachfront amusement park where they first started, Mo is skeptical. But Johnny Clay persuades Mo and the other band members that in addition to performing together again, they’re going to pull off a major robbery of the resort. Mo’s estranged teenage daughter shows up and is enthusiastic about both the gig and the Fun City Heist (Severn House, 2025). Mo hopes everything goes according to plan – what could possibly go wrong? Michael Kardos is the two-time Pushcart Prize-winning author of three previous novels: The Three-Day Affair, Before He Finds Her and most recently Bluff, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time, all of which have earned acclaim and starred trade reviews. Originally from the Jersey Shore, Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Princeton and received an M.F.A. from Ohio State and a Ph.D from the University of Missouri. He co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for over a dozen years before moving with his family to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2022. Michael played the drums professionally in his twenties as part of a band who were booked at a lot of clubs, slept on a lot of sofas— and accrued a lot of musical war stories. But he’s never pulled off a heist (that he’ll admit to). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    22 min
  • Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022)

    Eileen Myles, "Pathetic Literature" (Grove Press, 2022)
    Dec 1 2025
    “Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”. Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    32 min
  • Emily Hunt Kivel, "Dwelling" (FSG, 2025)

    Emily Hunt Kivel, "Dwelling" (FSG, 2025)
    Nov 28 2025
    The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a fun-house mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    37 min
  • Yvonne Blomer, "Death of Persephone: A Murder" (Caitlin Press, 2024)

    Yvonne Blomer, "Death of Persephone: A Murder" (Caitlin Press, 2024)
    Nov 27 2025
    In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Yvonne Blomer about her stunning narrative poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core? About Yvonne Blomer: Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    38 min