New Books in Literary Studies
1,623 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 year ago - ★★★★★ - 18 ratingsInterviews with Scholars of Literature about their New Books
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Episodes
Amy Fusselman, "The Means" (Mariner Books, 2022)
November 21, 2022 09:00 - 37 minutesAmy Fusselman is the author of five books. Her latest, The Means (Mariner Books, 2022), is her first novel. Fusselman’s previous four books, all nonfiction, have been translated into several languages. Her work has been nominated for The Believer Book Award and the University of Iowa's Krause Essay Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many other places. She lives in New York City with her family and teaches creative writing...
Grant Faulkner, "All the Comfort Sin Can Provide" (Black Lawrence Press, 2021)
November 21, 2022 09:00 - 43 minutesToday I had the pleasure of talking to Grant Faulkner. We discuss National Novel Writing Month, of which Grant is the executive director, 100 Word Story, of which Grant is a practitioner and editor, and Grant's book of short stories All the Comfort Sin Can Provide (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Here's a bit about the book, a book I highly recommend you buy and read. "With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise-tracing those h...
Erin Alice Cowling, "Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature" (U Toronto Press, 2021)
November 21, 2022 09:00 - 45 minutesIn terms of its popularity, as well as its production, chocolate was among the first foods to travel from the New World to Spain. Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature (U Toronto Press, 2021) considers chocolate as an object of collective memory used to bridge the transatlantic gap through Spanish literary works of the early modern period, tracing the mention of chocolate from indigenous legends and early chronicles of the conquistadors to the theatre and literatur...
Lynn Steger Strong, "Flight" (Mariner Books, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourLynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight (Mariner Books, 2022). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York, The Paris Review, Time, and elsewhere. She has taught writing at The Pratt Institute, Fairfield University, Catapult, and Columbia University and will be the Visiting Fiction Writer at Bates College for the 2022-2023 school year. She was born and raised in South Florida. Recommended Books: Sheila Heti, Pure Color ...
Sindya Bhanoo, “Tsunami Bride” The Common magazine (Fall, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 35 minutesSindya Bhanoo speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about her story “Tsunami Bride,” which appears in The Common’s new fall issue. Sindya talks about her experience reporting from India after the 2004 tsunami, and how that experience eventually became a story about a journalist in the same position, told from a local’s perspective. She also discusses how the training and techniques she developed as a journalist have shaped her drafting and revision process for fiction, how food often makes ...
Yigal Bronner et al., "Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation" (U California Press, 2022)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 53 minutesWhat are the pleasures of reading translations of South Asian literature, and what does it take to enjoy a translated text? Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation (U California Press, 2022) provides opportunities to explore such questions by bringing together a whole set of new translations by David Shulman, noted scholar of South Asia. Together, the translations and the accompanying essays form an essential guide for people interested in literature and art ...
Alexander Des Forges, "Testing the Literary: Prose and the Aesthetic in Early Modern China" (Harvard UP, 2021)
November 18, 2022 09:00 - 58 minutesThe eight-legged essay (bagu wen) was the one genre of writing that dominated in late imperial China. As the primary mode of expression in which men were schooled, writing and reading shiwen (modern or contemporary prose) epitomized literary production in Ming-Qing China, and it was vitally important for every student, examination candidate, and examiner to master and know the genre intimately — but this genre hasn't yet been approached from a literary perspective. Alexander Des Forges' new...
Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, "Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation" (Tilted Axis Press, 2022)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesFrantz Fanon wrote in 1961 that 'Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,' meaning that the violence of colonialism can only be counteracted in kind. As colonial legacies linger today, what are the ways in which we can disentangle literary translation from its roots in imperial violence? In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), twenty-four writers and translators from across the world share their ideas and practices for disrupting and decolonising transl...
Ethnonationalism since 1973: A Discussion with Quinn Slobodian
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 46 minutesWhat’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism? John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its pu...
4.6 Translation is the Closest Way to Read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 47 minutesIn our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the boo...
Ruth Vanita, "The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics" (Oxford UP, 2021)
November 17, 2022 09:00 - 56 minutesRuth Vanita's book The Dharma of Justice in the Sanskrit Epics (Oxford UP, 2021) shows that many characters in the Sanskrit epics - men and women of all varnas and mixed-varna - discuss and criticize discrimination based on gender, varna, poverty, age, and disability. On the basis of philosophy, logic and devotion, these characters argue that such categories are ever-changing, mixed and ultimately unreal therefore humans should be judged on the basis of their actions, not birth. The book expl...
Guido Ruggiero, "Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance" (Harvard UP, 2021)
November 16, 2022 09:00 - 54 minutesToday Jana Byars talks to her PhD advisor Guido Ruggiero about his latest monograph, Love and Sex in the Time of Plague: A Decameron Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 2021) over the meaning of love in the early Renaissance. As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing it...
On H. G. Well's "The Time Machine"
November 15, 2022 09:00 - 37 minutesWhen H.G. Wells was growing up in England in the 1860s, science wasn’t part of education or everyday life the way it is now. Even though the 19th century was an era of dramatic technological invention, the professionalization of science was still developing. Wells viewed science as an incredibly powerful force. He knew it could either help or hurt humanity--even with that risk, he believed society should fully embrace science. When Wells wrote his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, he ki...
Melancholy
November 15, 2022 09:00 - 15 minutesIn this episode of High Theory, Laura Stokes talks about melancholy. One of the four humors in ancient humoral medicine, melancholy, or black bile, is a fluid substance and spiritual principle that was thought to move within the human body. A proper quantity of black bile allows one to be calm and contemplative, thoughtful and withdrawn. A superabundance produces sadness, indigestion, and a host of other evils. Research is a melancholy practice; scholars are prone to melancholic dispositions....
Kayla Maiuri, "Mother In the Dark: A Novel" (Riverhead Books, 2022)
November 15, 2022 05:00 - 35 minutesKayla Maiuri holds an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Born in the greater Boston area, she now lives in Brooklyn. Mother in the Dark (Riverhead Books, 2022) is her first novel. Recommended Books: Anna Hogeland, The Long Answer 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-...
Ryan Poll, "Aquaman and the War Against Oceans: Comics Activism and Allegory in the Anthropocene" (U Nebraska Press, 2022)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesIn Aquaman and the War against Oceans (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), Ryan Poll explores ways the New 52 reimagining of Aquaman--a massive overhaul and rebranding of all DC Comics--transformed the character from a joke to an important figure of ecological justice. In this series, Aquaman becomes an accessible figure for charting environmental violences endemic to global capitalism and for developing a progressive and popular ecological imagination. Poll argues that The New 52 Aquaman sh...
Andrea Scheurer, et al., "Entanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South" (Ibidem Press, 2022)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 42 minutesEntanglements: Envisioning World Literature from the Global South (Ibidem Press, 2022) scrutinizes current debates to bring historical and contemporary South-South entanglements to the fore and to develop a new understanding of world literature in a multipolar world of globalized modernity. The volume challenges established ideas of world literature by rethinking the concept along the notion of “entanglements”: as a field of variously criss-crossing relations of literary activity beyond the c...
Kedar Arun Kulkarni, "World Literature and the Question of Genre in Colonial India: Poetry, Drama, and Print Culture 1790-1890" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 51 minutesIn 1818, the East India Company defeated the Maratha confederacy, acquiring vast domains in central and western India. Through coercion if not outright violence, the Company transformed many aspects of India's social, economic, and cultural landscape. This book charts one such shifting landscape-Marathi language literary culture-in order to expand the field of world and comparative literature. Kedar A. Kulkarni describes the way Marathi literary culture, entrenched in performative modes of pr...
Therí Alyce Pickens, "Black Madness :: Mad Blackness" (Duke UP, 2019)
November 14, 2022 09:00 - 1 hourIn Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Duke UP, 2019), Therí Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madn...
Martin Puchner, "Literature for a Changing Planet" (Princeton UP, 2022)
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 39 minutesWhy we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastrophe. Reading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for the planet, scientists, policymakers, and activists have woken up to the power of stories in the fight against global warming. In Literature for a Changing Planet (Princeton UP, 2022), Martin Puchner ranges across four thousand years of worl...
On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War"
November 10, 2022 09:00 - 30 minutesSometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life’s calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did....
Kevin Wilson, "Now Is Not the Time to Panic" (Ecco Press, 2022)
November 09, 2022 09:00 - 49 minutesToday I talked to Kevin Wilson about his new novel Now Is Not the Time to Panic (Ecco Press, 2022). Kevin Wilson is the author of two collections, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (Ecco/Harper Perennial, 2009), which received an Alex Award from the American Library Association and the Shirley Jackson Award, and Baby You’re Gonna Be Mine (Ecco, 2018), and three novels, The Family Fang (Ecco, 2011), Perfect Little World (Ecco, 2017) and Nothing to See Here (Ecco, 2019), a New York Times bes...
On Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
November 09, 2022 09:00 - 26 minutesIn 1987, Toni Morrison published her fourth novel, Beloved, based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped slavery with her child. Garner and her daughter were discovered by slave catchers. Rather than have her return to slavery, Garner killed her child. In Beloved, Morrison’s character Sethe has a similar story, but years later she meets a young girl who is the incarnation of the daughter she had killed. When Beloved came out, it immediately became Morrison’s most acclaimed work....
On Edward Said's "Orientalism"
November 08, 2022 09:00 - 34 minutesBeginning in the 17th century, European countries began colonizing countries east of Europe. They imposed their own ideas over local cultures and extracted free labor and resources. One way that European colonizers justified this exploitation was through an academic discipline called Orientalism. In 1978, Edward Said, a professor of literature at Columbia University, published a book of the same name, Orientalism. In his critique, he challenged Europeans’ construction of the so-called “East,”...
Neta Yodovich, "Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the 'Good' Fan" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
November 08, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutesHow do women balance feminist identities whilst being science fiction fans? In Women Negotiating Feminism and Science Fiction Fandom: The Case of the “Good” Fan (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), Neta Yodovich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Haifa’s department of Sociology, explores the lived experience of feminist women who are sci-fi fans. The book shows their commitments to being both feminists and part of the sci-fi community, even where they face hostility and gatekeeping, perso...
Lydia Millet, "Dinosaurs" (Norton, 2022)
November 07, 2022 09:00 - 36 minutesToday I talked to Lydia Millet about her new novel Dinosaurs (Norton, 2022). Lydia Millet has written more than a dozen novels and story collections. Her novel A Children's Bible was a New York Times "Best 10 Books of 2020" selection and shortlisted for the National Book Award. In 2019 her story collection Fight No More received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. She also wri...
On John Milton's "Paradise Lost"
November 04, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesAs a young student at Christ’s College Cambridge, John Milton announced to the world that he was going to write the greatest poem that the world has ever seen. He didn’t want to sit among the epic geniuses Homer and Virgil, he wanted to surpass them. Decades later, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, reworking and embellishing the stories of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise and Satan’s fall from heaven to create what is unquestionably the greatest epic poem written in English. Erik Gray is a profess...
Erin Webster, "The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 04, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourToday’s guest, Erin Webster, is the author of The Curious Eye: Optics and Literature in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2020). A book that casts its attention on the early modern period far and wide, The Curious Eye will be of interest to anyone interested in early modern mathematics, optic technology, poetic theory, and the contested relation of empiricism and empire. Erin is Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. Erin is a former Research Fellow and SSHRC Po...
4.5 The Best Error You Can Make: Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Baptiste Naudy on Claude McKay
November 03, 2022 08:00 - 49 minutesWhat can a French translator do with a novelist who writes brilliantly about the “confrontation between Englishes?” How can such a confrontation be made legible across the boundaries of language, nation, and history? Renowned scholar and translator Brent Hayes Edwards sits down with publisher and translator Jean-Baptiste Naudy to consider these questions in a wide-ranging discussion about translating the Jamaican American writer Claude McKay. They focus especially on the recent translation in...
92 Janet McIntosh on "Let's Go Brandon," QAnon and Alt-Right Language (EF, JP)
November 03, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutesElizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words." The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They specul...
Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, "The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable" (Indiana UP, 2020)
November 03, 2022 07:00 - 1 hourWhat can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment...
Joseph Valente and Margot Gayle Backus, "The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable" (Indiana UP, 2020)
November 03, 2022 07:00 - 1 hourWhat can James Joyce, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Keith Ridgway, Tana French, and Anne Enright tell us about Ireland’s culture of child sexual abuse? Much, it turns out. In their 2020 co-authored book, Writing the Unspeakable: The Child Sex Scandal and Modern Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 2020), Margot Gayle Backus and Joseph Valente examine the works of these six modern Irish authors, whose writings are both reflections of and engagements with the “open secrets,” “architecture of containment...
Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick" (Oxford UP, 2022)
November 02, 2022 08:00 - 57 minutesToday I talked to Hester Blum, editor of a new edition of Moby-Dick (Oxford UP, 2022). "It will be a strange sort of a book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;--& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy.... Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this." Moby-Dick has a monumental reputation. Less well known are the novel's unexpectedly weird, funny, tantalizing, me...
On "Grimms' Fairytales"
November 02, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesYou probably already know the story of Snow White—as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Briar Rose, The Frog Prince, and so many others. These tales have a rich history of oral storytelling. They’ve travelled through culture, adapted and readapted in each retelling and reaching as far as the popular Disney movies that our kids watch over and over. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm saw the power of this folklore and made it their life’s mission to compile and preserve it. But while we tend to think of Grim...
Joanna Ebenstein, "Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide" (MIT Press, 2022)
November 02, 2022 04:00 - 54 minutesFrederik Ruysch (1638-1731) was a celebrated Dutch anatomist, master embalmer, and museologist. He is best remembered today for strange tableaux, crafted from fetal skeletons and other human remains, that flicker provocatively at the edges of science, art, and memento mori. Ruysch exhibited these pieces, along with hundreds of other artful specimens, in his home museum and catalogued them in his lavishly illustrated Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus (MIT Press, 2022). This book off...
Sarah Quesada, "The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 54 minutesThe African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2022) unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, ...
On Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 29 minutesWhen Thomas Mann published The Magic Mountain in 1924, tuberculosis had a deadly hold on Europe and the United States, killing one in seven adults in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If that wasn’t enough, Mann’s writing was interrupted by the First World War, so it took him twelve years to finish the book. Mann was a modern, experimental writer who wrote about the major issues of his time—not only the war and the pandemic, but also industrialization, class resentment, and rising natio...
Ksenia Chizhova, "Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday" (Columbia UP, 2021)
November 01, 2022 08:00 - 59 minutesIn the face of a Korean cultural world preoccupied with newness, literary output from the more measured and regulated Choson period (1392-1910) can seem difficult to engage with for readers both inside and outside the country. But as Ksenia Chizhova’s Kinship Novels of Early Modern Korea: Between Genealogical Time and the Domestic Everyday (Columbia UP, 2021) shows, a particular genre of late-Chsoson lineage novels reflect not only the staid norms of Confucian patriarchy and heredity, but als...
Alan Verskin, "A Vision of Yemen: The Travels of a European Orientalist and His Native Guide--a Translation of Hayyim Habshush's Travelogue" (Stanford UP, 2019)
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1869, Hayyim Habshush, a Yemeni Jew, accompanied the European orientalist Joseph Halévy on his archaeological tour of Yemen. Twenty years later, Habshush wrote A Vision of Yemen a memoir of their travels, that provides a vivid account of daily life, religion, and politics. More than a simple travelogue, it is a work of trickster-tales, thick anthropological descriptions, and reflections on Jewish-Muslim relations. At its heart lies the fractious and intimate relationship between the Yemeni...
On Augustine's "Confessions"
October 31, 2022 08:00 - 34 minutesWhat is freedom? If we are free, why do we feel anxiety? How do I relate to the world? Saint Augustine of Hippo asked himself these questions around 400 AD as he wrote Confessions—indeed, as he lived his life. At various points in his life, Augustine was a Manichaean, a Platonist, an academic, a father, and a thief. He was on a quest for truth, an understanding of himself as an individual and a human being. Augustine wrote this text in his forties when he was a bishop. Formally speaking, it i...
On Cicero's "On Friendship"
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 30 minutesThere’s nothing better or more important in life than a good friend. For Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, the emphasis was on “good.” Cicero lived through the assassination of Caesar, one of the most famous examples of betrayal between friends in history. But according to Cicero’s treatise On Friendship, you must be virtuous to be a good friend, and, he argues, bad people cannot really be friends. In this text, Cicero examines true friendship, tough love, social transaction, and affect...
Halloween Special: Alice Walker’s Cat
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 20 minutesSaronik tells Kim about Alice Walker’s book Anything We Love Can Be Saved, where she talks about her many cats over the years, and how they represented her connection with the cosmos. Image: “Rescued from the rough streets of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Princess Marmalade earned her PhD in Meowological Studies in 2019, with an advanced certificate in acritical napping.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbook...
Benjamin Parris, "Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care" (Cornell UP, 2022)
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn an exciting new book titled Vital Strife: Sleep, Insomnia, and the Early Modern Ethics of Care (Cornell UP, 2022), Benjamin Parris shows how early modern writing about care and sleep were deeply indebted with the Stoic principle of oikeiosis. While sleep could imperil the Christian soul, insomnia too could have deleterious effects on both communal and individual life. In Parris’s analysis, early modern writings by William Shakespeare, Jasper Heywood, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish on ...
Bartholomew Ryan, "Kierkegaard's Indirect Politics: Interludes with Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin and Adorno" (Brill, 2014)
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 1 hourIn 1848, as political movements and events were sweeping Europe and Marx and Engels penned their famous Communist Manifesto, Kierkegaard wrote in a letter: “No, politics is not for me. To follow politics, even if only domestic politics, is nowadays an impossibility, for me, at any rate. I love to focus my attention on lesser things, in which one may sometimes encounter exactly the same.” This negation of politics (and it’s negation) is the starting point for Bartholomew Ryan with his book Kie...
Tess Gunty, "The Rabbit Hutch: A Novel" (Knopf, 2022)
October 28, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutesBorn and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess holds a B.A. in English with an Honor’s Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. After graduating in 2015, she began an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. After earning her MFA, Tess worked alongside her former professor Jonathan Safran Foer, providing research and writing for his book of nonfiction about the climate crisis. We Are the Weather was published by FSG in 2019. As a freel...
On Franz Kafka's "The Trial"
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 31 minutesWhen reading a crime novel, we usually learn the crime within the first few page turns; the trick is discovering the perpetrator. Perhaps this is what makes Franz Kafka’s 1914 book The Trial so haunting—the crime itself is never revealed. Kafka was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1883 and died in 1924, never experiencing the Nazis or Hitler’s totalitarian rise to power. Yet his book seems to prophesize the most dangerous aspects of unchecked bureaucracy, legal systems, and arbitrary po...
Halloween Special: Jacques Derrida’s Cat
October 27, 2022 08:00 - 13 minutesSaronik talks with Kim about Jacques Derrida’s cat. Derrida writes about his cat, who makes him rather anxious, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369-418. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344276 Image: “Beatrix or Bea or BeaBea is a tiny cat living her tiny cat life.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.f...
Hongwei Bao, "Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism" (Routledge, 2020)
October 26, 2022 08:00 - 58 minutesIn Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture Under Postsocialism (Routledge, 2020), associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Nottingham Hongwei Bao returns with a theory-driven, methodologically-diverse, empathetic, and insightful analysis of LGBTQ literature and visual culture in postsocialist China. A thorough introduction positions Bao as a participant observer and explores key concepts including “postsocialist metamorphosis,” defined as “the ...
Andrei Nae, "Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games" (Routledge, 2021)
October 26, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesAndrei Nae's book Immersion, Narrative, and Gender Crisis in Survival Horror Video Games (Routledge, 2021) investigates the narrativity of some of the most popular survival horror video games and the gender politics implicit in their storyworlds. In a thorough analysis of the genre that draws upon detailed comparisons with the mainstream action genre, Andrei Nae places his analysis firmly within a political and social context. In comparing survival horror games to the dominant game design nor...
Amina Yaqin, "Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing" (Anthem, 2022)
October 26, 2022 08:00 - 55 minutesAs the first study of its kind, Gender, Sexuality and Feminism in Pakistani Urdu Writing (Anthem, 2022) offers a new understanding of progressive women’s poetry in Urdu and the legacy of postcolonial politics. It underlines Urdu’s linguistic hybridities, the context of the zenana, reform, and rekhti to illustrate how the modernising impulse under colonial rule impacted women as subjects in textual form. It argues that canonical texts for sharif women from Mirat-ul Arus to Umrao Jan Ada need t...