New Books in Literary Studies
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network, an academic audio library dedicated to public education. Each episode features scholars discussing their recently published research with another expert in their field. The network offers over 150 channels and 28,000 episodes, available on their website. Listeners can also subscribe to a free weekly Substack newsletter and follow on social media for updates.
Episodes
Rachel Silveri, "The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026),
Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life,
an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical
avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw
their own everyday lives—their bodies, ide
In Praise: A Conversation with Texas Poet Laureate & Founder of Torch Literary Arts, Amanda Johnston
In 2006 poet Amanda Johnston went in search of community and, when she didn’t find what she was looking for, Amanda built her own. Today, Torch Literary Arts is a resource and a destination for Black women writers and readers across the diaspora. Fueled by wisdom and writings from poets, novelists, and screenwriters, the organization’s exceptional programming and award-winning magazine amplify Bla
Kevin Reilly, "Gregory Ghosts: Haunting Irishness" (Peter Lang, 2026)
Kevin P. Reilly is President Emeritus and Regent Professor with the University of Wisconsin System, having served as President from 2004-13. Kevin grew up in Manhattan and the Bronx, and went on to earn his B.A. at the University of Notre Dame, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, all in English. He has published on higher education policy and accreditation, autobiography and b
“O Albany”: Novelist William Kennedy on His Great Cycle of the City
Monday, June 22—William Kennedy is to Albany what Joyce is to Dublin and Faulkner to Mississippi, a fictional alchemist who transforms his native place into novels at once deeply evocative of their setting and movingly universal in their human resonances. In The Albany Trilogy, just out from Library of America, three of Kennedy’s masterpieces—including his beloved novel Ironweed—take readers from
John K. Roth, "Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times" (Wipf and Stock, 2026)
The American Dream at its best is an ethical ideal and a moral
compass. If respected and sustained, it can guide the United States
through Trump 2.0. Anchored in the US Constitution, Saving the American Dream: Meditations for Dark Times (Wipf and Stock, 2026) features
meditations for dark times. Meditations are intentional acts of focused
attention.Its fundamental premise is that individuals m
What Running Your Own Imprint for 15 Years Teaches You about Books, Readers, and Risk with Sarah Crichton
Great books don't happen by accident. Sarah Crichton, one of publishing's most respected voices and the founder of Sarah Crichton Books at FSG, joins host Sarah Russo for an unfiltered conversation about what it takes to acquire, edit, and launch books that last. They cover everything: crashing books in secret, fighting for the right jacket design, discovering A Long Way Gone by child soldier, Ism
Christina Williams "Work of Fiction: Making a Living from Writing in the UK" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)
Just how difficult is a career as a writer? In Work of Fiction: Making a Living from Writing in the UK (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024) Christina Williams, a Lecturer in Media Communications at Bath Spa University examines contemporary writing as a paradoxical and precarious occupation. Foregrounding the experiences of a range of different writers, the book shows the range of work writers actually do
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade" (Yale UP, 2025)
Mark Twain’s Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self‑aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward freedom. Jim is also a highly polarizing figure: he
Michael D. Nichols, "Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films" (McFarland, 2026)
Fans of Batman are used to seeing the Caped Crusader associate with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman, but what if one were to put the Dark Knight into the company of figures such as Beowulf, Robin Hood, Oedipus, and Sun Tzu, among others? Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films (McFarland, 2026) is the first book to compare famous Batma
Alexander Vandewalle, "Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
The first book-length study on mythology reception in video games, Characters and Characterization in Mythological Video Games (Bloomsbury, 2026) examines how video games characterize mythological characters from the perspectives of classical reception and game studies. Characters are vital to most stories, and many video games. They allow us to enter the fiction of a game, and facilitate our embo
173* Novel Dialogue Crossover: Aaron Gwyn goes West (Sean McCann, JP)
RTB's sister podcast, Novel Dialogue, spoke recently with Aaron Gwyn. He is the author of four novels: The World Beneath, Wynne’s War, and, most recently, two wonderfully linked historical novels, All God’s Children, which won the Oklahoma Book award, and The Cannibal Owl. In his conversation with Sean McCann of Wesleyan (A Pinnacle of Feeling: American Literature and Presidential Government and G
The Legacy of Chaim Grade
Chaim Grade was born in 1910 in Vilna, Poland. In his youth, Grade was a student of the Novaredok Musar Yeshiva and of Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz. He was also a founding member of the Yung-Vilne literary group, known for its leftist politics, secular Jewish thinking, and literary influence. After losing both his mother and wife during the Holocaust, he emerged as one of the most prolific and definin
Jeffrey R. Di Leo , "Theory as World Literature" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
What does it mean for theory to be considered as a species of not just literature but world literature? Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), edited by Jeffrey De Leo, offers a wide range of accounts of how the “worlding” of literature both problematizes the national categorizing of theory (e.g., French theory), and brings new meanings and challenges to the coming together of theory and l
Kristen Abbott Bennett, "Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Teaching Shakespeare's Theatre of the World (Cambridge University Press, 2025) engages with one of Shakespeare's greatest thought-experiments: How does one navigate the 'theatre of the world'?
It invites students to examine how Shakespeare challenges this
metaphor's vertical hierarchies in response to shifting understandings
of cosmological order.
Teachers will find rich contextual
framewor
Islam in English
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr. Oludamini Oguannaike, Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia.
Tazin and Oludamini talk about his work into how languages, such as English, express concepts that originate from onto-epistemic perspectives that are not historically associated with the English lan
Christina Lord, "Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction" (Liverpool UP, 2023)
The study of French science fiction – even in France – remains an underexploited field. Only recently have French literary scholars been able to gain recognition for the validity of studying SF, but their works are often literary histories. Reimagining the Human in Contemporary French Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2023) is the first book-length study to take into account both French and Anglo-Ame
Adam Phillips, "The Life You Want" (FSG, 2026)
Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do - and fail to do - about actually getting them? In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the diffi
Emmanuel Buzay, "Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of
futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information
and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive
narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and,
more broadly,
Amrita Chowdhury and Ujaan Ghosh trans., "Baidehisha Bilasa: The Amorous Plays of Sita’s Husband" (Wide Open Window Books, 2025)
Amrita 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 ma
Kenna Neitch, "A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism" (SUNY Press, 2026)
A Praxis of Persistence: Central American Feminist Testimony and Sustainable Activism (SUNY Press, 2026) by Dr. Kenna Neitch establishes persistence as a framework for understanding methods of feminist activism in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Blending literary and ethnographic approaches, Dr. Neitch analyzes texts produced by activist movements from the 1980s to 2020—from colle
Michael E. Sawyer, "The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black" (Temple UP, 2026)
In The Door of No Return: Being-As-Black (Temple University Press, 2026), Michael E. Sawyer presents a bold work of speculative theory and philosophy that explores how Black people bring the future into being—and what existence in that future looks like. He considers what people of African descent face and the proper response to the situation. He introduces the idea of Being-As-Black as a response
What AI Means for Fiction: A Discussion with Literary Critic Mark McGurl
How is the tool of Artificial Intelligence shaping the writing of fiction? Is AI emerging as more than just a potentially handy aid to an author—and, ominously, more like an actual author? I discuss these ripe questions and others with the literary critic Mark McGurl, professor of English at Stanford. He is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard Un
chaun webster, "Without Terminus: untraining an archive" (Greywolf, 2026)
In 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
Petal Kimberly Samuel, "The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance" (Rutgers UP, 2026)
A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet
Timothy K. August, "The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America" (Temple UP, 2020)
In The Refugee Aesthetic: Reimagining Southeast Asian America (Temple University Press, 2021), Timothy K. August centers Southeast Asian American writers and artists to develop a theory of refugee aesthetics as a way of considering how aesthetic forms are created and contested by refugees, nonrefugees, and institutions alike.
On this episode of New Books in Asian American Studies, Timothy K. Augus
Barry Devine and Ellen Scheible eds., "Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century" (UP of Florida, 2025)
A guide for today’s classrooms, this collection from leading Joyce scholars explores innovative pedagogical approaches to the works of this often-challenging writer
Teaching James Joyce in the Twenty-First Century (UP of Florida, 2025) presents examples of bold, innovative pedagogical techniques instructors have used to adapt the study of Joyce’s work for the contemporary classroom. Leading Joyce
Matthew L. Reznicek, "Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale" (Liverpool UP, 2026)
Tales of Health: Illness, Disability, and Citizenship in the Romantic National Tale (Liverpool UP, 2026) is about the way the Romantic National Tale exercises power and defines the boundaries of citizenship through the categories of health, illness, and disability. When we see these categories at work in these novels, we understand how socio-political belonging is premised on the conception of th
The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan (MAT)
“I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire, history as a whole,” declares the Iraqi novelist, poet, scholar, and literary translator Sinan Antoon near the start of this conversation about his most recent novel, Of Loss and Lavender. Sinan, speaking with Magalí and critic Michael Allan, goes on to say that “the novel allows for a more wholesome, in-depth confrontat
Elizabeth Bradfield's Books in Dark Times (JP)
For the RtB Books in Dark Times series back in 2021, John spoke with Elizabeth Bradfield, editor of Broadsided Press, poet, professor of creative writing at Brandeis, naturalist, photographer.
Her books include Interpretive Work, Approaching Ice, Once Removed, and Toward Antarctica. She lives on Cape Cod, travels north every summer to guide people into Arctic climes, birdwatches.
Liz is in and o
Sumana Roy, "Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Plant Thinkers of Twentieth-Century Bengal (Oxford UP, 2024) by Sumana Roy takes an unexpected cast of writers and artists and, in studying their work as ‘plant thinkers’, looks at how their stories and songs, art and films, and, of course, the idiomatic affected Bengali life and thought. Forest and garden, grass and root, weeds and magical plants—supported by a foliage of thought that allowed the
Marissa Nicosia, "Shakespeare in the Kitchen" (Routledge, 2026)
Audiences and scholars alike have long remarked that Shakespeare’s poems and plays record the pleasures and perils of the table. Shakespeare in the Kitchen (Routledge, 2026) by Dr. Marissa Nicosia asks what Shakespeare’s works can tell us about Renaissance culinary recipes, and what these recipes can tell us about Shakespeare’s works.
Dr. Nicosia explores how Shakespeare’s works reveal tensions n
Benjamin Dalton, "Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity" (Edinburgh UP, 2026)
Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge.
Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film
David Eisler, "Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present" (U Iowa Press, 2022)
In Writing Wars: Authorship and American War Fiction, WWI to Present (U Iowa Press, 2022) David Eisler looks at how American literary fiction about war has changed as the nature of civil-military relations has changed. For much of the 20th century the people who wrote novels about war were men who went to war. And for some authors and critics, being a war veteran was a requirement for being author
Jue Liang, "Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel" (Oxford UP, 2026)
Conceiving the Mother of Tibet: The Early Literary Lives of the Buddhist Saint Yeshe Tsogyel (Oxford UP, 2026) is the first comprehensive study dedicated to the literary tradition surrounding Yeshe Tsogyel, revered as the foremost matron saint of Tibetan Buddhism. It traces the emergence and development of a rich body of narratives about Yeshe Tsogyel during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
Caroline Bicks, "Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King" (Hogarth, 2026)
My guest is Caroline Bicks, whose new book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King (Hogarth, 2026) became a bestseller shortly after release. After she was named the University of Maine's inaugural Stephen E. King Chair in Literature, Caroline Bicks became the first scholar to be granted extended access by King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that docu
Martin Munro and Eliana Vagalau eds., "Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide" (Liverpool UP, 2022)
Despite being a major figure of Haitian literature, Jean-Claude Charles (1949-2008) has received relatively little scholarly attention to date. Jean-Claude Charles: A Reader's Guide (Liverpool UP, 2022) seeks to serve as an introduction to the work and universe of this unique and capital writer to an English-language readership. The essays in the collection are organized along three major axes: co
Italo Calvino on the Written and the Unwritten Word
In this episode of the Vault, we revisit the Italian writer Italo Calvino’s James Lecture, presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities on March 30, 1983.
Italo Calvino was one of the most inventive and widely read Italian authors of the twentieth century. Born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy, he began his literary career as a journalist and fiction writer after World War
Patrick Noonan, "Age of Disaffection: The Aesthetic Critique of Politics in 1960s Japan" (Columbia UP, 2025)
The 1960s in Japan have long been understood as a period of radical political engagement. But as political movements from Old Left Communism to New Left revolts appeared to fail in their efforts to revolutionize Japanese society, artists and intellectuals came to reject the ideals of postwar politics. Instead, they advocated withdrawing from political participation and making self-transformation t
Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT)
How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johanne
Ana I. Oancea, "Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Dangerous Creations: The Inventor Novel in Fin-de-siècle France (U Toronto Press, 2025) presents a master narrative of the inventor in fin-de-siècle French literature by analyzing the works of Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Émile Zola, and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Their writings challenge the role of science in shaping French national identity and aim to transform contemporary understandings of scien
Frontier Films for America250: On the Western Genre and Beyond with Matthew J. Franck
Here in Episode 7 of Season 5, I interview Dr. Matthew J. Franck. A senior contributing fellow at Public Discourse, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, as well as a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, he has written, edited, and contributed to many books, including Against the Imperial
Christopher Cusack et al. eds., "The Corpse in Modern Irish Literature" (Liverpool UP, 2026)
From the bodies rotting by the wayside in Famine fiction, Synge's sodden corpses and Joyce's dead, to Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill's talking corpses and the unburied and dissected remains of Celtic Tiger fiction, the figure of the corpse is ubiquitous in Irish writing. This collection examines the Irish corpse as a conceptually rich centrepoint with multiple differently signifying implications across this
Malcolm Sen, "Irish Anthropocene: Literature, Climate Change, Sovereignty" (Syracuse UP, 2026)
In Irish Anthropocene, Malcolm Sen traces the ways in which contemporary Irish literature responds to climate breakdown. Drawing upon concepts of sovereignty, precarity, and disaster, Sen examines Irish literary works to reveal how they engage with the entangled relations between ecology, economy, and politics. Irish writers not only critique the association of greenness with Ireland and the corpo
David Krolikoski, "Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea" (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)
Lyrical Translation: The Creation of Modern Poetry in Colonial Korea (U Hawai'i Press, 2026)is a literary history of modern Korean poetry's origins and its development through translation. As the use of Korean became increasingly restricted during the Japanese occupation, translation was not a choice but a necessity for higher education and intellectual labor. Yet it also had an expansive, creat
Andrea Horbinski, "Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989" (U California Press, 2025)
Andrea Horbinski's Manga's First Century: How Creators and Fans Made Japanese Comics, 1905-1989 (U California Press, 2025) centers the fans and creators who built Japanese comics into a massive global phenomenon. The book traces the history of manga from the art form's distinctly modern emergence in the early 1900s, one that first hybridized the artistic legacy of Japan with the world of Western
David Womersley, "Thinking Through Shakespeare" (Princeton UP, 2026)
In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Johnson’s view largely prevailed until the late twentieth century, when it was challenged by a growing scepticism about the existence
Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon, "Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis" (NYU Press, 2026)
Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With c
Tiffany Jo Werth, "The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton" (Oxford UP, 2024)
The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Tiffany Jo Werth explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England's religious and cultural systems, a role that, in turn, informs the period's poetic and visual imagination. The scale of the human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England's long Reformation provide
Vin Nardizzi, "Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance" (U Toronto Press, 2025)
Today, I interview Vin Nardizzi, Professor of English at the University of British Columbia, about his new monograph Marvellous Vegetables in the English Renaissance (U Toronto Press, 2025), published by the University of Toronto Press. Vin Nardizzi is the author of Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (University of Toronto, 2013). He is also the co-editor of Queer Renaissance Hi
Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King
Caroline Bicks became the first scholar granted extended access by Stephen King to his private archives, a treasure trove of manuscripts that document the legendary writerʼs creative process—most of them never before studied or published. The year she spent exploring King’s early drafts and hand-written revisions was guided by a question millions of Kingʼs enthralled and terrified readers (includi
Francis Young, "Fairies: A History" (John Wiley & Sons, 2026)
Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Dr. Francis Young's Fairies: A History (Polity, 2026) demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the nineteenth century, the category of fairies included a vast
Sasha Senderovich and Harriet Murav, "In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union" (Stanford UP, 2026)
In their anthology, In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers from the Soviet Union (Stanford University Press, 2026), Sasha Senderovitch and Harriet Murav provide an underappreciated perspective on the Holocaust, as it was experienced and remembered in the former Soviet Union. In these works, Jewish authors from Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia, and Belarus, writing in Yiddish and
Generic
In this episode of High Theory, Kim talks to Ben Mangrum about Generic. A curious term that denotes both the conventions and rules of genre, and the impersonal or nameless quality of things like generic drugs or generic devices; the generic structures many of our cultural codes. Ben uses both senses to talk about the history of computing. He tells us about the surprising role the genre of comedy h
Twelve Lives: Creating Literary Community with Raymond Williams, PhD
From the moment I began working with the New Books Network, my vision was bigger than author interviews. I envisioned my platform one where people could connect what they were hearing about the past to their own lives in the present and, in that way, perhaps see themselves as an important part of a continually-evolving community. Through this work, I have been fortunate to connect, not only author
Decolonizing the Novum
In this episode of High Theory, Zac Zimmer talks to Kim about Decolonizing the Novum. The novum is a concept developed by Darko Suvin that names the new element of a science fiction or speculative fiction narrative. SF narratives from the Americas that rewrite archival material about colonization and first contact have begun an imaginative project of decolonizing that novum.
In Zac’s words, the "
Ted Goossen on translating Hiromi Kawakami’s “Third Love”
Translator Ted Goossen talks about everything from first landing in Japan in 1968 to the differences between translating Haruki Murakami and Hiromi Kawakami, especially the complexities of Hiromi Kawakami’s latest book The Third Love.
Amy has a deep discussion with Ted Goossen about Japan, it’s emerging culture, it’s historically strong women and how Japanese literature and its themes are changin
Ed Simon, "Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great Unraveling" (Bloomsbury, 2026)
Rising authoritarianism. Covid. Inflation. Wealth disparity. War. Climate change. While every time period is marked by apocalyptic fears, it certainly seems like our current anxieties aren't ill placed. And yet, art and literature persist.In captivating and culturally savvy prose, Ed Simon grapples with the notion that writers and their work ought to distract readers from the dire situation we fac
Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Kahn
Fiction has “lost its ambition,” and not only that, “its centrality to the culture,” Sam Kahn says in a recent piece on “Castalia,” his popular Substack newsletter. We explore that proposition in our wide-ranging conversation about contemporary fiction and its ailments. What’s especially sad about the diminished role that fiction plays in the culture is that, in our Age of Upheaval, circumstances
Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison" (Hogarth, 2026)
Toni Morrison, Nobel Laureate and one of our most beloved writers, has inspired generations of readers. But her artistic genius is often overshadowed by her monumental public persona, perhaps because, as Namwali Serpell puts it, “she is our only truly canonical black female writer—and her work is highly complex.” In On Morrison (Hogarth, 2026), Serpell brings her unique experience as both an awar
Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness" (U Toronto Press, 2022)
Altered states of consciousness – including experiences of deprivation, pain, hallucination, fear, desire, alienation, and spiritual transcendence – can transform the ordinary experience of selfhood.
Unselfing: Global French Literature at the Limits of Consciousness (U Toronto Press, 2022) explores the nature of disruptive self-experiences and the different shapes they have taken in literary writ
Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
In Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film (Edinburgh UP, 2025), Leslie Barnes examines the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism. She explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates conce
Eleanor Houghton, "Charlotte Brontë's Life in Clothes" (Bloomsbury 2026)
Eleanor Houghton, in conversation with Duncan McCargo and Alexis Wolf
Meet the real, thinking, feeling woman that was Charlotte Brontë, as told in this biography by the surviving witnesses to her life – the clothes that she once wore.These garments were present as she penned Jane Eyre, as she walked the cobbled streets of Haworth, and as she stood with her fiancé at the altar in the summer of 18
Asif Iqbal, "Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation" (Routledge, 2025)
Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular Literature: Cultural Imaginings of a Postcolonial Nation (Routledge, 2025) illuminates individual and collective imaginings of postcolonial Bangladesh. It explores the emergence of Bangladesh as a nation from a variety of perspectives. The author studies the impact of Muslim nationalism on the subaltern life-worlds of East Bengal during the Partition, religi
Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa" (Princeton UP, 2026)
The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and British imperial literary and intellectual history. In The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa (Princeton UP, 2026) Jeanne-Marie Jackson positions his career as an intriguing case study of anticolonial literature and politics. Jac
Pre-Reading
In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is sha
Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think" (Columbia UP, 2026)
Forests in fiction are often understood simply as settings, symbols, or remnants of a premodern past. Yet many African novelists have turned to the forest to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. This groundbreaking book explores the life of the forest in African fiction, showing how writers have used it to reinvent the novel’s formal, aesthetic, and political possibilities.
Megan Peiser, "British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical" (JHU Press, 2026)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, British women novelists were publishing more fiction than their male counterparts, yet their place in literary history remains precarious. In British Women Novelists and the Review Periodical (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Dr. Megan Peiser offers a compelling new perspective on this pivotal period by examining the overlooked power of the review perio
John Kuhn, "Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
Today’s guest, John Kuhn, is the author of Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024). Making Pagans argues that drama played a powerful role in the articulation of religious difference in the seventeenth century. Examining the common scenes of pagan ritual that filled England's seventeenth-century stages—magical conjurations, o
Why Did Langston Hughes's "Troubled Lands" Go Unpublished for Nearly a Century?: A Conversation with Ricardo Wilson
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
10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW)
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
S. D. Ellison, "Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse: Reading the Psalms as Utopian Literature" (Fortress Academic, 2025)
Does the Psalter have a unified theme or message? Davy Ellison says, “Yes!” In his new book Hope for a New David in the Psalter's Narrative Impulse: Reading the Psalms as Utopian Literature (Fortress Academic, 2025), he argues that the Psalter’s narrative impulse sustains expectations of a better future by assuring readers that one day Zion will be glorified, enemies vanquished, and the Davidic d
Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental hu
Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
In the Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the Cultural Imagination of Seventeenth-Century France (Northwestern University Press 2025) explores the relationship between sensory experience, state ideology, and artistic form, examining literature and art inspired by comets that unsettled the heliocentric order to which French politics and culture aspired.
Guest Claire Goldstein Professor of French and Di
The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem
Novelist, playwright, journalist, essayist, and editor, Sholem Aleichem was one of the founding giants of modern Yiddish literature. The creator of a pantheon of extraordinary characters, his literature provided readers with a window into the world of Eastern European Jews as they confronted the forces of modernity that tore through Russia at the end of the 19th century. But just as compelling as
David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods
An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig
Prolepsis
In this episode of High Theory, Gloria Fisk talks to Kim about Prolepsis. Defined by Gerard Genette in the 1970s, prolepsis is a flash forward, the opposite of analepsis, a flash back. Initially the province of high modernism, this rhetorical device has become a well-worn trope with a surprising aptitude for representing violence in our current moment. Fisk shows us how prolepsis dramatizes the wo
Imagining Independence; or, Why Does Rip Van Winkle Sleep Through the Revolution?
Thursday, March 12—Inaugurating a series of programs to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, authors and scholars Michael Gorra, Wendy S. Walters, and Brenda Wineapple discuss three classic short stories, each written within fifty years of the American Revolution, that imaginatively explore the meaning of that founding moment: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Willia
Hiromi Ito, "The Thorn Puller" (Stone Bridge Press, 2022)
Hiromi Ito author of The Thorn Puller (originally published in Japanese as Toge-nuki Jizo: Shin Sugamo Jizo engi) came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways
Pedro Thiago Ramos Bassoe, "Supernatural Japan: Izumi Kyoka and the Global Fantastic" (U Michigan Press, 2026)
Supernatural Japan: Izumi Kyoka and the Global Fantastic (U Michigan Press, 2026)examines the role of Japanese writer Izumi Kyōka (1873–1939) in the formation of modern literature of the fantastic in Japan as a global literary genre. Kyōka wrote some of the most famous stories of ghosts, monsters, and the supernatural in modern Japanese literature, including The Holy Man of Mt. Kōya, The Grass L
Suzanne Bost, "Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities" (U Minnesota Press)
What would it mean to disentangle humanities scholarship from combative, extractive, and colonial ways of knowing and writing? This is the question that animates Quiet Methodologies: Humility in the Humanities (U Minnesota Press), the latest book by literary scholar and poet Suzanne Bost.
Quiet Methodologies isn’t a traditional work of literary scholarship. Instead, the book reaches toward altern
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