New Books in Literature

Two women, bound by blood and betrayal, must break silence across centuries--or be silenced forever, in the dazzling new novel by New York Times bestselling author Madeline Martin. Lilith Legare's life is unraveling. Since her mother's death, strange things have been happening - plants turn toward her touch, animals linger in her path, and the birthmark on her arm has started tingling. Worse still is her recurring nightmare of being burned alive at the stake. Her search for answers brings her from Savannah to England, to the decaying Brackenmere Manor where the past blurs with the present. There, Lilith...

When her family moves to a new country, Ren is heartbroken to leave Popo and her magical stories behind. In her new home, nothing feels familiar―until Ren discovers that, with her pencil, she can bring to life what she can’t find the words to say.

Through drawing, she bridges the gap between her two worlds and transforms her loneliness into a meaningful connection.

Tune in to this interview with author Bo Lu about Ren's Pencil: A Picture Book (Abrams, 2026)

Bo Lu is an author-illustrator, and winner of an Ezra Jack Keats Illu...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Jason Pargin about his new novel, There Are No Giant Crabs in this Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs (St. Martin's Press, 2026).

New York Times bestselling author Jason Pargin's nightmarishly hilarious John Dies at the End series is back to entertain all who dare enter.

A massive, sticky pile of severed human limbs suddenly appears in the parking lot of a vacant department store in a desolate small town. A set of footprints is found trailing away in the snow, as if a single pair of...

Yunus Turabi, a bus driver in Tehran, leads an unremarkable life. A solitary man since the unexpected deaths of his father and mother years ago, he is decidedly apolitical—even during the driver’s strike and its bloody end. But everyone has their breaking point, and Yunus has reached his.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, he is taken to the infamous Evin prison for political dissidents. Inside this stark, strangely ordered world, his fate becomes entwined with Hajj Saeed, his personal interrogator. The two develop a disturbing yet interdependent relationship, with each playing his assigned role in a high stak...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Waubgeshig Rice about his novel, Moon of the Turning Leaves (Penguin Random House Canada, 2023). 

In this gripping stand-alone literary thriller set in the world of the award-winning post-apocalyptic novel Moon of the Crusted Snow, a scouting party led by Evan Whitesky ventures into unknown and dangerous territory to find a new home for their close-knit Northern Ontario Indigenous community more than a decade after a world-ending blackout.

For the past twelve years, a community of Anishinaabe people have made the Northern Ontario bush their home in th...

Few things delight a historical novelist more than true stories of forgotten individuals remembered, if they are remembered at all, for one dramatic moment or act. Flora Cordier—a Belgian glove maker who apparently married the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), before his accession to the throne—is just such a person. Flora left almost no impression in the historical record, not much more than a newspaper account and a few references to her outside the empire in later life, yet the question of how a European craftswoman might not only have set up shop in nineteenth-century Istanbul but ha...

Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering.

Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences...

Norrin M. Ripsman (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1997) is the Monroe J. Rathbone Distinguished Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. His primary research interests include crisis prevention; democracy and national security; postwar peacemaking; the construction of regional stability; the political economy of national security; neoclassical realism; crises and pre-crises; and the impact of globalization on national security.

Norrin M. Ripsman writes in two genres: academic and literary fiction. He has published a short-story collection, Song Book, and a novel, The Oracle of Spring Garden Road. His latest novel is Bullet Holes (2026).

Bullet Holes (Next...

Describing the plot of a Tom McCarthy novel requires some caveats about the scale and the projection of the thing. One might begin with a description of a man who after suffering a head injury decides to recreate and reenact a day in his life again and again ad absurdum to the point of violence, but this would be insufficient as a depiction of the novel Remainder’s electrical currents of feeling and its intellectual conduits that flip switches on and off in literary theory and philosophy. Likewise, a gloss of Satin Island might rest on the project of its...

When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara. 

But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the ine...

Sharma and Sushila were ahead of their time in marrying for love and across castes in early 1950s India. When their oldest daughter is nine, they leave their home and family for Sharma to take an academic position in astrophysics in America. Sushila takes care of their home, raises their girls, manages to complete a doctorate, and becomes a feminist philosopher. The three daughters grow into young women, each navigating school and community during the upheaval of the 1960s.  While coming to terms with their parents’ flaws and building relationships and lives, they learn to count on each other thr...

Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power.

Hosted by Max Rudin

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Matt Cahill about Radioland, his mesmerizing 2022 literary thriller where music, fame and magic wind together in an eerie mystery.

There are whispers about murders on the scene in Toronto, from bartenders, hairdressers and others who trade in rumours. When the bodies are found they are altered in disturbing ways. No one knows who the killer could be. Perhaps it is Kris, a troubled musician who has just reached a level of fame only to have his life collapse around him. Perhaps it is Jill, a sensitive with a d...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Christine Fischer Guy about her novel, The Instrument Must Not Matter (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026). 

She sees the score for the Bach-Brahms in her mind’s eye, hears the indigo notes unfurl.

In this sweeping coming-of-age novel gifted young classical pianist Lila Rys finds herself in New York City studying under famed teacher George Vrubel. The move from Toronto to the American city is terrifying, but Lila is determined to bring music back to the Rys family, where the story of her grandmother refusing to play Soviet music afte...

The seven stories and novella that comprise The Calamity of Desire, Judith Dancoff’s debut collection of short fiction, each focus on a famous painter or well-known work of art. Inspired by the art of Gustav Klimt, John Singer Sargent, Auguste Renoir, Diego Velásquez, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin, and Roman glass found around the world, these stories explore the imagined desires and dreams of both famous artists and the models they used to express their art. Each story is a gem, but you’ll never forget Dancoff’s tale about Gustav Klimt’s well-known, posthumous portraits of Ria Munk, a y...

In How to Date a Fanatic (HarperVia, 2026), a novel by Aruni Kashyap, a young professor searches for connection and love during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

As political tensions rise precipitously across India, Rohit returns to Delhi University to teach and gets caught in a web of unrequited love with his friend Dhruv. To alleviate his inevitable heartbreak, Rohit seeks relationships with other men on campus, until he meets and embarks on a delicate new romance with the effervescent Sayan, a literature student he hopes will be the answer to getting over Dhruv.

Rohit...

Danny Bradigan survived brutal fighting in Afghanistan and fought as a professional boxer, but a bullet finally puts him in a coma. Part of his recovery involves heading to a small Appalachian town where he’s inherited a property and a car mechanic business. He knows nothing about repairing cars and needs to understand who gave him this chance at another life. He begins mentoring Ryan, the young man who used to help the previous owner, falls in love with Amy, the boy’s older sister, and when he’s not stuck in his memories, spends his free time search...

Her clothes shredded and disrobed by her own teeth, Lucy finds herself draped over a high tree branch in the quad of her college, naked but unafraid, a wild leopard more than any humankind. So begins Emeline Atwood’s starling debut novel, A Real Animal (Catapult, 2026). We know early on that Lucy will never be able to reach back to that precise feeling of being the leopard, powerful and at one with the natural world. Instead, she will swim in the harsher waters of a society that scorns and shames her, that seems to revel in her abuse, with a family...

Jaclyn Gilbert's Butter Road (Acre Books, 2026) is a searing novel about a community irrevocably transformed by gun violence. In 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, taking the students hostage and shooting ten girls before turning his weapon on himself. Set twelve years after this event, largely in the village of Nickel Mines, Butter Road explores the long-reaching ramifications of tragedy through the imagined lives of three women: Emma Walsh, an eighteen-year-old survivor of the shooting; her mother, Ruth, who lost her eldest daughter to the violence; and Sara Caldwell, an "English" outsider and wife...

In this latest Books for Better Understanding video from Notre Dame Press, David Carlson facilitates a conversation between Marian Schwartz and Dan Mahoney about Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's March 1917 The Red Wheel, Node III available in English now for the first time. Schwartz and Mahoney discuss the historical, literary, and cultural significance of MARCH 1917.

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Samantha: The Next Chapter (American Girl Publishing, 2026). From American Girl and New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis comes the next chapter of Samantha Parkington's story--now an adult searching for justice after her legacy is stolen in New York City in 1920. It’s 1920, and 25-year-old Samantha Parkington is working hard to educate women in New York about suffrage and encourage them to vote in their first presidential election that fall. But when Samantha’s large inheritance, including her childhood Mount Bedford home, is stolen in a shocking scheme, she goes from socialite to shop girl overnight and experiences a very...

In upstate New York in 2001, nine-year-old twins Sabina and Camilla spend the summer weathering the moods of their erratic mother while finding themselves pulled toward diverging interests: Sabina into the mystery of their absent French father and Camilla into burgeoning popularity. But their lives are shaken up by the arrival of an Arab French family across the street. Thrilled by what she sees as a link to the country of her origins, Sabina attempts to befriend the family’s son, Khalil, and is rebuffed for reasons she doesn’t understand.

Yet as the twins and Khalil come of a...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning author Nancy Jo Cullen about her new novel, Dish (Wolsak & Wynn, 2026).

In this smart, sexy romp of a novel, Nancy Jo Cullen explores the joys of second chances – at life and at love.

Frida Davis-Lefebvre is back in her hometown of Lakeland, BC, sober and recovering from the sale of her popular, but debt-ridden, Toronto restaurant La Grange before she heads off to greener pastures when things get complicated. It’s hard enough settling in at home with her mothers, but then Perry, the sperm dono...


Meg Reid and Will Evans join Mesha Maren to consider what makes up a literary ecosystem. As leaders of two nonprofit independent presses,Hub City Writers Project and Deep Vellum Press, Meg and Will describe their roles as publishers, booksellers, community builders, and advocates working with the many interconnected players in publishing: writers, readers, translators, critics, librarians, distributors, and funders. They discuss how independent presses create literary infrastructure by staying rooted in their communities, building relationships with readers, and making space for voices and stories that might otherwise be overlooked.

The conversation turns to the impact of conso...

“I hear whispers: Have you seen her? The woman who is not a woman, she is a walking museum. Have you seen her wares?”

The narrator of SL Carroll’s radiant debut leads an empty life in a small town until she is employed to catalogue the Museum's collection. She has never seen anyone rewrite their bones the way the Museum has, until they are hardly bones at all. Obsession takes hold and the Museum's display case body inhabits her mind. In an attempt to duplicate the Museum's existence, the narrator secretly begins collecting objects of her own. C...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Malon Edwards about his book, If Wishes Were Obfuscation Codes (Fireside Fiction Company, 2023). 

“Electric Resurrection. Born again perfection. The six-zero correction.”

For the last decade, Malon Edwards has been spinning out a world where humans have conquered death but still haven't bothered to take care of the living. Where resurrection is the ultimate commodity—if you're rich enough, powerful enough, and white enough to buy in.

If Wishes Were Obfuscation Codes and Other Stories collects 10 cyberpunk dispatches, including a brand-new, epic rap novella. On offer i...

Taylor D. Lott's The Stitches Between Us (Hawes & Jenkins, 2025) tells the story of Theo, a quiet, imaginative boy growing up in a home where sensitivity is punished and creativity is met with cruelty. He learns early to retreat inward, expressing what he cannot say through fabric, sketches, and observation. In a world that leaves little room for softness, Theo finds refuge in Danielle-unguarded, curious, and gently defiant. She recognizes his talent without trying to reshape him, and their connection becomes a fragile lifeline. Something fractures that lifeline. What once grounded Theo is slipping away, leaving him unmoored and overwhelmed...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Joanna Cockerline about her acclaimed novel, Still (The Porcupine's Quill, 2025).

Longlisted for the Giller Prize, Still is the story of Kayla, who lives and works on the streets of Kelowna, Canada, and of Little Zoe, a woman working in the sex trade who is missing. Set in a vibrant and diverse community of people living unhoused, the novel explores sex work, street life, the opioid crisis, what it means to survive, and what it means to find a home-especially in one's self.

As Kayla-whose past is...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Su Chang, author of The Immortal Woman (House of Anansi, 2025). 

A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind. 

Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to b...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Robin Blackburn McBride about her novel, River of Dreams (Guernica Editions, 2026).

A near-tragic accident. A life-changing phenomenon. A calling she couldn't foresee. Toronto, 1914. Avery Conlon's world turns upside down in an instant. Overhearing a comment that casts doubt on her blood ties with the mother raising her, the despairing twelve-year-old runs away--but ends up falling through a river of ice. Dragged out and on the edge of death, she awakens with secret, heightened powers of perception... and a vision of a strange woman. Learning to navigate her new...

Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself (Black Lawrence Press, 2026) is a collection of ten playfully strange and unsettling stories, some realistic and some surreal. The characters in these pages feel alienated: from their communities and relationships, on the streets of wealthy suburbs, at the doctor's office, in classrooms and swimming pools, in their own homes and their own skin. They wonder: is it better to be alone, imagining the life you want, as fantastic and strange as you wish, or is it better to be in the real world with real people, even if that means you...

In this NBN episode,  host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Liz Johnston about her eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect (Book*hug, 2026). The Fall-Down Effect traces the diverging fates of siblings Sylvia, Fern, and River from their late-1980s childhood in a small British Columbia logging town, where their mother Lynn' s environmental activism sets them apart from the local community, to 2020, when a forest fire forces a fraught, baggage-filled family reunion.At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. As she goes underground, her parents and siblings-- responsible grad student Sylvia and b...

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Utopias and Dystopias in Film and Literature with Matthew Leggatt (SUNY Press, 2026) is an edited collection exploring utopias ad dystopias in films and literature. It challenges readers, in these uniquely dystopian times, to reevaluate their ideas about utopia and dystopia. 

The book brings together film, literary, and utopian studies scholars from across the world. As an interdisciplinary collection, it covers a wide range of utopias and dystopias, from those of visionaries as varied as William Morris and George Lucas to such fresh new and distinctive voices like Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and N. K. Jemisin. 

...

DON’T FALL IN LOVE.

That’s the only rule. 

In this world, everyone knows their death date. If you’re rich, you can check in to a resort to have the greatest final few weeks of your life, in five-star luxury.

Regan works at one of these resorts as a “Juliet”. Her next client is Jude, who has a week to live. Regan’s job is simple: make Jude feel as though he has found true love before he dies.

But when a fake romance starts to become something else, can they take...

Liz DeWolf speaks to Emily Everett about her story “Ex Situ,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. The story follows an American living in Istanbul, navigating the end of a relationship, alongside the appeal and alienation of living abroad in a layered, complex city. Liz also discusses her process and revision methods, the themes she often returns to, and her work as a nonfiction book editor.

Liz DeWolf writes fiction and edits nonfiction books about politics and culture. Originally from Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles and is currently at work on a novel an...

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Ed Seaward about his thrilling novel, London Gothic (Dark Winter Press, 2026). 

In 1975, John Caine and his nineteen-year-old son Ricky bury a woman near a clump of trees in an open field on the rural outskirts of London, Ontario. In 1984, seventeen-year-old Bethany Caine is haunted by the disappearance of her mother nine years previous. Her father and brother insist Thelma Caine abandoned them one night, evidenced by her brief goodbye note. Having already escaped the house dominated by her brutish father to live with her lover, university student Angela, B...

It seems likely that most listeners to this podcast channel have heard of “shell shock,” the old name for what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder (usually abbreviated as PTSD). Even today, the long-term effects of combat tend to be under-estimated, but that was much more true in the years following World War I, when the diagnosis of “shell shock” first appeared.

 Terri Lewis’s When They Came Home (Miami UP, 2026) tackles this problem head-on. Based on the lives of the author’s grandparents, this beautifully written, compassionate novella follows the war experiences and long-term effects of combat on not o...

In Alice Sees Ghosts (Galiot Press, 2026), Daisy Rockwell tells an unforgettable story of love, grief and wanting closure. A profound exploration of people trying to piece their broken selves together, this novel celebrates life in all its guises, and what comes after.

Alice's ancestral home is crumbling. As her grandmother lies on her deathbed, and her relationships with her alcoholic mother and extended family members grow strained, Alice finds herself haunted by a spectral visitor. The ghost's cryptic and friendly whispers lead her on a journey to India, where long-buried family secrets lie in wait.

...

Whether you’re hoping to publish your first book or you’re a seasoned author with an unfinished proposal languishing on your hard drive, The Book Proposal Book provides honest and invaluable advice on how to overcome common sticking points and get your book published. It also shows why a well-conceived proposal can help lead to an outstanding book. The Book Proposal Book cuts through the mystery and guides you through the process of crafting a compelling proposal and pitching it to university presses and other academic publishers.

This episode explores: what a book proposal is and isn’...

Psychoanalysing Mind-Body Narratives Through Beckett and Artaud: The Trauma of the Body (Routledge, 2026) provides an epistemology of the body as it relates to subjectivity through an analysis of selected works of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett. Presented in three parts, the book explores a fundamental premise: that there is a traumatic and alienating dimension to embodiment that resists expression within representational systems and is core to the being of any subject. In Part One, The Epistemology of the Body, Meehan O'Callaghan approaches a theory of the body as traumatic by framing it as a question, a gap in knowledge...