New Books Network
Arts & Letters
Literary Studies April 19, 2021

Touch

Recovering Our Most Vital Sense

Richard Kearney

Hosted by Britton Edelen
In this episode, I interview Richard Kearney, professor of philosophy at Boston College, about his most recent book, Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense, out through Columbia University Press. The …

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Performing Arts April 19, 2021

Owed

Joshua Bennett

Hosted by Andy Boyd
Owed (Penguin, 2020) is the second collection of poems by Dr. Joshua Bennett, poet, professor, and artist. This volume is a wide-ranging, celebratory book focused on what Bennett calls "the Black quotidian," …
Music April 19, 2021

Chronicling Stankonia

The Rise of the Hip-Hop South

Regina N. Bradley

Hosted by Emily Ruth Allen
Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) pulses with the beats of a new American South, probing the ways music, literature, and film have remixed …
Art April 19, 2021

The Art of Experiment

Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design

Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes

Hosted by Pierre d'Alancaisez
The Art of Experiment: Post-Pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design (Routledge, 2020) is a handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times. In search of new knowledge practices …
Sex Work, Sexualities and Sex April 16, 2021

Reinventing Licentiousness

Pornography and Modern China

Y. Yvon Wang

Hosted by Rachel Stuart
Y. Yvon Wang draws on previously untapped archives--ranging from police archives and surveys to ephemeral texts and pictures--to argue that pornography in China represents a unique configuration of power and …
Critical Theory April 16, 2021

Redlining Culture

A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction

Richard Jean So

Hosted by Dave O'Brien
What is the story of race in American fiction? In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020), Richard Jean So, an assistant professor of …
Literary Studies April 16, 2021

Contingent Figure

Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment

Michael D. Snediker

Hosted by Britton Edelen
In this episode, I interview Michael Snediker, professor of English at the University of Houston, about his book, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment, recently published by University of …
Literature April 16, 2021

An Indian Among Los Indígenas

Ursula Pike

Hosted by Zoe Bossiere
The western travel narrative genre has a history long tied to voyeurism and conquest. A way to see the world—and its many unique people and places—through the eyes of mostly …
History April 16, 2021

The Golden Age of the American Essay

1945-1970

Phillip Lopate

Hosted by Zachary McCulley
The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in …
Architecture April 16, 2021

Gardens at the Frontier

New Methodological Perspectives on Garden History and Designed Landscapes

James Beattie

Hosted by Bryan Toepfer
Gardens at the Frontier: New Methodological Perspectives on Garden History and Designed Landscapes (Routledge, 2019) addresses broad issues of interest to architectural historians, environmental historians, garden writers, geographers, and other …
Fantasy April 15, 2021

The Frozen Crown

A Novel

Greta Kelly

Hosted by Gabrielle Mathieu
The horror of the battlefield is fresh for Princess Askia. She’s just been forced to flee her kingdom, the northern country of Seravesh, where her cousin now rules under the …
In Conversation: An OUP Podcast April 15, 2021

The Hidden History of Coined Words

Ralph Keyes

Hosted by Marshall Poe
Successful word-coinages--those that stay in currency for a good long time--tend to conceal their beginnings. We take them at face value and rarely when and where they were first minted …
Literary Studies April 15, 2021

Prosthesis

David Wills

Hosted by Britton Edelen
In this episode, I interview David Wills, professor of French Studies at Brown University, about his book, Prosthesis, recently republished for its 25th anniversary by University of Minnesota Press. A …
Sex Work, Sexualities and Sex April 13, 2021

Provocauteurs and Provocations

Screening Sex in 21st Century Media

Maria San Filippo

Hosted by Rachel Stuart
Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and …
Literature April 13, 2021

Four Dead Horses

KT Sparks

Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
Today I talked to KT Sparks about her debut novel Four Dead Horses (Regal House, 2021) On May 1, 1982, eighteen-year-old Martin Oliphant watches a horse drown off the shore of …
American West April 13, 2021

California Exposures

Envisioning Myth and History

Richard White

Hosted by Stephen Hausmann
This book began as a bet between a father and son: could Richard White, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and renowned historian of the American West, tell a complete history of …
Japanese Studies April 13, 2021

Flowering Tales

Women Exorcising History in Heian Japan

Takeshi Watanabe

Hosted by Jingyi Li
Telling stories: that sounds innocuous enough. But for the first chronicle in the Japanese vernacular, A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari), there was more to worry about than a …
Poetry April 13, 2021

Hotel Almighty

Sarah J. Sloat

Hosted by Andrea Blythe
Visually arresting and utterly one-of-a-kind, Sarah J. Sloat's Hotel Almighty (Sarabande Books) is a book-length erasure of Misery by Stephen King, a reimagining of the novel's themes of constraint and …
Jewish Studies April 12, 2021

Salvage Poetics

Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies

Sheila E. Jelen

Hosted by Zalman Newfield
In Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (Wayne State University Press, 2020), Sheila Jelen explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish …
Literature April 9, 2021

A Fourteen-Hour Lesson in Theosophy

Edgar Garbelotto

Hosted by Emily Everett
Writer and translator Edgar Garbelotto speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about his short story “A Fourteen-Hour Lesson in Theosophy,” which appears in Issue 20 of The Common magazine. The story …