Episodes

  • 8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)

    8.3 Aspire to Magic but End Up With Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs speaks with Sunny Yudkoff (JP)
    Nov 7 2024
    What happens when a novelist wants “nonsense and joy” but his characters are destined for a Central European sanatorium? How does the abecedarian form (i.e. organized not chronologically or sequentially but alphabetically) insist on order, yet also embrace absurdity? Here to ponder such questions with host John Plotz are University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Sunny Yudkoff (last heard on ND speaking with Sheila Heti) and Adam Ehrlich Sachs, author of Inherited Disorders, The Organs of Sense, and the recently published Gretel and the Great War. Sachs has fallen under the spell of late Habsburg Vienna, where the polymath Ludwig Wittgenstein struggled to make sense of Boltzmann’s physics, Arnold Schoenberg read the acerbic journalist Karl Kraus, and everyone, Sachs suspects, was reading Grimms’ Fairy Tales, searching for the feeling of inevitability only narrative closure can provide. Beneath his OULIPO-like attachment to arbitrary orders and word-games, though, Sachs admits to a desire for chaos. Thomas Bernhard, later 20th century Austrian experimental novelist Heinrich von Kleist, “Michael Kohlhass” Romantic-era German writer Italo Calvino,If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler OULIPO Home of French literary experimentalists like Perec and Raymond Queneau Georges Perec’s most famous experiment is Life: A User’s Manual (although John is devoted to “W: or the Memory of Childhood”) Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra! (ignore John calling the author Dr Scarry, which was a scary mistake.,..) Marcel Proust: was he a worldbuilder and fantasist, as Nabokov says or, as Doris Lessing claims, principally an anatomist of French social structures, a second Zola? Franz Kafka is unafraid of turning his character into a bug in a story’s first sentence. Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway offers the reader a mad (Septimus) and a sane (Mrs Dalloway herself) version of stream of consciousness: how different are they? Cezanne, for example The Fisherman (Fantastic Scene) The Pointillism of painters like Georges Seurat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    30 mins
  • Megan Staffel, "The Causative Factor" (Regal House, 2024)

    Megan Staffel, "The Causative Factor" (Regal House, 2024)
    Nov 5 2024
    Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class. After a heavenly night together, they go hiking, and he dives off a cliff, disappearing without a trace. Although Rachel graduates with an art degree, moves to New York, and supports her painting as an ESL teacher, she’s scarred for years by the mystery of Rubiat’s disappearance. This is a sweet coming-of-age, but also a suspense-filled novel told in shifting viewpoints, about art, growing up, making choices, and finding love. Megan Staffel splits her time between a farm in western New York State and an apartment in Brooklyn. She is an avid walker, bird watcher, and gardener. Her new novel, The Causative Factor, was inspired by a hike she took with her husband in a state park in October, 2020 and grew into a story about an artist trying to understand the mysterious disappearance of her lover. Staffel's interest in the arts and in the process of art-making has been a life-long passion. Her first novel, She Wanted Something Else, was a story about an artist as well. Staffel's other book publications include a third novel and three collections of short stories. She taught for many years in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and writes a monthly Substack newsletter, "Page and Story." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    26 mins
  • Tim Ecott, "Sigmundur and the Golden Ring" (Sprotin, 2024)

    Tim Ecott, "Sigmundur and the Golden Ring" (Sprotin, 2024)
    Nov 3 2024
    Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    38 mins
  • Bonnie Jo Campbell, "The Waters: A Novel" (Norton, 2024)

    Bonnie Jo Campbell, "The Waters: A Novel" (Norton, 2024)
    Oct 29 2024
    Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies. Her first two daughters Molly and Prim were foundlings, but Rose Thorn is the product of Hermine’s husband having an affair with Prim before getting kicked off the island. Herself, now nearly eighty, is raising eleven-year-old granddaughter Dorothy “Donkey” Zook. Donkey loves animals and longs for her mother, Rose Thorn, to marry Titus, whom she wants as her father. Donkey is the product of Rose Thorn being raped by Titus’s drunk father in this richly nuanced tale of rural poverty, changing landscapes, corporate control of farmland, religious extremism, childhood naivete, and the shaky balance between nature and humanity. Bonnie Jo Campbell’s novel The Waters (Norton, 2024) was a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club selection. Her other novels include Once Upon A River, a National Bestseller that was adapted into an award winning film, and Q Road. Campbell’s short story collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Women and Other Animals, an AWP Grace Paley Prize winner. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Prize and Mark Twain Award. She lives in Kalamazoo with her husband and donkeys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    26 mins
  • Kristopher Jansma, "Our Narrow Hiding Places" (Ecco, 2024), "Revisionaries" (Quirk Books, 2024)

    Kristopher Jansma, "Our Narrow Hiding Places" (Ecco, 2024), "Revisionaries" (Quirk Books, 2024)
    Oct 28 2024
    Kristopher grew up in Lincroft, New Jersey. He received his B.A. in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Columbia University. He is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels, OUR NARROW HIDING PLACES (Ecco/2024) WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking/2016) and THE UNCHANGEABLE SPOTS OF LEOPARDS, (Viking/2013). His book of essays on the creative process is REVISIONARIES: WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE LOST, UNFINISHED, AND JUST PLAIN BAD WORK OF GREAT WRITERS. And Kristopher is the director of the creative program and SUNY New Paltz. Recommended Books: E. Lily Yu Break Blow Burn and Make Kate Hamilton, Mad Wife  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 Against World Literature, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    49 mins
  • To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)

    To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi (SW)
    Oct 25 2024
    An unforgettable horse gallops through the pages of Kaveh Akbar’s best-selling novel Martyr! (2024), but it is a figurative hastening toward failure and the limitations of language that Akbar discusses with critic Pardis Dabashi. In their conversation, Kaveh considers writing both as an escape from the confines of the self and as a vehicle for expressing its contradictions. Together they explore which forms might best capture the ambivalence and polyphony of the human mind, the contours of Iranian American identity, and the spiritual beauty of everyday existence. Whether discussing neurolinguistics or the affordances of poetry, Kaveh contemplates the limits of language: how can we write what we think, when we struggle to know what—or how—we think? This conversation goes deep into the psyche in order to reach far beyond it. Even Kaveh’s deeply personal response to the signature question demonstrates that the places farthest away from us may also be found within. Mentioned in this episode By Kaveh Akbar: Martyr! The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (editor) Calling a Wolf a Wolf Also mentioned: My Uncle Napoleon To the Lighthouse Ars Poetica Ferdowsi The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts The Tempest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    48 mins
  • Nat Reeve, "Earlyfate" (Cipher Press, 2024)

    Nat Reeve, "Earlyfate" (Cipher Press, 2024)
    Oct 24 2024
    Pip Property is no stranger to disaster. Typically, they’ve got a plan, but now Dallyangle’s favourite dandy & part-time criminal is locked in the morgue of the crime-fighting Division gone rogue, accused of far more crimes than they’ve actually committed, with (at least) two bucolic burglars out to strangle them with their own cravat. Their lover – the semi-feral Welsh heiress Rosamond Nettleblack – has disappeared into dangerous hands. Enlisting the Division to save Rosamond might be Pip’s only hope, but the cravat designer and the chaotic vigilantes have never seen eye to eye. The Division is looking to prove themselves to a potential new patron – and trusting schemers like Pip is a risk the detectives don’t want to take. Armed only with a borrowed notebook, threadbare charm, suits without cravat pins, and a swordstick everyone keeps confiscating, Pip must get the Division on-side, convince them that faith is a thing they can still have, and unravel the truth behind Rosamond’s disappearance before it’s too late. From Dr. Nat Reeve, the author of Nettleblack, Earlyfate (Cipher Press, 2024) throws us back into the same madcap Neo-Victorian world, where queerness is a given and chaos is mandatory. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    51 mins
  • S. L. Wisenberg, "The Adventures of Cancer Bitch" (Tortoise Books, 2024)

    S. L. Wisenberg, "The Adventures of Cancer Bitch" (Tortoise Books, 2024)
    Oct 22 2024
    It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriousness of her illness. She doesn’t let the fear and discomfort stop her from throwing her left breast a farewell party. Now, fifteen years later, SL Wisenberg’s journey of self-acceptance, Adventures of Cancer Bitch (Tortoise Books, 2024) has been reissued without page numbers, but with additional entries, notes about her life, and updates about cancer. S. L. Wisenberg was born in Texas and has lived in Chicago, more or less, since she was 18. She is the author of a fiction collection, The Sweetheart Is In; the essay collections Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions and The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home. In 2009 she published a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch, about her breast cancer from diagnosis to post-chemo. On October 15, the book is being re-released as a paperback, revised and updated. She is still cancer free, except for a rare chronic blood cancer, so she remains the Cancer Bitch. Wisenberg has received a Pushcart Prize, and awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Illinois Arts Council, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The former co-director of the MA/MFA program at Northwestern University, she has taught workshops and read and lectured widely, from San Francisco to Sofia, Bulgaria. Wisenberg edits Another Chicago Magazine, an international online literary journal. In the summer she raises Eastern Black Swallowtail butterflies. Year round she walks through Chicago and hypnotizes wild rabbits. She also pulls weeds in public areas and leaves markers proclaiming, The Mad Weeder Strikes Again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature
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    25 mins