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PODCAST

New Books in Literary Studies

New Books Network

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow

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All Episodes

22:27

Decolonizing the Novum

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/13

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 "novum" has been part of our definition of science fiction since Darko Suvin first offered up the concept

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44:58

Ted Goossen on translating Hiromi Kawakami’s “Third...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/10

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 changing. In addition to talking about Hiromi Kawakami’s novel The Third Love, other prominent people mentioned

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66:05

Ed Simon, "Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/09

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 face in these fetid days of the Anthropocene. In Writing During the Apocalypse: Reflections on the Great

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61:22

Namwali Serpell, "On Morrison" (Hogarth, 2026)

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/08

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 award-winning writer and a professor who teaches a course on Morrison to illuminate her masterful

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57:14

Fiction’s Lost Ambition with Writer Sam Kahn

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/08

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 beg for the sort of wide-angled treatment that novelists like Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer supplied in

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37:26

Michaela Hulstyn, "Unselfing: Global French...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/07

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 writing. The book focuses on the tension between rival conceptions of unselfing as either a form of

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82:47

Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/07

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 concerning the status of transactional sex, Sex Work in Southeast Asia explores the symbolic force and

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29:51

Eleanor Houghton, "Charlotte Brontë's Life in...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/05

Eleanor Houghton, in conversation with Duncan McCargo and Alexis WolfMeet 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 1854. Yet, until now, their testimonies had remained unheard.Renowned Brontë scholar and dress historian

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35:43

Asif Iqbal, "Bangladesh in Anglophone and Vernacular...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/04/02

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, religious minorities and their insecurity in East Pakistan, East Pakistan’s political insurgencies, the

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69:47

Jeanne-Marie Jackson, "The Letter of the Law in J. E....

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/31

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. Jackson maps the contours of Casely Hayford’s thought through sustained attention to his written work

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20:17

Pre-Reading

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/30

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 shared, social knowledge that shapes our expectations long before we open the cover or hit play.This

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62:02

Ainehi Edoro, "Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/29

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.Ainehi Edoro argues in Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2026) that forests

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35:57

Megan Peiser, "British Women Novelists and the Review...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/28

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 periodical in shaping literary reception, authorial careers, and the novel as a genre. Through a dynamic

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48:24

Why Did Langston Hughes's "Troubled Lands" Go...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/27

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 five months and began translating short fiction by prominent Mexican and Cuban writers. These stories,

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38:23

John Kuhn, "Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/27

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, oracular prophecies, barbaric triumphal parades, and group suicides—Kuhn traces these tropes across

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43:57

10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/26

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 makes room for other voices, or more precisely, how it becomes “a voice that could focalize the desires

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34:04

S. D. Ellison, "Hope for a New David in the Psalter's...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/25

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 dynasty embodied in a new Davidic king.Join us as we speak with Davy Ellison about his book, Hope for a

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63:17

The Remarkable Life and Afterlife of Sholem Aleichem

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/24

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 the fictional lives of his characters, was Sholem Aleichem's own life story. Born Sholem Rabinovitch in

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26:15

Hsuan L Hsu, "Olfactory Worldmaking" (U Minnesota...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/24

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 humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates

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39:20

Claire Goldstein, "Sun King's Cosmos: Comets and the...

New Books in Literary Studies ·

2026/03/24

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 Director of the Humanities Program at UC Davis. Her research in ancien régime French-language literature

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