New Books in Literary Studies

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm.
Mentions:
Oprah's Book Club
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Chinua Achebe
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Franzen
Junot Díaz
Salman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Michelle Obama's Becoming
Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow
Roxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"
Random House's Andy Ward
Verdi’s Aida
Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me

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A multimedia collection dedicated to John D. Smith on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, edited by Wendy J. Phillips Rodríguez and Simon Brodbeck.
Open Access here

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Be the main character in the story that is your life – that is the ambition of eight remarkable women featured in Anne Fernald’s collective biography, Her Own Voice, guided by Virginia Woolf. We talk about Margaret Wise Brown, groundbreaking author of Goodnight Moon, addressed to young children and inspired by Gertrude Stein and Woolf, Jessie Redmon Fauset, prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director to make both silent and sound films, inventor of the boom mic, and five other remarkable women who ignite our ability to change within the contingencies of our lives.
Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University.

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Romantic Media and Wartime Networks (Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Deven Parker tells the story of how Britain revolutionized its state communication networks on an unprecedented scale during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, setting the stage for our modern infrastructure state where connectivity and surveillance go hand in hand. Dr. Parker argues that Romantic literary representations of this state communications network managed to reveal—and, on occasion, to resist—its ideological functions.
In a wide-ranging study drawing upon an archive of military surveys, spy reports, trial records, and even ladies' hand fans, Dr. Parker reveals the scope and impact of the British government's investments in shutter telegraphs, mapping projects, and postal routes across two decades of war with France. The writers of the Romantic period, meanwhile, were cognizant of the political motivations undergirding the state's overhauled networks, which were designed to facilitate and speed up but also to more easily control communications. Taking up familiar writers including Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey—as well as lesser-known figures such as radical playwright John Dent, inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the proto-science fiction novelist Jane Loudon—Dr. Parker reads Romantic literature for its astute chronicling and interrogation of the material hardware of the state's media ecology.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose 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. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; the audience for this art was, after all, that same Western and Westernized elite.

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