New Books in Literary Studies

• Bradley A. Gorski, "Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

  Bradley Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of Russian book publishing and of Russian literature more broadly – in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, thousands of new publishers emerged, up from a mere two hundred at the Soviet Union’s end. The notion of the “bestseller” quickly came to dominate the new market, fueling he rise of immensely popular genres such as detective novels, including its zhenskii variety (detective novels written by women and featuring female sleuths. Gorski artfully weaves together the evolution of the book market - from the chaos of the early post-Communist years to the near-monopoly in the 2000s - with literary analysis of some of the most prominent post-Soviet authors. At early stages, post-Soviet literature often reflected a degree of optimism about the Western ideal of personal liberty and embraced what sociologist Boris Dubin called a Russian version of the “American success story”. In recent years, however, the Russian literary market has taken a distinctly illiberal turn, exemplified by the writer Zakhar Prilepin, a bestselling author turned jingoistic patriot who fought in the Donbas region of Ukraine and inspired many of his admirers to join the front.  Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism (Northern Illinois University Press, 2025) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• 156 Recall This B-Side #1: Merve Emre on Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Dry Heart”

  RtB loves the present-day shadows cast by neglected books, which can suddenly loom up out of the backlit past. So, you won’t be shocked to know that John has also been editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books. In it, around 50 writers (Ursula Le Guin was one) have made the case for un-forgetting a beloved book. Now, there is a book that collects 40 of these columns. Find it as your local bookstore, or Columbia University Press, or Bookshop, (or even Amazon). Like our podcast, B-Side Books focuses on those moments when books topple off their shelves, open up, and start bellowing at you. The one that enthralled Merve Emre (Wesleyan professor and author ofsuch terrific works as The Personality Brokers) was a novella by the luminous midcentury Italian pessimist, Natalia Ginzburg. And if you think you know precisely why a mid-century Italian writer would have a dark and bitter view of the world (already thinking of the Nazi shadows in work by Italo Calvino, Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani) Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart will have you thinking again. Merve Emre, Ginzburg fan and B-Side author Merve started her piece, and we started this 2023 conversation, by asking that age-old question: “When should a woman kill her husband?” Mentioned in This Episode J. W. Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Michael Warner, “Uncritical Reading” Natalia Ginzburg. The Little Virtues (personal essays that do not stage an excessive evacuation of the self, but instead triangulate between reader, writer and object of concern…) Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Novels Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline and These Possible Lives Rachel Ingals Mrs. Caliban (1982) Read transcript here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux, "The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New Tellings of Half-forgotten Stories from England's 39 Historic Counties" (The History Press, 2025)

  Do you know the legends of the giants who ruled England before the first human kings? What about the demon dog Black Shuck who terrorized sixteenth-century Norfolk? Or the many times the Devil has tried to get his way before being outwitted by everyday people? England’s historic counties are overflowing with folklore, and this collection of 39 stories from the hit podcast Three Ravens reimagines dozens of classic tales in surprising, spooky, and often hilarious ways. Filled with tales of ghosts, mermaids, half-forgotten heroes, bloody legends and more, The Three Ravens Folk Tales: New tellings of half-forgotten stories from England's 39 Historic Counties (The History Press, 2025) by Eleanor Conlon and Martin Vaux spans centuries, styles, tones and narrators, making it perfect for bedtimes, reading by torchlight, or curling up on the sofa to enjoy with a mug of something hot. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Dominic Davies and Candida Rifkind, "Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics" (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2025)

  Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2025) by Dr. Dominic Davies & Dr. Candida Rifkind is the first in-depth study of comics about refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, and detainees by artists from the Global North and South. Co-written by two leading scholars of nonfiction comics, the book explores graphic narratives about a range of refugee experiences, from war, displacement, and perilous sea crossings to detention camps, resettlement schemes, and second-generation diasporas. Through close readings of work by diverse artists including Joe Sacco, Sarah Glidden, Don Brown, Olivier Kugler, Jasper Rietman, Hamid Sulaiman, Leila Abdelrazzaq, Thi Bui, and Matt Huynh, Graphic Refuge shows how comics challenge dominant representations of the displaced to bring a radical politics of refugee agency and refusal into view. Beyond simply affirming the “humanity” of the refugee, these comics demand that we apprehend the historical construction of categories such as “citizen” and “refugee” through systems of empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. The comics medium allows readers not only to visualize the lives of refugees but also refocuses the lens on citizen non-refugees—“we who can sleep under warm cover at night”, as Vinh Nguyen writes in his foreword—and interrogates their perceptions, aspirations, and beliefs. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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• Mark Seligman, "AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature" (First Hill Books, 2025)

  Taking recent spectacular progress in AI fully into account, Mark Seligman's AI and Ada: Artificial Translation and Creation of Literature (Anthem Press, 2025) explores prospects for artificial literary translation and composition, with frequent reference to the hyperconscious literary art of Vladimir Nabokov. The exploration balances reader-friendly explanation (“What are transformers?”) and original insights (“What is intelligence? What is language?”) with personal and playful notes, and culminates in an assortment of striking demos The book’s Preface places the current AI explosion in the context of other technological cataclysms and recounts the author’s personal (and not always deadly serious) AI journey. Chapter One (“Extracting the Essence”) assesses the potential of machine translation of literature, exploiting Nabokov’s hyperconscious literary art as a reference point. Chapter Two (“Toward an Artificial Nabokov”) goes on to speculate on possibilities for actual artificial creation of literature. Chapter Three (“Large Literary Models? Intelligence and Language in the LLM Era”) explains recent spectacular progress in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), as exemplified by Large Language Models like ChatGPT. On the way, the chapter ventures to tackle perennial questions (“What is intelligence?” “What is language?”) and culminates in an assortment of striking demos. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat with Mark Seligman to talk about how the current AI revolution fits into the long arc of cultural and technological shifts, Seligman's framing of the “Great Transition” between Humanity 1.0 and 2.0, Nabokov’s style as a lens for thinking about artificial creativity, the possibilities and limits of machine translation and literary artistry, and the philosophical stakes of whether AI-generated works can ever truly be considered art.Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer based in Boston. His interests include translation studies, Arabic literature, ecocriticism, disability studies, and migration literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

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