New Books Network

• Dorie Greenspan, "Dorie's Anytime Cakes" (Harvest, 2025)

  Beloved baker and five-time James Beard Award winner Dorie Greenspan joins the New Books Network to discuss her new cookbook, Dorie’s Anytime Cakes (Harvest, 2025), a warm, inviting collection designed to slip easily into everyday life. From celebration-worthy showstoppers to simple loaves meant for sharing over coffee, Greenspan’s latest book distills decades of experience into recipes. In this conversation, Dorie talks with host Laura Goldberg about how her life between New York, Connecticut, and Paris has shaped her sensibility as both a home baker and a recipe writer. She reflects on the cultural differences she has observed in American and French kitchens, their attitudes toward time, technique, and pleasure, and how these contrasts surface in cakes like her Franco-American Banana Bread, a recipe that bridges two culinary worlds. Dorie shares the cookbooks and culinary mentors who have most influenced her craft, as well as the joy of collaborating with a design team whose work helps the book feel lively, inviting, and full of personality. The episode also explores the book’s recipe inspirations, including holiday-ready desserts like the Thanksgiving Cake with its sweet potatoes, maple, and marshmallow frosting, and the Cocoa-Swirled Pumpkin Bundt, which links late autumn to winter festivities. She also explains her chapter on Salty Cakes, a playful reimagining of what a cake can be. Recipes such as the Harissa-Lemon Loaf and the Seaweed and Furikake Muffins show how savory ingredients can transform familiar forms into something surprising, satisfying, and perfect for lunch, snacks, or aperitif hour. Interview by Laura Goldberg, longtime food blogger here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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• Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, "Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation" (PublicAffairs, 2025)

  1991 ushered in a new epoch of hope as Russia marched toward democracy and prosperity on the ruins of the Soviet Union. In 2025 those hopes for a thriving, democratic Russia have not panned out. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov lived it as journalists in Russia from the start of Putin’s reign. Specialists in documenting Russia’s secret services, they’ve reported many, many important stories over the past decades. Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation (PublicAffairs, 2025) tells an intimate story of a group of friends in journalism whose view diverged against the backdrop of Putin’s revanchist, authoritarian rule. Soldatov and Borogan narrate the personal, perplexing, and painful story of the friends and colleagues who assimilated Kremlin-aligned views as the authors themselves moved from opposition journalists to exiles under threat from the Putin’s regime. This conversation scratches the surface of the book’s riveting and important attempt to make sense of polarization and allegiances with weighty consequences. Andrei Soldatov is a Russian investigative journalist in exile, co-founder and editor of Agentura ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities. He has been covering security services and terrorism issues since 1999. Irina Borogan is a Russian investigative journalist in exile. Borogan reported on terrorist attacks in Russia, including hostage takings in Moscow and Beslan. In 1999 Borogan covered the NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, in 2006 she covered the Lebanon War and tensions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She chronicled the Kremlin’s campaign to gain control of civil society and strengthen the government’s police services under the pretext of fighting extremism. Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are currently fellows at King’s College London and the Center for Europan Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are co-authors of four books: The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia's Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (2010); The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries (2015); The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia's Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad (2019);and Our Dear Friends in Moscow: The Inside Story of a Broken Generation (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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• Henry H. Sapoznik, "The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City" (SUNY Press, 2025)

  The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City (SUNY Press, 2025) by Henry H. Sapoznik explores a century of Yiddish popular culture in New York City. Sapoznik--the author of Klezmer! Jewish Music fro0m Old World to Our World and a Peabody Award-winning coproducer of NPR's Yiddish Radio Project--tells his story through chapters on eating, architecture, music and theater. Within each chapter are shorter entries on topics as varied as knishes, cafeterias, prominent buildings, Jews and jazz, Black cantors, women cantors, and Yiddish theater. Culled from over five thousand Yiddish and English newspaper articles, the book offers fresh insights into the profound influence of Yiddish culture on New York City. The guide also contains fifty images, many of which have never before been published. The Tourist's Guide to Lost Yiddish New York City is vivid, deeply researched, and engaging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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• Wendy I. Zierler, "Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry" (Jewish Publication Society, 2025)

  Interweaving memoir with Hebrew poetry, Going Out with Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry (Jewish Publication Society, 2025) illluminates author Wendy I. Zierler’s literary and personal Jewish mourning journey in the aftermath of unremitting personal loss. She begins with her story: the death of both her parents in one year; the challenges she faced as a woman saying Kaddish in an Orthodox synagogue; and her decision to teach a weekly class on modern Hebrew poems that addressed grief, prayer, and God wrestling. Each subsequent chapter delves into the works of a different modern Hebrew poet—Lea Goldberg, Avraham Ḥalfi, Yehuda Amichai, Rachel Morpurgo, Rachel Bluwstein, Ruhama Weiss, and Amir Gilboa—in the order in which she translated, interpreted, and taught their poems (many translated into English for the first time). Each poet, like Zierler, comes to writing deeply connected to Jewish tradition and yet at odds with it, too. Ultimately, Going Out with Knots reflects on how a woman living in a modern Orthodox community can claim a place in the male-centered rituals that Jewish tradition prescribes for mourning, and how immersion in modern Hebrew poetry can respond deeply to both communal (COVID-19, October 7) as well as personal losses, offering a new form of theology and Torah. Rabbi Dr. Wendy I. Zierler is Sigmund Falk Professor of Modern Jewish Literature and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York and the coeditor of Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History. She is the author of Movies and Midrash: Popular Film and Jewish Religious Conversation and And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Hebrew Women’s Writing and coeditor of These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness. Rabbi Marc Katz is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He is the author of Yochanan's Gamble: Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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• David Boyk, "Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

  Provincial Metropolis: Intellectuals and the Hinterland in Colonial India (Cambridge UP, 2025) tells the story of Patna, in the north Indian region of Bihar, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A century and more earlier, Patna had been an important and populous city, but it came to be seen by many-and is still  seen today-as merely part of the mofussil, the provincial hinterland. Despite Patna's real decline, it continued to nurture a vibrant intellectual culture that linked it with cities and towns across northern India and beyond. Urdu literary gatherings and other Islamicate traditions inherited from Mughal times helped animate the networks sustaining institutions like scholarly libraries and satirical newspapers. Meanwhile, English-educated lawyers sought to bring new prominence to their city and region by making Patna the capital of a new province. They succeeded, but as Patna's political influence grew, its distinctive character was diminished. Ultimately, Provincial Metropolis shows, Patna's intellectual and cultural life thrived not despite its provinciality but because of it. * David Boyk is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses in Hindi-Urdu language and literature, and on South Asian literature, film, and history more broadly. My scholarly interests are focused on South Asia and include urban and regional history, film, food studies,and the history of language and literature. You can learn more about him on his website.  * Saumya Dadoo is a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. Her dissertation focuses on the history of law, policing, and punishment in colonial Allahabad.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

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