New Books Network

Since its invention more than 150 years ago, the microphone transformed the world in an instant. Yet its evolution and integration into our daily
lives has been comparatively gradual – so gradual, crucially, that it is easy to
forget just how much we take it for granted. As explored in Microphone (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Ralph Jones, every phone has a microphone. Every laptop has a microphone. We are surrounded by microphones.

The microphone wields enormous power. But when we're 'on mic' we aren't just powerful, we're vulnerable. Microphones can destroy careers as quickly as make them. The microphone is inextricable from our need to be heard. This book takes a curious, always humorous look at this object as a metaphor for power and how the fulfillment of our desire to be heard has created a multi-headed beast we are still learning how to tame.

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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Contemporary French and Francophone Futuristic Novels: The Longing to be Written and Its Refusal (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2022) sheds a new light on the metafictional aspects of
futuristic and science fiction novels, at the crossroads of information
and media studies, possible worlds theories applied to cognitive
narratology, questions related to the criticism of post-humanity, and,
more broadly, contemporary French and Francophone literature. It
examines the fictional minds of characters and their conceptions of
resistance to the anticipated worlds they inhabit, particularly in
novels by Pierre Bordage, Marie Darrieussecq, Michel Houellebecq, Amin
Maalouf, Jean-Christophe Rufin, Antoine Volodine, and Élisabeth
Vonarburg. It also explores how corporal postures serve as a matrix for
philosophical quests in novels by Amélie Nothomb, Alain Damasio, and
Romain Lucazeau. More specifically, from the fictional readers’ points
of view, it provides a critical approach to the mythologies of writing,
in the wake of the French philosophical tales by authors including
Cyrano de Bergerac and Voltaire, to question the traditionally expressed
formulations of the mythologies of writing, that is, of the metaphors
of the book (the book of life, nature, and the world), to rethink the
idea of a humanity within its limits.

Guest Emmanuel Buzay is currently working as an international
technical expert for the Modern Language Association and the French
Embassy in the US, having previously held appointments at UMass Amherst
and the University of Connecticut. In addition to this monograph, he has
published book chapters on topics from Frankenstein to Michel Houellebecq, and his articles have appeared in Nouvelles Études Francophones, Res Futurae, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.

Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of
Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and
speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism
to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan
France and the francophone Caribbean, with a book manuscript under
review on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement.
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Dr. Shirley's monograph, Religion, Gender, and Politics in Medieval Sri Lanka: The Reconstruction of Buddhist Kingship, ca. 1070-1215 (ARC Humanities Press, 2026), is now available open access, thanks to the generous support of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. This book offers a radical
reconsideration of the Poḷon-naruva period, long understood to be a
turning point in the history of Theravāda Buddhism. Histories of this
period have been overwhelmingly based on a series of literary accounts
written long after the fact. But by drawing on textual, inscriptional,
numismatic, and material evidence from within the period itself, the
book reveals how the intellectual and social histories of Buddhism,
politics, and gender were inextricably intertwined in Poḷon-naruva. In
particular, it argues that debates over what it meant to be a “good
Buddhist king” were intrinsically debates about Buddhist masculinity and
about the proper relationship of gender to power.

Link to purchase/download the book here.

Bruno M. Shirley is a lecturer in Buddhist Studies at
Heidelberg University, Germany. He completed his MA in Religious Studies
at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, NZ, and then PhD
in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell University in New
York, USA.

Dr. Shirley is a historian of religion, gender, and
politics in early second-millennium Sri Lanka and beyond. As an
academic, he is interested in what it meant to understand oneself as
“Buddhist” in medieval South Asia. His research explores a wider range
of evidence—from royal inscriptions, to monastic disciplinary codes, to
elaborate poems—in order to expose the cracks and fissures between
competing visions of Buddhism.

Resources referred to in the interview: 

Alastair Gornall, Rewriting Buddhism: Pali Literature and Monastic Reform in Sri Lanka, 1157–1270. University College London Press, 2020.

Day, Tony. “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (1996): 384–409.

Gunawardana, R. A. L. H. Robe and Plough: Monasticism and Economic Interest in Early Medieval Sri Lanka. University of Arizona Press, 1979.

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In Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Duke UP, 2025), Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims' remains for public display. Rwanda's genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms trauma heritage, wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized--made visible in public space--to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by "writing" them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda's genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
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Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do - and fail to do - about actually getting them? In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying - and fashioning - our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want (FSG, 2026) is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.

Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023).
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