The Kannada language boasts an ongoing literary tradition spanning more than a millennium, with a rich array of social positions and roles, religious traditions, and poetic styles that developed over the dramatic history of the region. Yet translations from premodern Kannada to English have been inconsistent, with only a handful of works that have endured. Stories of Shiva's Saints is the first English translation of selected stories from a thirteenth-century text by Hampeya Harihara that sheds light on the rapid spread of Shiva devotion in the region through edified biographies of figures who lived a few decades earlier, and the stories' historical significance is matched by their gripping plots and emotional expressivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like “pandemic,” a Freudian state of mind like the “Oedipus complex,” or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks’ spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us? In What the Greeks Did for Us (Yale UP, 2023), Tony Spawforth explores our classical heritage, wherever it’s to be found. He reveals its legacy in everything from religion to popular culture, and unearths the darker side of Greek influence—from the Nazis’ obsession with Spartan “racial purity” to the elitism of classical education. Paying attention to the huge breadth and variety of Hellenic influence, this book paints an essential portrait of the ancient world’s living legacy—considering to whom it matters, and why. Tony Spawforth is emeritus professor of ancient history at Newcastle University. As well as leading cultural tours in Greece, he has presented eight documentaries for the BBC and has published thirteen books, including The Story of Greece and Rome. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it.  In Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer (Bloomsbury, 2023), Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels. Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings. Daniel Moran earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches research and writing at Rutgers and co-hosts the podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics (Twitter @15MinFilm). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today, I speak with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the new artist’s biography Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book was recently named one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. Pollack-Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher at Portland State University, whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. Pollack-Pelzner’s biography offers a captivating exploration of Miranda’s artistic journey—from a sensitive child in Manhattan’s Washington Heights to the visionary creator of Hamilton whose voice has reshaped musical theater and popular culture. This book captures a living artist in motion, weaving together countless threads of collaboration, cultural synthesis, and personal revelation that define Miranda’s work. In our conversation, we focus on the challenge of writing biography itself. How does a scholar and critic approach the story of someone whose art feels both deeply personal and expansively historical? How does one trace the education of an artist who learned not in isolation, but through community, heritage, and creative exchange? Pollack-Pelzner guides us through these questions with the grace of a storyteller and the precision of a historian, drawing on unparalleled access to Miranda’s inner circle and his own interviews with the artist. This is a book about how an artist finds his voice, and a conversation about how a biographer finds the shape of a life. Join me for this engaging discussion with the delightful Daniel Pollack-Pelzner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

KGB Literati: Spy Fiction and State Security in the Soviet Union (University of Toronto Press, 2025) offers a first-ever glimpse into the mysterious and long-ignored world and work of Soviet spies- and counterspies-turned-writers. Once out of active service, many former spies have turned to writing spy fiction. They drop the dagger and pick up the pen. Some are very successful, like James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming or the novelists John Le Carré and Graham Greene. Their Soviet counterparts have rarely been afforded the same attention or examination. Drawing on materials from KGB archives and Soviet publications long out of print, KGB Literati offers the first-ever account of spy fiction written, frequently with institutional support, by Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence officers. Spy fiction can give insights into the operational workings of clandestine agencies and the personal dimensions of secret service work. By analysing the literary output of KGB spies and counterspies, the book shows that for the KGB, this type of intervention into Soviet popular culture was a crucial component of their overall counterintelligence strategy. These texts played an instrumental role in the Soviet state’s efforts to neutralize and counter Western cultural influences on the Soviet population. Dr. Filip Kovacevic’s research is of great relevance today, given that a large segment of the Russian ruling elite is still composed of former KGB officers, including Russian president Vladimir Putin. KGB Literati illuminates the deep-seated KGB myths, values, aspirations, and fears that continue to have a profound impact on the foreign and domestic policies of the Russian Federation. 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

Wednesday, December 17—“The best play I’ve seen this season,” says New York Magazine’s Sara Holdren about Liberation, Bess Wohl’s moving exploration of the women’s movement through the story of an Ohio consciousness-raising group in the early 1970s and a daughter who yearns to understand her mother’s life and her own.To discuss this timely play and the movement’s powerful literary roots, Wohl joins memoirist Honor Moore, co-editor of Library of America’s Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can, for a conversation about freedom, feminism, and visions for a better future, then and now.LOA LIVE programs are made possible by contributions from friends like you, and we encourage you to consider making a donation to support future presentations. Max Rudin is President & Publisher of Library of America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Many Disney films adapt works from the Victorian period, which is often called the Golden Age of children’s literature. Animating the Victorians: Disney’s Literary History (University Press of Mississippi, 2025) explores Disney’s adaptations of Victorian texts like Alice in Wonderland, Oliver Twist, Treasure Island, Peter Pan, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Author Patrick C. Fleming traces those adaptations from initial concept to theatrical release and beyond to the sequels, consumer products, and theme park attractions that make up a Disney franchise. During the production process, which often extended over decades, Disney’s writers engaged not just with the texts themselves but with the contexts in which they were written, their authors’ biographies, and intervening adaptations. To reveal that process, Fleming draws on preproduction reports, press releases, and unfinished drafts, including materials in the Walt Disney Company Archives, some of which have not yet been discussed in print. But the relationship between Disney and the Victorians goes beyond adaptations. Walt Disney himself had a similar career to the Victorian author-entrepreneur Charles Dickens. Linking the Disney Princess franchise to Victorian ideologies shows how gender and sexuality are constantly being renegotiated. Disney’s animated musicals, theme parks, copyright practices, and even marketing campaigns depend on cultural assumptions, legal frameworks, and media technologies that emerged in nineteenth-century England. Moreover, Disney’s adaptations influence modern students and scholars of the Victorian period. By applying scholarship in Victorian studies to a global company, Fleming shows how institutions mediate our understanding of the past and demonstrates the continued relevance of literary studies in a corporate media age. An audiobook will be available in January 2026. Patrick C. Fleming is a scholar of Victorian studies and children's literature. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In this episode of New Books Network, I speak with Zubeda Jalalzai about her book Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan (Bloomsbury, 2023). Literary License and the West’s Romance with Afghanistan, analyzes the role literature and poetic sensibility played in colonial British and American writings on Afghanistan from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries. The book also examines how literature and literariness themselves have shaped Western discourses framing Afghanistan. British Romantic Orientalists of the nineteenth century studied the region in depth and were drawn to what they perceived as an alien space—one in which they could remake themselves in print and in life. Writers who followed, including scholars, civil servants, and wives or professional women, were inspired by the region and at times crossed ethnic, national, and imaginative boundaries. The book explores the connections forged in print through both fantastic and familiar assumptions about Afghanistan and its people. Qaseem Ahmadzai have studied Intellectual History in Sweden. His research focuses on postcolonial theory, historiography, and non-Western intellectual traditions, with particular attention to Afghanistan and the broader Pashto-Persianate and Islamic worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

In The Saga of the Earls of Orkney (Birlinn, 2025), Professor Judith Jesch presents a fascinating history of the Earldom of Orkney, which was established in the Viking Age, records the adventures, feuds and battles of powerful Norsemen during its first three centuries. The medieval earls of Orkney owed allegiance to the kings of Norway but their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland to Sweden and Russia, and they travelled as far as Narbonne, Crete and Jerusalem. Advised by bishops and formidable women, they and their henchmen jockeyed for power with each other and with neighbouring rulers in Scotland, often with murderous outcomes. In between the high politics and violence, the world of the earls was one of piety, poetry and feasting. The Saga also provides rare glimpses of culture and everyday life in northern Scotland when it was central to the Viking diaspora. Set in a recognisable landscape, it mentions features, sites and even buildings that can still be seen today. This new translation of the manuscripts of the Saga uses an innovative approach to presenting medieval sources to non-specialist audiences, highlighting textual variations that affect its interpretation. It also reflects saga style and language more closely than previous translations and is ideal for both research and reading aloud. This is an essential, detailed and up-to-date resource for academics and general readers who wish to know more about Viking and Norse Scotland. 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

A unique study of the only physical manuscript containing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as both a material and literary object.In this book, Arthur Bahr takes a fresh look at the four poems and twelve illustrations of the so-called “Pearl-Manuscript,” the only surviving medieval copy of two of the best-known Middle English poems: Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript, Bahr explores how the physical manuscript itself enhances our perception of the poetry, drawing on recent technological advances (such as spectroscopic analysis) to show the Pearl-Manuscript to be a more complex piece of material, visual, and textual art than previously understood. By connecting the manuscript’s construction to the intricate language in the texts, Bahr suggests new ways to understand both what poetry is and what poetry can do. Arthur Bahr is professor of literature and MacVicar Faculty Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London, also published by the University of Chicago Press. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

This episode features a conversation with the inspiring Dr. Veronica House, whose book Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (Utah State University Press, 2025) explores how writing takes shape within community networks. House brings a generous scholarly voice to questions of writing, community partnership, and meaningful collaboration, and this episode offers a chance to hear how her ideas grew from years of work alongside the people who shaped the project. From Dr. House’s faculty bio:  Veronica House is Associate Professor of the Practice and Director of the Writing Center at Boston College. She is the author of Local Organic: Food Rhetorics and Community Writing for Impact (2025) and Medea's Chorus: Myth and 20th Century Women's Poetry Since 1950 (2014). Veronica's recent teaching, community work, and scholarship focus on food movements, community-engaged writing, and writing as a force for social change. Veronica is Founding Director of the Conference on Community Writing and Founding Executive Director of the Coalition for Community Writing. She consults with faculty at colleges and universities across the country to design community-engaged courses and programs. Veronica is recipient of Campus Compact's Engaged Scholar Award; University of Colorado's Women Who Make A Difference Award; and numerous teaching awards. She serves as Consulting Editor of the Community Literacy Journal. ABOUT THE BOOK: In Local Organic, Veronica House explores ways to collaboratively build resilient local food systems and coalitions across disciplines and communities. Framed by a study of language, power, and food both nationally and in Boulder, Colorado, the book offers teachers, organizers, activists, and scholars ideas and examples for building interdisciplinary and intercommunity coalitional ecologies through writing in a methodology for engagement that the author calls ecological community writing. Based on more than a decade of research, teaching, writing, and project-building with undergraduate writing students and project partners, House theorizes how work to encourage local community-based writing becomes an ecological thread connecting things, ideas, and people. Local Organic is a book about collaboratively building community-derived definitions for resilient local food systems and how faculty and students can work to ethically partner with local communities using distributed definition building.Local Organic offers writing and rhetoric faculty and graduate students an ecological methodology to produce, teach, and theorize writing to help communities engage with a wide array of social issues and to work toward individual and community-level impacts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Waka poetry was all the rage in tenth-century, courtly Japan. Every educated person composed it, emperors and consorts sponsored it, and societal interest in it was at an all-time high. Poets, Patrons, and the Public: Poetry as Cultural Phenomenon in Courtly Japan (Brill, 2025) offers an unprecedentedly broad and vivid portrayal of this season of literary flourishing, revealing the multitude of factors that contributed to it, as well as the social, political, and cultural reasons behind waka’s rise.Deftly combining sociological theory and social and intellectual history with insightful readings of a wealth of primary texts—some never before discussed in English—the book is both a history of waka in the Heian period and a study of Heian court society through the lens of waka. Gian Piero Persiani is Assistant Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Jingyi Li is an assistant professor of Japanese Studies at Occidental College, Los Angeles. She is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century Japan. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity's fundamental unity and common fate. Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (U Texas Press, 2025) by Dr. Shiben Banerji recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period's most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Dr. Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects. 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

This is an unabridged bilingual, fully annotated edition of Tullia d’Aragona’s epic poem The Wretch. This mid-century epic reflects the many historical and religious changes taking place in the first half of the sixteenth century in Europe and the burgeoning literary debates following the publication of another Italian epic poem, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The Wretch recounts the adventures of Guerrino, a nobleman captured by pirates as an infant and sold into slavery. His famous quest in search of his parents and his identity involves abductions, same-sex seductions, and skirmishes with fantastical beasts as he travels through Europe, Turkey, Africa, India, Arabia, and the Purgatory of St. Patrick. The poem occupies an important position in the development of the prestigious epic genre, the highest step on the ladder to literary recognition and fame, and Tullia’s work paved the way for the epics of other women writers in subsequent decades. Edited by Julia L. Hairston, with an Introduction by Julia L. Hairston, translated by John C. McLucas Kate Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Italian and Romance Studies at Duke University. She is a specialist of early modern Italian and European literary and cultural history, with interests in women’s and gender studies, performance history, and the cultures of diplomacy and reception. Her monograph, Tasso and Women Readers: Literary Hospitality in Early Modern Italy (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press) won the 28th annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Publication Award for a Manuscript in Italian Literary Studies. Email: kate.driscoll@duke.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Showing the political importance of play in postwar French literature In postwar France, authors approached writing ludically, placing rules and conditions on language and on the context of composition itself. They eliminated "e's" and feminized texts; they traveled according to strict rules and invented outright silly public personas. The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (2025, Northwestern University Press) is a comprehensive examination of how and why French authors turned to these ludic methods to grapple with their political moment. These writers were responding to a range of historical upheavals, from the rise and fall of French feminist and Third-Worldist groups to the aftermath of international socialism both at home, in the former Parisian Belt and in France more broadly, and abroad, in post-Yugoslavia Balkan states and elsewhere. Juxtaposing an array of case studies and drawing on cross-disciplinary methodologies, Aubrey Gabel reads three generations of the formalist literary group Oulipo, including Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet, alongside writers not traditionally deemed ludic--or sometimes not even conventionally known as novelists--such as the lesbian activist-writer Monique Wittig and the editor François Maspero. Gabel argues that literary ludics serve as both an authorial strategy and a political form: playful methods allow writers not only to represent history in code but also to intervene creatively--as political actors--in the fraught social fields of postwar France. Author Aubrey Gabel is Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University, as well as an affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender (ISSG) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and currently a fellow with the Institute for Ideas & Imagination. She has also published a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes on literary play and constraints, but also on bande dessinée and other comic genres. 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 in progress on posthumanist ecological engagement in the surrealist movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Exploded Views: Speculative Form and the Labor of Inquiry (U Minnesota Press, 2025) is the latest book by scholar Jonathan P. Eburne, J. H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. An experiment in returning to incomplete scholarly projects to renovate and reimagine them, the book stages a series of encounters with essays “suspended in process”: essays that Jonathan began writing but that didn’t materialize in their intended form. Fascinating, witty, and original, Exploded Views is a record of Jonathan’s intellectual curiosity in its rich idiosyncrasy—from the parasitical deformations of insect galls to the speculative science of “orgone energy,” from Leonora Carrington’s surrealist art and literature to methamphetamine addiction in the time of late capitalism, and more. It’s also a challenge for scholars to account for the many kinds of labor that make and unmake scholarship, and, just as importantly, an unabashed defence of "nerding out" as the humanities scholar's prerogative. This conversation brings together Exploded Views with the work of NBN host Alix Beeston, whose interest in abandoned and interrupted scholarly and creative works informs her recent co-edited book Incomplete. Like Exploded Views itself, Jonathan and Alix’s frank and wide-ranging discussion brings to the foreground the kinds of scholarly activity that usually sit in the background of scholarly writing, not least the communities, relationships, and environments that define intellectual labor. What does it mean, Jonathan and Alix ask, to be doing the kind of work we do as scholars? What does it feel like to do this work? What does it require or cost? And what might be the value of cultural criticism as an inventive, creative practice—or even, perhaps, a form of relational labor akin to friendship? The non-profit bookstore Jonathan helped to found is The Print Factory in Bellafonte, Pennsylvania—check it out if you’re in the area! Exploded Views is available now from the University of Minnesota Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

I’m excited to talk to Carlo Rotella today. Carlo is Professor of English at Boston College. His books include The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories (University of Chicago Press, 2012); Cut Time: An Education at the Fights (Houghton Mifflin, 2003); and October Cities (University of California Press, 1998). He has written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and Harper's. Today, we discuss Carlo’s new book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics (University of California Press, 2025). The book does two things. It directly reports what happened in a class Carlo taught in the spring of 2020. Carlo interviews students in the semesters after the class ended, learning what students were going through while they were taking your class, and also what stood out in their memories years later. The second thing the book does is offer hands-on lessons from a life of teaching. Throughout the book, Carlo discusses how to deal with a class that hates the novel that you assigned, how to reach out to a student who falls silent, and how to introduce the multitude of ways of being enthusiastic about literature to skeptical students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The average reader need not go far in a bookstore before, knowingly or not, they encounter authors who started their careers by self-publishing prior to achieving commercial success. Examples include Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Colleen Hoover, Anna Todd, E. L. James, Scarlett St. Clair, and many more. Such stories of self-made writers are compelling and seem more attainable to others with the accessibility of modern publishing platforms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Wattpad, Webtoon, Radish, Inkitt, Qidian, Tapas, and Swoon Reads. However, in Inequalities of Platform Publishing: The Promise and Peril of Self-Publishing in the Digital Book Era (U Massachusetts Press, 2025) Claire Parnell uncovers in her examination of the two most popular—Amazon and Wattpad—these services in fact perpetuate systemic racial, gender, and sexual bias against authors of color and queer authors through their technological, economic, social, and cultural structures. At a time when there is a real reckoning with the discrimination that has resulted in publishing opportunities for only relatively few privileged authors—who are often White, upper class, and male—self-publishing presents itself as an equalizer of sorts. Exploring that idea, Parnell shows that these platforms are not just intermediaries for information; they structure content and users in multiple, often inequitable, ways through their ability to set market conditions and apply algorithmic sorting. Combining original interviews, walkthrough method, metadata analysis, and more, Parnell finds that self-publishing platforms reproduce challenges for authors from marginalized communities. Far from equalizing the market, the new platforms instead frequently perpetuate the stubborn barriers to mainstream success for BIPOC and queer authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Babushka Phenomenon: Older Women and the Political Sociology of Ageing in Russia (UCL Press, 2025) by Dr. Anna Shadrina examines the social production of ageing in post-Soviet Russia, highlighting the role of grandmothers as primary caregivers due to men’s traditional estrangement from family life. This expectation places grandmothers, or babushkas, in a position where they prioritise childcare and housework over their careers, making them unpaid family carers reliant on the state and their children. Dr. Shadrina situates older Russian women’s experiences within the post-Soviet redefinition of the nation, analysing their portrayal in popular media and biographical narratives of women aged 60 and over in Russia and the UK. It addresses class and racial disparities, noting how some women outsource family duties to less qualified women, and emphasises age as a significant but overlooked axis of social inequality. From a feminist perspective, the book explores citizenship as both a status and a practice of inclusion and exclusion. By focusing on older women’s rights to participate in private and public spheres, it discusses the new social inequalities that emerged after the USSR’s collapse. Despite prioritising others’ interests, older Russian women actively engage in economic citizenship, though their struggles for recognition are often excluded from formal economy and politics. 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

Rebind combines reading with AI-chat to deepen learning and simulate the experience of conversing with some of the greatest scholars and thinkers. With Rebind, you can read A Tale of Two Cities with Margaret Atwood, Huck Finn with Marlon James, and Candide with Salman Rushdie. John and his team have recently launched the Rebind Study Bible, an interactive way to read, listen, and interpret the Bible with insight from scholars. As we head further into a world augmented by AI tools, Rebind is on the frontlines of embracing AI without destroying the art of deep, contemplative engagement. To give so insight into how Rebind is marrying scholarship with AI tools, I’m thrilled today to have John Kaag on the podcast. For a free 7-day trial, visit this link John Kaag is an American philosopher and chair and professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is co-founder of Rebind Publishing. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies