Lisa Swayze has been the General Manager at Buffalo Street Books for 8 years and will transition to becoming the Executive Director of the bookstore’s new literary nonprofit in 2025. Lisa is on the board of directors of the American Booksellers Association and the Downtown Ithaca Alliance. Laura Larson is the owner of Odyssey Bookstore. In 2019 Laura decided to return to her hometown of Ithaca NY to satisfy her life-long dream of opening her own bookstore. Now Laura enjoys spending her days talking about books, reading books and thinking about what to read next. Recommended Books from our Booksellers: Lisa's Favorites Cursed Daughters - Oyinkan Braithwaite The Bone Thief - Vanessa Lillie Wild Dark Shore - Charlotte McConaghy The Hounding - Xenobe Purvis I Want to Burn This Place Down - Maris Kreizman Laura's Favorites Calculation of Volume I-III by Solvej Balle (9780811237253, 9780811237277, 9780811238397) Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue by Yoko Tawada (9780811237871) The End of Drum Time by Hanna Pylvainen (9781250871817) January by Sara Gallardo (9781953861641) Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino (9781250338020) Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (9780593854280) Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (9781984820716 The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (9780307700155) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Sean Minogue about this play, Prodigals (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2025). When a big-city dreamer from a small northern Ontario city returns to his hometown to testify in a murder trial, he faces old uncovered wounds in his circle of friends and discovers that his missed opportunities are more than just regrets. Sean Minogue has written for film, television and theatre. His poems, stories and essays have been published in ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Shift, THIS Magazine, Full Stop, Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, NBN host Hollay Ghadery speaks with acclaimed Manitoba author David Elias about his new novel, Into the D/Ark (Radiant Press, 2025).  Rose Martens struggles with the aftermath of a terrible fire that has left her sons, Jake and Isaac, horribly disfigured. The boys have gone to live in an abandoned house they’ve named Bachelor’s Paradise, where they spend all their time watching American network television. Their father Clarence works day and night in his blacksmith shop, producing bizarre metallic creations no one can make any sense of. Martha Wiebe returns to the stifling conformity of the valley to discover that her brother Abe, a preacher, has abandoned his congregation to devote himself to the construction of “The Ark”, a massive and mysterious edifice whose purpose he will not divulge. When the first major snowstorm of the year roars into the valley, it unleashes a chain of bizarre events that the valley may never recover from. About David Elias: David Elias is the author of seven books, most recently The Truth about the Barn: A Voyage of Discovery and Contemplation, published by Great Plains Publications. It was featured in the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top titles for 2020. His most recent work of fiction is an historical novel, Elizabeth of Bohemia: A Novel about Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. It was published in 2019 by ECW Press, and was a finalist for The Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction at The Manitoba Book Awards. His previous works have been up for numerous awards including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, the Amazon First Novel Award, and The Journey Prize. His short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across the country, and in addition to writing he spends time as a mentor, creative writing instructor, and editor. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Brad Smith about his new novel, Billy Crawford's Double Play (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025).  Everything is legal – if you can get away with it. Billy Crawford is a hero. The star of the Rose City Rounders, the baseball player has been thrilling fans of the city for years. But Billy’s not as young as he used to be and his tendency to play hard is catching up with him. A string of losses for the Rounders puts his position at risk as the team’s owner, local developer Carroll Miller, doesn’t like being associated with anything that loses. Miller’s thinking of making changes, and not just at the team. When he decides to enter politics Billy suddenly finds himself facing an offer he can’t refuse. In this wise-cracking, fast-paced novel, Brad Smith lampoons today’s scandal-ridden politics and politicians. But among the laughter, Smith also shows us there can be hope, and even integrity, where we least expect it. Award-winning author Brad Smith is a novelist and screenwriter, born and raised in southern Ontario. Billy Crawford’s Double Play is his fifteenth novel. His 2019 novel – The Return of Kid Cooper – won the Spur Award for Best Western Traditional Novel from the Western Writers of America. His novels One-Eyed Jacks and Copperhead Road were shortlisted for the Dashiell Hammett Prize. He adapted his book All Hat to feature film, starring Keith Carradine and Luke Kirby. He now lives in a ninety-year-old farmhouse near the north shore of Lake Erie, where he tinkers, respectively, on his vintage cars and his golf swing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sarah Vogel was born in Auschwitz and liberated at age three, but she has no memories of being there and nobody to tell her the story of her birth or her mother. Becoming Sarah (Diane Botnick, She Writes Press 2025) grapples with identity, memory, belonging, and reinventing oneself. Sarah’s trajectory is filled with both happiness and extreme loss, and she finds love, friendship, and home, but the lies she invented as a survivor follow her through her daughters and granddaughters, each of them survivors of something. Diane was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, but always knew she'd wind up in New York City. Her first night in Greenwich Village she went to a double feature of Godard’s “Weekend” and Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies,” and her romance with the city began. For the next 30 years, Diane worked around, starting out in Italy assisting people like Jerome Robbins and Ellen Stewart with their contributions to the Spoleto Festival, then back in the City for the Dia Art Foundation, Isamu Noguchi, Great Performances at WNET, and finally, Workman Publishing. Along the way, she returned to school in pursuit of a master’s in creative writing at City College. Fulfilling all requirements but unable to pass the French exam (with a dictionary!), she was never awarded her diploma. However, the privilege of being mentored by Donald Barthelme and being appointed student editor of the literary magazine FICTION gave her far more than a diploma ever could. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The landscape of comedy has undergone a seismic shift in recent years with an increasing number of female comedians breaking through to mainstream audiences. Women are claiming high-profile roles as late-night hosts, sketch comedians, television producers, and standup stars. As they disrupt industry norms and transgress cultural boundaries, they have also become lightning rods for controversy, eliciting flares of anger, amazement, revulsion, or hope. Caught in the Crosshairs: Feminist Comedians and the Culture Wars (Indiana UP, 2025) delves not only into the work of feminist icons like Samantha Bee, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Michelle Wolf, and Hannah Gadsby, but also into the discourse surrounding their comedy. Author Amber Day argues that these debates transcend mere entertainment; they are cultural battlegrounds for larger philosophical and political conflicts, interrogating ideals of gender, race, power, and public space. We see conflicts over what should be considered scandalous or beyond the pale, who should be in the intended audience, what is appropriate behavior for which performing bodies, and what the boundaries of comedy ultimately are. Caught in the Crosshairs is an examination of how feminist comedy reflects the tensions of our times, disrupting established narratives and challenging traditional power structures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

With stunning lyricism, Somia Sadiq's Gajarah (GFB, 2025) tells the story of a fearless woman torn between two worlds-Pakistan and Canada-whose life is upended by sexual violence. Emahn is big haired, mischievous, and larger than life. Born in the Arabian Gulf, she spends extended summers with her grandparents, aunties, and cousins on the rooftops of Lahore. But tucked away beneath her spirited exterior, Emahn carries the weight of childhood trauma. When she marries and moves to Canada, she quickly learns the art of navigating multiple realities and compartmentalizing memories of the world she left behind, even as she clings to the stories of her home. She is resilient; she is driven; she is unbreakable. Almost. When tragedy strikes, Emahn must draw upon the deepest wells of her ancestral strength to survive, even if it means revisiting her gutting past. Braided together with prose, poetry, and mythical parables, Gajarah confronts the realities of forgiveness and justice, and asks what it means to belong to a land that so forcefully pushes one away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women’s cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team’s star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls’ chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin’s confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run (Hogarth, 2025) deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination. Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recommended Books: Marisa Crane, A Sharp Endless Need Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Aftertaste (Simon & Schuster, 2025) Konstantin Duhovny’s father died when he was young, and his mother is too anguished to raise him, so he raises himself, but not very well. After a sad breakup, he advertises for a roommate and finds a chef who becomes his best friend. Kostya starts to realize that although he doesn’t see ghosts, he can taste the food they once loved. He figures out how to prepare special dishes that unite people with their dead loved ones, and in hopes of helping people, decides to really learn how to cook. But he falls in love with someone who has an inkling about the afterlife and she wants to stop him from feeding ghosts. This is a beautiful but crazy novel about New York’s food scene, the most esoteric and expensive foods, ghosts, finding a soulmate, and losing one’s soul. Daria Lavelle is a speculative fiction writer. Her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, Dark Matters, and elsewhere, and her debut novel, Aftertaste, was published by Simon & Schuster (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025, and is currently being translated into thirteen languages. Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in the New York metro area, she holds degrees in writing from Princeton University and Sarah Lawrence College. She lives in New Jersey with her family, and can often be found in a coffee shop, inventing new worlds or distorting this one. When she's not writing, she enjoys opera, One Night Ultimate Werewolf, and Escape Rooms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Caitlin Galway about her short fiction collection, A Song for Wildcats (Dundurn Press, 2025).   An arresting, vividly imaginative collection of stories capturing the complexity of intimacy and the depths of the unravelling mind.Infatuation and violence grow between two girls in the enchanting wilderness of postwar Australia as they spin disturbing fantasies to escape their families. Two young men in the midst of the 1968 French student revolts navigate — and at times resist — the philosophical and emotional nature of love. An orphaned boy and his estranged aunt are thrown together on a quiet peninsula at the height of the Troubles in Ireland, where their deeply rooted fear attracts the attention of shape-shifting phantoms of war.The five long-form stories in A Song for Wildcats are uncanny portraits of grief and resilience and are imbued with unique beauty, insight, and resonance from one of the country's most exciting authors. Caitlin Galway is the author of the novel Bonavere Howl. Her work has been published in journals, anthologies, and media outlets throughout Canada, and she has won or been nominated for numerous prizes. She lives in Toronto. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Mo Melnick has perfect pitch, which didn’t help him in his career as a drummer, but he used to be in a rock band and now his job is sitting on the Jersey Shore renting out chairs and beach umbrellas. When the singer from his old band shows up and begs Mo to reunite for a final gig at the beachfront amusement park where they first started, Mo is skeptical. But Johnny Clay persuades Mo and the other band members that in addition to performing together again, they’re going to pull off a major robbery of the resort. Mo’s estranged teenage daughter shows up and is enthusiastic about both the gig and the Fun City Heist (Severn House, 2025). Mo hopes everything goes according to plan – what could possibly go wrong? Michael Kardos is the two-time Pushcart Prize-winning author of three previous novels: The Three-Day Affair, Before He Finds Her and most recently Bluff, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time, all of which have earned acclaim and starred trade reviews. Originally from the Jersey Shore, Michael earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Princeton and received an M.F.A. from Ohio State and a Ph.D from the University of Missouri. He co-directed the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for over a dozen years before moving with his family to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware in 2022. Michael played the drums professionally in his twenties as part of a band who were booked at a lot of clubs, slept on a lot of sofas— and accrued a lot of musical war stories. But he’s never pulled off a heist (that he’ll admit to). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

“Literature is pathetic.” So claims Eileen Myles in their provocative and robust introduction to Pathetic Literature (Grove Press, 2022), a breathtaking mishmash of pieces ranging from poems to theater scripts to prose to anything in between, all exploring the so-called “pathetic” or awkwardly-felt moments and revelations around which lives are both built and undone. An utterly unique collection composed by the award-winning poet and writer, a global anthology of pieces from lesser-known classics by luminaries like Franz Kafka, Samuel R. Delany, and Gwendolyn Brooks to up-and-coming writers that examine pathos and feeling, giving a well-timed rehab to the word “pathetic”. Hal Coase is a PhD candidate at La Sapienza, University of Rome. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a fun-house mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Yvonne Blomer about her stunning narrative poetry, Death of Persephone: A Murder (Caitlin Press, 2024). In Death of Persephone, the patriarchal myth of the maiden taken, raped, and made the potent and sexualized queen of the underworld is questioned, altered, flipped. Instead, we have Stephanie, a girl of seven, taken and raised by her Uncle H. who is obsessed by her, tries to control her, to keep her, to have her even as she blooms out from underneath him. In poems both lyrical and narrative, a woman paints Hecate on a building, a Hyacinth Macaw flies overhead, a detective bumbles from crime to crime. This is a city with a vast underground where bats hang and paperwhites bloom, a city where men still rule. Who sees what, who will pay, and who will survive in this ancient story altered at the core? About Yvonne Blomer: Yvonne Blomer is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections The Last Show on Earth (Caitlin Press, 2022) and As if a Raven (Palimpsest Press, 2015) as well as the travel memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur (Palimpsest Press, 2017). Blomer served as the city of Victoria poet laureate from 2015 to 2018. Through poetry, she has raised awareness for the plight of the Pacific Ocean and its ecology. She is the creator and editor of Refugium: Poems for the Pacific (Caitlin Press, 2017), the first in a trilogy of water-based poetry anthologies that was followed by Sweet Water: Poems for the Watershed (Caitlin Press, 2020). She was the Artistic Director for the weekly Planet Earth Poetry series and edited the anthology Poems for Planet Earth. Yvonne recently edited Hologram: Homage to P.K. Page (Caitlin Press, 2023). She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the Montreal Poetry Prize and the Troubadour International Poetry Prize and won the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Prize for Death of Persephone. She has performed at reading series and festivals in cities across the country and has had poems published in Canada, the UK and Japan. Yvonne lives, works and raises her family on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Sarah Cartell, who grew up in a White Supremacist family controlled by a violent grandfather who preaches hate and violence, learns from books and a kind librarian that there’s another way to see the world. In White: A Novel (RE: Books 2024), Aviva Rubin’s protagonist starts researching her family’s history of intolerance and learns about a grandmother and aunt who ran away. She manages to get into college in Montreal, but rather than focusing on her studies, decides to infiltrate a Neo-Nazi gang and stop the hate crimes before they happen. The duplicity and other factors chip away at Sarah’s sanity until she ends up in a psychiatric ward wondering if she’ll ever escape the hate. Aviva Rubin is a Toronto-based writer of memoir, essays and social commentary. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Toronto Life and Zoomer as well as numerous anthologies. She wrote a memoir, Lost and Found in Lymphomaland, that tracks her harrowing and funny trip (she doesn’t like the word journey) through a cancer diagnosis and treatment. WHITE is her debut novel. In her so-called spare time, Aviva bakes cookies, runs, argues and commiserates about the world with her super-senior parents, and passes somewhat informed judgement. She is the mom of two young adult sons who have math and science skills that seem to have bypassed her. For more information about Aviva, visit her website here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Following a young woman over the course of one outrageous and insufferable downtown dinner party at the home of her estranged best friends—an artist and curator couple, whom she now realizes stands for everything she detests—Happiness and Love (Scribner, 2025) is a piercing debut novel about brazen materialism, self-obsession, and the empty careerism of so-called cultural elites.Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well. Zoe Dubno is a writer from New York. She attended Oberlin College and has an MFA from Rutgers University, Newark. Her writing has appeared in Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The Nation, Vogue, and elsewhere. Happiness and Love is her first novel. Recommended Books: Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

As the Sami community (Norway) struggles to protect ancestral lands from the building of a damn in 1979, Oslo detective Hans Sorensen arrives in the north of the country to investigate sabotage on a damn. Then a body is discovered, and Sorensen has to delve into his own past and heritage. He is Sami but no longer immersed in the culture, and Sorensen is also mourning the recent death of his wife, so he’s hesitant to return to his hometown. He ends up following the trail of two women, a journalist and a musician, and discovers the writings of a relative, a real-life Sami author who wrote about his struggle to survive. If the Owl Calls (Sharon White, WTAW Press 2025) is a fascinating mystery filled with Norwegian and Sami history, about identity and memory. Sharon White is an award-winning author whose work spans nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. She has written extensively about nature, place, and memory, bringing a lyrical and reflective voice to her storytelling. Her books include Vanished Gardens, the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction winner; Boiling Lake, winner of the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction; and Minato Sketches, a Rosemary Daniell Prize winner. White received her BA in English Literature from Colby College and spent a year studying at Manchester College, Oxford University. She has an MFA from Goddard College, where she was a member of the first class of graduates in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s innovative program. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Denver. An Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University, White has dedicated her career to writing and teaching. A passionate traveler, she draws inspiration from diverse landscapes and cultures. In Scandinavia she researched the life of Danish painter Emilie Demant Hatt, and in 2019, as an artist-in-residence in Dunedin, New Zealand, she immersed in the region’s literary and artistic culture. She has also taught creative writing at Temple University Japan. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Scott Masker. When not working or traveling, she loves to garden and take walks around the city. She also enjoys skiing and biking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In Lonely Crowds (Little, Brown and Co., 2025) Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl's school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria's orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world. While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation. Ruth and Maria's decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead. Stephanie Wambugu was born in Mombasa, Kenya and grew up in Rhode Island. She lives and works in New York. Stephanie is an editor at Joyland magazine. Recommended Books: Do Everything in the Dark, Gary Indiana Sula, Toni Morrison Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Ann Cavlovic about her new novel, Count on Me (Guernica Editions, 2025).  Count on Me exposes how a family can fracture when aging parents grow frail and debts from the past resurface. Tia is raising a baby when her older brother Tristan gradually takes over their ailing parents’ bank account, house, and medical decisions. Through a web of complex family dynamics, Tia uncovers the disaster left by Tristan’s meddling in their parents’ lives. As Tia tries to set things straight, she confronts how money and love were entangled in her family, and whether her own mothering now goes to opposite extremes. Told in an intelligent and hopeful voice, this is a story about sibling rivalry, elder abuse, how life can become transactional, and how we come to feel entitled to someone else’s money. About Ann Cavlovic: Ann Cavlovic lives in Western Quebec where she writes fiction and essays. Her work has appeared in Canadian Architect, CBC First Person, Event, The Fiddlehead, The Globe and Mail, Grain, PRISM international, Room, SubTerrain, the anthology This Place a Stranger (Caitlin Press), Today’s Parent, and elsewhere. Her writing has been listed for various literary prizes and awards, including winning the 2017 Little Bird Writing Contest. Her stage play Emissions: A Climate Comedy won “Best in Fest” at the 2013 Ottawa Fringe festival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Despite the long-held perception that medieval and early modern women were as quiet, pious, and obedient as society expected them to be, the truth is more complex. The Bailiff’s Wife (Cuidono Press, 2025) builds on a historical event recorded in a seventeenth-century English broadsheet to create a picture of a society in flux, the result of far-reaching political and religious changes that found expression in the English Civil War and its aftermath, the Restoration of King Charles II. Sarah Kidd, a woman whose husband has gone missing, along with the small fortune with which he intended to support her and their infant son, sets out—defying the demands of social convention—to find out what happened to her missing Nathaniel. She tracks him to the Cotswold village of Chalfont St. James, where despite relentless hounding, the local constable and magistrate refuse her requests for an exhumation of the body discovered in the village three years before and never identified. After annoying pretty much everyone in town by her refusal to take no for an answer, Sarah finds support from the unlikely combination of Frances Bright, a relatively well-off Quaker widow with two daughters, and Arthur Brunskill, the local vicar whose Puritan religious sympathies have fallen out of favor with the Restoration. As the tale unfolds, it develops into a classic murder mystery. Someone in Chalfont St. James caused the death of Nathaniel Kidd, and Sarah will not let matters rest until she sees the killer brought to justice. And this small, insular setting turns out to harbor plenty of suspects anxious to avoid drawing notice to themselves … Maren Halvorsen is a historian of medieval and early modern Europe and lifelong writer of fiction. The Bailiff’s Wife is her debut novel. C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book, Song of the Steadfast, appeared in 2025. Maren's website here Cuidono Press's website here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature