NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb

Neighbors, friends, and co-workers stop by to offer casseroles to a family that’s grieving the loss of a six-month-old baby. The mother won’t be able to function for months, and everyone in the story faces a challenge: few jobs, an abusive father, a school bully, aging parents with memory loss or different values, a young Black man trying to fit into an all-white town. This is a small story of survival in a failing Ohio town during the winter of 2016, but it’s a larger, more complex story about how everything is better with a little help from friends and neighbors.

American Scholar is about memory, queer love, first love, and being gay during the onslaught of AIDS in the 1980s. It’s also the story of a famous Harvard historian and literary critic who had to hide his love affair with a man, and who ultimately took his own life. James Fitzgerald is in a happy, open marriage to a wonderful man, has a beautiful young boyfriend, and his first novel just launched, but a letter written by his first boyfriend, who took his own life, sends him into a tailspin.

In 1975, Kathleen Osberger, who’d just graduated from Notre Dame University, flew to Chile to teach in a Catholic school in Santiago. She was assigned to live with several religious women, and when she arrived, was told that they would sometimes shelter dissidents who were wanted by the secret police.

Olive Kersey is both penniless and alone at 37 – her brother and her boyfriend both died during WWII, her father not long after, and Olive spent all the years taking care of her ailing mother.

Until her unemployed husband Charlie volunteers to step in as team coach, professional organizer Gillian Cloud has also controlled the neighborhood swim club and its team. She’s a beautiful, much-admired part of the community, but Gillian is living behind a façade, refusing to accept the truth about her father’s alcoholism and philandering, suppressing any unpleasantness in order to present her well-known positivity.

Rebecca Cohen and her family live in Istanbul, until they lose all their wealth and are forced to leave. It’s also no longer safe for Jews, and many are trying to find a place to go. Rebecca’s father, once a successful businessman, now cleans a synagogue in Barcelona.

Set mostly in a clinic for migraine sufferers run by a concerned doctor and funded by a wealthy widow, Pain of Pleasure is about tending and being tended, striving and obsession. The widow hires a nurse to spy on the doctor, who is obsessed with a former patient. And the hurricane battering the church where the clinic is housed is a metaphor for the pounding, inescapable torture of relentless headaches.

It’s 1895, and Tim Badger, who is quite familiar with the inside of a jail cell, and his intuitive friend Ben Watson, who is Black in a society that is weary of difference, are unlikely detectives. But Tim was once one of the Baker Street Irregular urchins who ran errands and spied for the great Sherlock Holmes, and the two young men are trying to be detectives.

Meryl Ain's Shadows We Carry (Sparkspress, 2023) is a follow-up to the author’s 2020 novel, The Takeaway Men, focuses on fraternal twins Bronka and JoJo Lubinski, now in college and figuring out what to do with their lives.

When racing yacht “The Revonoc” went down in the Bermuda Triangle’s Sargasso Sea during a freakish storm in January of 1958, the sailing world was dumbfounded. The boat and five people on board, all well-known in the sailing world, completely vanished.

An automobile accident in front of a homeless shelter causes Lola, a dog trainer/groomer in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to renew her battle with the grief she previously pushed below the surface of her daily life. Ben, formerly an architect in the same city, has been abandoned by his family and is currently homeless.

Tania James' novel Loot (Knopf 2023) is about a young woodcarver who is ordered by Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore in late 18th century India, to carve a large wooden tiger.

Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico.

After her mother dies in a tragic accident, Anna cleans out her closet and finds a striking painting that she’d never seen before. She also finds a trove of letters from Stefan Terre, a name she’s never heard.

The story of middle-aged sisters Zara and Lilly begins in Long’s fast-paced, first novel in this witty series, Nine Tenths of the Law, when Zara recognizes a family menorah in a New York City Museum.