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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
September 17, 2024
Trust Me
Scott Nadelson
Set mostly in a remote cabin in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, Trust Me is about a divorced dad who drives forty-five minutes to work and back each day.
September 10, 2024
Songs for the Brokenhearted
Ayelet Tsabari
A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself.
August 20, 2024
This Room is Made of Noise
Stephen Schottenfeld
Don Lank is a newly divorced handyman who spots an imitation Tiffany lamp in the front window of a house and offers the elderly owner $800 for it. He’s shocked to get a check for fifteen thousand and returns to the house to give 95-year-old Millie most of the money.
July 30, 2024
In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist
Ruchama Feuerman
Mustafa was born with a twisted neck and treated with disdain throughout his life. He works long hours as a janitor on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Isaac is a religiously observant new immigrant from New York who stumbles into a position as assistant to a famous rabbi known for curing the uncurable.
June 25, 2024
Life Span
Molly Giles
Molly Giles looks back at moments of her childhood, her mistakes and missteps, getting pregnant at eighteen, marrying her boyfriend and having a second child, divorcing, marrying a second time but failing to find the happiness she knows she deserves. As the decades passed, she edited many well-known novels and popped out four story collections, two novels, and this brutally honest memoir.
June 11, 2024
The Maiden of Florence
Katherine Mezzacappa
At the end of the 16th century, the powerful Medici family demanded that before marrying into the family, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, had to show his prowess by deflowering a virgin. This is her story.
June 4, 2024
Displaced Persons: Stories
Joan Leegant
Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives.
May 28, 2024
Your Presence is Mandatory
Sasha Vasilyuk
In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR.
May 14, 2024
The Truth Against the World
David Corbett
The Truth Against the World (Square Tire Books, 2023) is a brilliant literary fantasy about a divided, dystopian America on the verge of war. Shane, a former Irish combat soldier with a murky past, wants to save his young friend Georgie O’Halloran, who turned his stories of Celtic history and folklore into a beautifully illustrated book.
May 7, 2024
The Blameless
Ryan Kenedy
Virginia is a single mother of an autistic child with a disinterested ex-husband and a demeaning, dead ended job as an adjunct professor on three different college campuses. She struggles, barely able to get by with no end in sight. Then she learns that the man who murdered her father when she was a little girl, has just gotten paroled despite his life sentence. Virginia remembers the day her life changed because of Travis Hilliard and decides to confront him. She brings her gun.
April 16, 2024
The Forgetters
Greg Sarris
Greg Sarris, PhD and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, about his latest story collection, The Forgetters. The stories are connected to two sister crows who sit all day and night on Sonoma Mountain talking about the creation of the world, human frailty, silliness, and suffering. One crow sister can only ask the questions, and one can only answer in tales about Native American Indians struggling to remember the stories that made them who they are.
April 9, 2024
No More Empty Spaces
D.J. Green
No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn.
Off to Join the Circus
Deborah Kalb
In Deborah Kalb’s debut adult novel Off to Join the Circus (Apprentice House Press 2023) it’s 2018, Howard Pinsky’s sister Adele, who ran away in 1954, as his parents said, “to join the circus,” is suddenly, 64 years later, in Bethesda wanting to be a part of the family.
March 19, 2024
The Stark Beauty of Last Things
Céline Keating
The Stark Beauty of Last Things (She Writes Press, 2023) is set in Montauk, the far reaches of the famed Hamptons, an area under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land.
March 5, 2024
Inside the Mirror
Parul Kapur
INSIDE THE MIRROR centers on twin sisters growing up in 1950s Bombay, who aspire to become artists. The family is still recovering from the Partition of India in 1947, especially the twins’ grandmother, who once fought for justice against the British regime.
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