NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb

Garnett Kilberg Cohen’s 4th story collection is about people of all kinds who confront past failures, previous mistakes, or moments they wish they could do over. A man recalls a fall that changed his family’s life, a woman thinks about an abortion that went bad, an aging hippie confronts the death of his best friend – these are detailed, well-told, poignant stories that will stay with you.

Mrs. Lowe-Porter is a fictional retelling of the life of the author’s grandmother-in-law, who sidestepped the boundaries placed on women of the early 20th century to spend over three decades translating the books and stories of literary giant, Thomas Mann. Lowe-Porter’s translations led to worldwide acclaim that earned Mann the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, but she dreamed of being a published author in her own right and struggled to find her own voice.

Cynthia Sylvester's The Half-White Album (University of New Mexico Press 2023) is a collection of stories, flash fiction, and poems revolving around the journey of a travelling band, The Covers.

Nadia is a young Bosnian refugee who has lost everyone she’s loved. In 1997 she gets into England on a fake passport and finds temp work in a shady office that might be doing something illegal. A new temp shows up and Nadia knows he’s from her country even though he says he’s Armenian. She can tell that he’s Serbian, perhaps the kind that hunted down Bosnians like her. Nadia sees danger everywhere.

It’s the early 1900s in an Appalachian town filled with immigrants, and Yelena is the first American born to her Old Believer Russian Orthodox parents. She can cook, clean, and take care of her baby siblings by age nine, but she loves school and wants something different that all the other girls, who get married by 13 or 14, and start having more babies than they can feed.

Angus McDonald had to escape from Scotland or risk arrest. In 1838, he contracted with the Hudson Bay Company to trade in the Pacific Northwest. There he discovers majestic mountains, raging rivers, and buffalo.

The Lost Archive is a collection of stories that delve into universal themes of resentment, betrayal, and redemption.Some stories are about friendship, relationships, lost chances, and the search for love, others are about mysterious happenings, mistaken identities, and end of life decisions.

If you were struggling through a bitter divorce from an alcoholic spouse, and unable to communicate with your son, and finally enjoy a night out where you drink just one more beer, and a couple of people on a bike ride straight at you while you’re driving into the entrance, when they should have been taking the exit, and it’s impossible to see through the fog….is it really your fault if you hit them and they die? Tandem (Andy Mozina) is about a Kalamazoo economics professor who bargains with himself about how much good he can do if he stays out of prison, to make up for the deaths of two innocent kids.

When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline founded the Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised, to earn their bread from the earth, and to come together as sisters and brothers. They built a commune in the British Guyana jungle where some lived better than they’d lived in the states. Then Jim Jones became more autocratic, sired children with other followers, and ordered his doctor to drug dissenters. On November 18, 1978, 917 people were murdered or took their own lives at his direction.

It’s 1905, and there’s a bounty on the heads of Ruby Calhoun and Pip Quinn for trumped-up crimes they didn’t commit in Kansas. When a wannabe movie producer convinces them to star in a moving picture about their exploits, everyone’s lives are put in danger, but Ruby and Pip refuse to back down in this charming, light-hearted series about 1900s life in the west, the early movie industry, and the bonds of friendship.

It’s 2016, after an attempted coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and because of a tip, the police suddenly show up at the office of a young journalist. Nuray, her fellow journalists, and her visiting friend Adalet are thrown into a notorious prison. They’re placed in separate, filthy and horrifying cells, and Adalet has to confront the possibility of never getting out alive. Her Jewish boyfriend has already left Istanbul and is trying to get her to marry him, but Adelet loves her country. Nuray is alone in the world, but she has to confront the father who disappeared from her life and the soldier who wants to see her punished. This is a novel about regular people trying to live their lives in the aftermath of Turkey’s takeover by a populist, authoritarian leader.

A sweeping picture of family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel’s wife dies, leaving him alone in a snooty North Carolina senior community. Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her family, takes in the white child whose father killed her beloved niece. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while his son guards the bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut about race relations, land use, history, and memory.

Lorna is a social worker who helps countless depressed and disturbed patients pull their lives together, but she can’t begin to communicate with her miserable 19-year-old son, who will barely communicate and speaks in passive voice. She needs to drive up to Vermont to see to her aging mother, now suffering from a possible broken ankle, and dreads being with her because the mother disappeared without a word when Lorna was a child, and only came back in her life after her son was born. Then there’s her ex-husband out on the west coast – Lorna’s job is communicating, but she hasn’t found a way to do so in her own life.

It's 1917 during WWI, and Rand Brandt is living with two dangerous secrets, either of which could destroy him: 1) he can grow any plant or tree, but everything he grows will die within days, and 2) he is gay during a time when the army does not accept homosexuality.

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.