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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
Literary Fiction
September 19, 2023
The Heart of it All
Christian Kiefer
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.
September 12, 2023
American Scholar
Patrick E. Horrigan
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.
August 22, 2023
The Orphans of Mersea House
Marty Wingate
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.
August 8, 2023
Swimming with Ghosts
Michelle Brafman
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.
July 25, 2023
The Pain of Pleasure
Amy Grace Loyd
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.
June 20, 2023
Under the Blue Moon
Joan Schweighardt
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.
June 13, 2023
LOOT
Tania James
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.
May 30, 2023
Our Lying Kin
Claudia Hagadus Long
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.
May 16, 2023
Hotel Cuba
Aaron Hamburger
Two sisters fleeing the horror of the Soviet Revolution and aftermath of WW1 are disappointed when American policy prevents them from joining their older sister in New York.
April 25, 2023
The Great Reclamation
Rachel Heng
In the 1940s, Singapore was controlled by the British occupied by the Japanese and comprised of rubber plantations and decrepit fishing villages. A timid little boy is the only one who can help his father, a fisherman, find a string of mysterious islands surrounded by teeming ocean life that will change the fortune of his family and neighbors.
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April 18, 2023
Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions
Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi’s novel Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories (Amistad 2022), is a moving and unforgettable collection of stories that span a lifetime.
April 11, 2023
Because I Loved You
Donnaldson Brown
Sixteen-year-old Leni O’Hare loves her horse, so when her mother tries to sell it, she rides as far as she can. It’s 1972, and she ends up falling in love with another horse-lover.
March 14, 2023
Take What You Need
Idra Novey
This is a story about family, the opioid epidemic in rural America, the rise of hatred and bigotry during the past few years, and the grip of creating art on those who feel its pull.
February 21, 2023
In the Fall They Leave: A Novel of the First World War
Joanna Higgins
Nineteen-year-old pianist Marie-Thérèse has dropped out of her prestigious conservatory in favor of becoming a nurse, much to her mother’s disappointment. As she begins her final year of study, Germany invades Belgium on its way to France. It’s 1914, and Marie-Thérèse’s world is upended by harsh rules and demands that students and staff spy on each other.
February 14, 2023
Side Effects of Wanting
Mary Salisbury
In Side Effects of Wanting (Main Street Rag, 2022), author Mary Salisbury spent nearly twenty years gathering together the pieces of humanity she saw reflected in the lives around her and distilled them into a poetically written, beautifully curated short story collection.
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