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NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb
Literary Fiction
August 20, 2018
Among the Lesser Gods
Margo Catts
When her grandmother writes to ask Elena to come and babysit for two children whose mother is "gone," Elena accepts with hopes that she can put off making any real decisions about her future. Through her grandmother's stories, Elena starts to understand her father's remoteness, and as the children she babysits become more attached to her, she starts to understand herself.
September 6, 2018
Underground Fugue
Margot Singer
The novel intertwines the lives of four people, each one of whom is grappling in some way with loss, fear, and betrayal. Esther, the main character, is in London to care for her dying mother and to escape from the breakdown of her marriage.
November 13, 2018
A Terrible Country
Keith Gessen
The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip ticket, hockey games, and his old bedroom with free WiFi in exchange for taking care of their aging grandmother.
September 14, 2018
Everything Here is Beautiful
Mira T. Lee
In her first novel, Everything Here is Beautiful (Pamela Dorman Books, 2018), author Mira T. Lee delves into the sometimes troubled but always compelling life of Lucia from the perspectives of her older sister Miranda, her husband, Yonah, and the father of her child, Manny.
November 16, 2018
The Past is Never
Tiffany Quay Tyson
It’s a hot August day in 1976, the sun beats down in the Mississippi Delta, and three siblings go swimming in the old, forbidden rock quarry. Everyone knows that something evil and unspeakable once happened there. The youngest child disappears, the quarry is drained, and news of the missing child spreads.
November 19, 2018
The Promise of Pierson Orchard
Kate Brandes
How do families decide when financial relief outweighs the risks of drilling for natural gas on their land? In Kate Brandes' novel Promise of Pierson Orchard, a big energy company comes to Minden, Pennsylvania and hires the long-estranged brother of orchard owner Jack Pierson.
December 3, 2018
Start Without Me
Joshua Max Feldman
In candid, witty, and often funny, razor-sharp dialogue, Feldman confronts the fall-out from excessive drinking, mental illness, childhood trauma, drugs, adultery, and nearly every other way a person can be wounded.
December 28, 2018
Made by Mary
Laura Catherine Brown
Ann and her husband Joel have been rejected as adoptive parents, and their plan to host and pay medical expenses for a pregnant teen goes terribly wrong.
December 10, 2018
This is How it Always Is
Laurie Frankel
In her new novel This is How it Always Is (Flatiron Books, 2017), Laurie Frankel tells the story of the Walsh-Adams family and how they grapple with the youngest child, the fifth son, who announces at age three that he wants to be a girl.
December 29, 2020
Dreaming the Marsh
Elizabeth McCulloch
A giant sinkhole begins swallowing an enormous swath of a marsh-like ecosystem that has been slated for development, along with parts of a highway and a large lake. The citizens of Opakulla, Florida struggle to understand what is happening as the land is sucked under. They’re also perplexed by un-erasable writing that appears on their new town hall. The sinkhole starts wreaking havoc with their lives and nobody knows what to do about it.
September 21, 2021
One Two Three
Laurie Frankel
The little town of Bourne made national news seventeen years before when its water turned green and people started to get sick. The Mitchell triplets were born that year, after the factory closed, the town began to wither along with its citizens, and their father died.
July 6, 2021
Ghost Forest
Pik-Shuen Fung
When her father dies after a drawn-out illness, the unnamed protagonist of Ghost Forest wonders how one grieves if a family never talks about feelings. The father is one of Hong Kong’s ‘astronaut’ fathers, who stays there to work after the rest of the family leave before the 1997 handover, when Britain returns the sovereignty of Hong Kong to China.
June 8, 2021
One Kind Favor
Kevin McIlvoy (1953-2022)
Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident in 2014, One Kind Favor (WTAW Press 2021) explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina.
March 30, 2021
Father Guards the Sheep
Sari Rosenblatt
In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, Father Guards the Sheep, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become?
March 9, 2021
The Man Who Loved His Wife
Jennifer Anne Moses
Peppered with Yiddishisms and salted with sisters, brothers, parents, children, grandparents, neighbors, and friends, Moses tells the stories of regular people faced with the problems of daily life but weighted with the 4000-year-old history of Judaism.
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