NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Magical Realism October 24, 2023 Indigo Field Marjorie Hudson 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 3, 2023 Dry Land B. Platek 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 15, 2019 The Forgetting Flower Karen Hugg Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 26, 2020 The Rocky Orchard Barbara Monier Sitting on the porch swing at her family’s vacation house, Mazie sees an old woman cutting through the orchard across the way and offers her a glass of water. Before long, they are playing cards every morning, and Mazie, triggered by the place that holds many childhood memories, begins sharing stories with her new friend, Lula. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 29, 2020 The Moon Always Rising Alice C. Early At the dawn of the new millennium, Els Gordon finds herself adrift – she’s in mourning for her fiancé and her father, she’s lost the inheritance of her Scottish Highlands estate, her mother left when she was two-years-old but it her only living relative... Listen to Episode Buy Book May 22, 2020 Arroyo Chip Jacobs Two guys named Nick Chance, both with clairvoyant dogs named Royo, both inventors living in Pasadena, California – in 1913 and 1993. There’s some magical realism, lots of fascinating historical detail about Pasadena and southern California, and lots of eating. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 8, 2020 Timeless Sisters Shelly Hoover Janene, Cora, and Amadahy live on the banks of the river in a small North Carolina town, but they live centuries apart. Janene, a modern-day high school teacher, loses her career and identity in the face of a devastating disease. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 1, 2020 Reinhardt's Garden Mark Haber Ten men have already died while searching the jungles of Uruguay for a reclusive writer, Emiliano Gomez Carrasquilla, who Jacov Reinhardt believes knows the key to understanding melancholy. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 15, 2020 Zahara and the Lost Books of Light Joyce Ruth Yarrow Seattle journalist Alienor Crespo flies to Spain to apply for citizenship as a descendant of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula during the Inquisition, in 1492. She meets a long-lost cousin and begins to discover her family’s history. A strong and self-aware woman, Alienor is also invited into the hidden tunnels of a fantastic library, which for half a century has been preserving medieval Jewish and Muslim scholarly books that were saved from the Inquisition’s fires. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 7, 2021 Harvesting the Sky Karen Hugg Botonist Andre Damazy undertakes a perilous exploration into the mountains of Kazakhstan to retrieve a sapling from a rare apple tree in the mountains of Kazakhstan. At great cost, he manages to retrieve a sapling, and brings it to his hidden greenhouse in Paris. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 28, 2021 Jillian in the Borderlands Beth Alvarado Jillian can see ghosts – in the first story a dead child-bride saves her from the clutches of a predatory neighbor. These dark stories introduce faith healers, talking animals, and spirits of the dead. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 9, 2021 Nick Bones Underground Phil M. Cohen Shmulie Shimmer is the inventor of LERBS, the most popular designer drug ever to be created. Turns out that it leaves people brain dead, and Shmulie should be in prison, but his business partner took the rap. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 3, 2022 Constellations of Eve Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood Abbigail Nguyen Rosewood has created a swiftly mutating story about a woman who is either a loving mother, a famous artist, or a teacher. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Historical Mystery July 18, 2023 The Isolated Seance Jeri Westerson 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 15, 2022 The Lindbergh Nanny Mariah Fredericks Charles Lindbergh and his wife were out on the night of the kidnapping, but the nanny was home. After the baby disappeared from his bed, that nanny, Betty Gow, became a prime suspect, and her life was never the same. She was known thereafter as the Lindbergh Nanny. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 11, 2019 The Flavia de Luce Mystery Series Alan Bradley This book introduced the intrepid 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous manor house in England, with her widowed father and two sisters. It’s 1950, and England is still rebuilding itself after WWII. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 8, 2022 Under a Veiled Moon Karen Odden When the Princess Alice pleasure boat collides with a huge iron-hulled cargo ship on the Thames River, it’s split in half, and only 130 of the 650 passengers and crew members survive. It’s 1878, and clues point to sabotage by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which has already used violence in hopes of restoring Home Rule. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 17, 2020 The Anglophile's Notebook Sunday Taylor Californian Claire Easton, who writes a magazine column called “The Anglophile’s Notebook,” travels to England to do research for a book about Charlotte Brontë. She’s already in love with England, where her late mother grew up and where she plans to find some healing now that her marriage of twenty years is imploding. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 27, 2020 Death of the Chinese Field Hands Anne Louise Bannon When Anne Louise Bannon heard her husband, then archivist for the City of Los Angeles, speak about the how early Angelenos dug a large ditch (a zanja) to cull water from the Porciuncula River (now known as the Los Angeles River), her first thought was that the Zanja would be an interesting place to find a dead body. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 12, 2020 Road to Delano John DeSimone In John DeSimone's Road to Delano (Rare Bird Books, 2020), it's 1968, and Cesar Chavez is organizing the United Farm Workers to fight for decent working conditions and basic human rights, while growers get increasingly violent in trying to prevent unionization. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 28, 2020 Into the Suffering City Bill LeFurgy Sarah Kennecott is a brilliant young doctor who cares deeply about justice for murder victims after her own family is murdered. She’s not like other people; she doesn’t like noises and smells, she doesn’t understand chit chat, and she cannot interpret inflection or nuance. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 10, 2021 Devil by the Tail Jeanne Matthews It’s 1867, and a 20-something civil war widow has just set up a detective agency with a former rebel soldier named Gabriel Garnick. She uses a professional name, Mrs. Paschal, so nobody connects her with the former in-laws who are trying to stop her from receiving her dead husband’s estate. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 3, 2021 A Child Lost Michelle Cox Fifth in the Henrietta and Inspector Howard Mystery Series, A Child Lost (She Writes Press, 2020) begins in 1935, with Henrietta’s younger sister, Elsie, falling in love with Gunther, a German refugee. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 16, 2021 The Lost Shtetl Max Gross Imagine a Jewish village hidden in the forests of Poland that somehow escapes the Holocaust. Eighty years later, a young woman divorces her husband and runs into the surrounding forest. The town sends a young man to find her. He’s an orphan and expendable because he’s not that good a marriage prospect, but suddenly he finds himself in modern-day Poland. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 16, 2021 The Cry of the Hangman Susanna Calkins It’s December 1667 and London is still recovering both from the Plague and the Great Fire. Lucy Campion visits retired judge Master Hargrave and discovers that he’s been attacked and robbed in his home. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 7, 2021 Gone Missing in Harlem Karla FC Holloway The Mosbys leave their life in Sedalia within hours after six-year-old Percy loudly notes that his father’s boss has made a mistake in calculating what is owed. Percy’s parents know what would happen if they stayed. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 11, 2022 Down a Dark River Karen Odden n Karen Odden’s latest mystery it’s 1878 in London, and Scotland Yard inspector Michael Corravan, a former thief and bare-knuckles boxer, is battling demons, including his urge to drown his troubles in drink. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 25, 2022 The Counterfeit Wife Mally Becker Philadelphia, June 1780. George Washington's two least likely spies return, masquerading as husband and wife as they search for traitors in Philadelphia. Months have passed since young widow Becca Parcell and former printer Daniel Alloway foiled a plot that threatened the new nation. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Thriller and Suspense August 28, 2020 The Black Cage Jack Fredrickson In this well-written mystery, The Black Cage: A Milo Rigg Mystery (Severn House Publishers), it’s bitter winter in Chicago, and disgraced crime reporter Milo Rigg wakes up every night dreaming that his wife is calling to him from a black cage. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 24, 2020 Hour of the Assassin Matthew Quirk After a decade spent protecting public officials, Nick Averose has the unique ability to think like an assassin. Now he works as a red-teamer, who tests security systems to find vulnerabilities. His latest assignment, to assess the security of a former CIA director’s home, goes horribly wrong, and Nick gets entangled in a vicious crime that rocks Washington D.C. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 29, 2022 Iconoclast: A Sean McPherson Novel Laurie Buchanan Burdened by the pressing weight of survivor's guilt, Sean McPherson, an ex-cop, is desperate for redemption. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Eco-Fiction 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 3, 2023 Dry Land B. Platek 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 24, 2023 The Kudzu Queen Mimi Herman Kudzu salesman James T. Cullowee arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina in the spring of 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu. It can apparently feed cattle, improve soil, grow with no effort, be turned into jam, and cure headaches. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 20, 2022 Starling Sarah Jane Butler "Starling is 19 and was raised in a camper van by a strong-willed mother who cut them off from their community of fellow travelers. Starling, who has never gone to school or to the dentist, knows the nomadic life of trapping rabbits, foraging for food, and getting kicked out by local police." Listen to Episode Buy Book October 31, 2019 Pigs Johanna Stoberock In her new novel Pigs, Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 30, 2019 Kickdown Rebecca Clarren Two sisters are struggling to save their land when a gas well explodes on a neighboring ranch in western Colorado, setting off a disturbing chain of events. This is a moving debut novel about family, land, and the preservation of both in rural America. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 15, 2020 Watershed Mark Barr It’s 1937 and rural Tennessee is still recovering from the Great Depression. The construction of a huge dam brings job seekers, fortune hunters, and the promise of electricity to the area. Claire, a young mother of two, realizes her marriage is over when she wakes up with a sexually transmitted disease brought home by her husband. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 8, 2020 No Entry Gila Green Yael’s parents originally emigrated to Canada from South Africa years before and have returned while mourning the tragic death of Yael’s brother. Yael, also in mourning, but busy learning everything from medic training to driving on the left side of the road, uncovers a deadly elephant poaching ring. After witnessing some horrible violence, she just isn’t sure what to do about it. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 23, 2021 Just River Sara B. Fraser The Otis River flows through the once bustling city of Wattsville, a few hours north of NYC, reminding the remaining residents of better days. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 18, 2022 What Storm, What Thunder Myriam J. A. Chancy At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 5, 2022 Speed of Dark Patricia Ricketts Mosely Albright works in a Mission house helping drug addicts, alcoholics and those who are down on their luck. The reverend has asked him to search for one of the men who isn’t capable of surviving in the freezing cold. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 19, 2022 The Displacements Bruce Holsinger Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements is a gripping saga about what might happen in a world in which climate change can wreak havoc on life, even for those who have everything. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 4, 2022 News of the Air Jill Stukenberg Immigration problems, climate issues, dysfunctional families, road barricades, and the division between haves and have nots play a role in this dream-like novel. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 28, 2022 Gravity Hill Susanne Davis Gravity Hill (Madville Publishing 2022) is the story of a small town in Connecticut grappling with the tragic death of three teenage boys. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Queer Fiction January 30, 2024 The Half-White Album Cynthia Sylvester 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 23, 2024 Nadiia Christine Evans 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 3, 2023 Dry Land B. Platek 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 7, 2023 Tell Me One Thing Kerri Schlottman Quinn and a friend are driving from New York City to Pennsylvania when she sees 9-year-old Lulu sitting on a trucker’s lap, smoking a cigarette. At the truck stop for her friend to score drugs, Quinn takes an astounding picture and then leaves, disappointing Lulu, who thinks maybe people will see the picture and help her. Quinn goes on to live the heady life of a successful photographer while Lulu is confronted with various kinds of abuse and dysfunction. Despite the differences in their lives, both women experience moments of great joy, and significant amounts of despair This is a novel about haves and have-nots, those who find love and those who don’t, how the AIDS epidemic fractured New York’s gay community, and the confusing world of art. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 21, 2019 Degrees of Difficulty Julie Justicz Ben Novotny was born with a rare chromosomal abnormality that caused profound mental retardation and seizures. He is severely limited but forms a tight bond with his older brother Hugo, who invents fun distractions and games that become dangerous as Ben gets older and bigger. Degrees of Difficulty follows the family over several decades as they each come to an understanding of how Ben affected their lives. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 5, 2020 The Red Shirt Corey Sobel Nobody knows why he chose King, but Reshawn, who is assigned as Miles’s roommate, refuses to talk about it. Turns out he’s also struggling to be something he’s not and focuses on his research about the school’s slave-owning founders. The decisions they make will change both their lives. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 18, 2020 The World Doesn't Work that Way, But it Could Yxta Maya Murray These compelling stories are based on recent headlines from before the pandemic crisis, when environmental regulations were overturned at breakneck speed and society had already started to become numb in the face of moral depravity and a lack of objective truth. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 5, 2021 Art Is Everything Yxta Maya Murray Written as a series of web posts, Instagram essays, Snapchat posts, rejected Yelp reviews, Facebook screeds, and streams-of-consciousness that merge volcanic confession with eagle-eyed art criticism, Art Is Everything is about a woman who has to grapple with being derailed. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Literary Fiction ​ 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 6, 2024 Mrs. Lowe-Porter Jo Salas 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 30, 2024 The Half-White Album Cynthia Sylvester 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 23, 2024 Nadiia Christine Evans 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 28, 2023 The Lost Archive Lynn C. Miller 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 21, 2023 Tandem Andy Mozina 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 14, 2023 Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown Annie Dawid 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 24, 2023 Indigo Field Marjorie Hudson 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 17, 2023 The Blue Window Suzanne Berne 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 3, 2023 Dry Land B. Platek 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Short Story Collections February 13, 2024 Cravings Garnett Kilberg Cohen 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 30, 2024 The Half-White Album Cynthia Sylvester 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 27, 2019 The Book of Jeremiah Julie Zuckerman Julie Zuckerman’s moving and engrossing debut novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah, tells the story of awkward but endearing Jeremiah Gerstler—the son of immigrants, brilliant political science professor, husband, and father. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 1, 2019 The Genuine Stories Susan Smith Daniels The Genuine Stories is a linked collection centered around Genevieve “Genuine” Eriksson, a woman with an uncanny ability to heal people. Her gift begins to unfold at the age of eight despite the lingering disbelief of her parents. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 14, 2019 To Lay to Rest our Ghosts Caitlin Hamilton Summie Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s award-winning collection of short stories is peopled with characters who leave home, return home, or dream of home. The stories alternate between sweet, thoughtful, and sad, all expressing a universal longing for family, friendship and connection. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 5, 2019 Grace: Stories and a Novella Dan Burns Personal and insightful stories about our connections to each other and the world, our attempts to weave the past and present into a meaningful future, and our varying ways of seeking redemption. Unforgettable characters encounter gorgeous landscapes, nasty betrayals, shocking technology, a heartless future, and a decaying city neighborhood. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 6, 2020 A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son Sergio Troncoso Troncoso fills these 13 linked stories with the struggles and triumphs of Mexican/American immigrants or their children who’ve settled in the United States. In a nod to philosophical perspectivism, the view that perception changes according o the viewer’s interpretation... Listen to Episode Buy Book May 17, 2022 Geographies of the Heart Caitlin Hamilton Summie Three members of a loving Minnesota family have a voice in Caitlin Hamilton Summie’s new thought-provoking novel-in-stories. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Global Fiction 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 23, 2024 Nadiia Christine Evans 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 31, 2023 A Coup: Turkish Trilogy Book 3 Phyllis Skoy 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 5, 2023 I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile's Dictatorship, 1975 Kathleen M. Osberger 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 23, 2023 After the Barricades Jessica Stilling 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 13, 2022 Compass Murray Lee "We can't all be heroes. Some try and succeed. Others posture and pretend. And a few--just a few--set off on their hero's quest only to discover that failure was within them all along." Listen to Episode Buy Book December 3, 2019 The Art of Regret Mary Fleming Trevor McFarquhar is haphazardly running a struggling bicycle shop, with few friends, little ambition, and an inability to form a lasting relationship. Then, during the chaos of the 1995 Transit Strike in Paris, Trevor does something horrible. Five years later, he gets a chance to redeem himself. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 6, 2019 Agnon Library of The Toby Press S.Y. Agnon (Translated by Jeffrey Saks) Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia (now part of Ukraine). Yiddish was the language of his home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine. Considered one of the greatest Hebrew writers, in 1966, Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 25, 2019 To Keep the Sun Alive Rabeah Ghaffari Told through a host of vivid, unforgettable characters that range from servants to elderly friends of the family, To Keep the Sun Alive is the kind of rich, compelling story that not only informs the past, but raises questions about political and religious extremism today. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 9, 2019 Make it Concrete Miryam Sivan This Holocaust survivor’s story brings up the angst she feels about not knowing how her own mother survived the war. And how much of Isabel’s inability to love just one man comes from the trauma of being raised by broken parents, also divorced? Listen to Episode Buy Book February 13, 2020 The Lost Book of Adana Moreau Michael Zapata The story of how a book ends up decades later in Chicago is interwoven with train-jumping, alternate universes, and the heartbreaking tales of displaced people. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 19, 2021 Song of the Sisters C. P. Lesley Everywhere young Russian noblewoman Darya Sheremeteva turns, someone in her circle of family and friends reminds her that she exists to serve a single purpose: to marry a powerful man selected by her male relatives and bear children, preferably sons, to continue his line. But after years in isolation nursing her elderly father, Darya questions whether marriage and motherhood constitute the best, never mind the only, future for a woman of twenty-five. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 25, 2022 The Singing Forest Judith McCormack Two children stumble upon a mass grave in the forest outside of Minsk in Belarus where the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, buried tens of thousands of innocent victims of torture. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 19, 2022 The Lamps of Albarracin Edith Saavedra The Lamps of Albarracin tells the story of Sarita, who looks back on her life before and after the Inquisition arrived in her town. It’s 15th century Spain, and Sarita is the daughter and assistant of the town’s Jewish doctor. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Mystery November 7, 2023 The Good Time Girls Get Famous KT Blakemore 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 18, 2023 The Isolated Seance Jeri Westerson 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 4, 2023 Charred: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery G.P. Gottlieb In Charred, the third of G. P. Gottlieb’s Whipped and Sipped Mysteries, her heroine, Alene Baron, has a lot on her mind. Chicago is in lockdown, a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, complicating Alene’s already hectic life. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 6, 2022 The Dead Won't Tell S.K. Waters “July 25, 1969 12:41am Hunts Landing. Acrid sulfur from the fireworks faded with the nighttime breeze. Dr. Theodore Wexler held up his glass-red flashes from the police cars on the Quad pulsed chestnut in the bourbon. Pulse. Pulse. The cadence matched his heartbeat, steadier now, settled after this disrupted day of jubilee.“ Listen to Episode Buy Book November 15, 2022 The Lindbergh Nanny Mariah Fredericks Charles Lindbergh and his wife were out on the night of the kidnapping, but the nanny was home. After the baby disappeared from his bed, that nanny, Betty Gow, became a prime suspect, and her life was never the same. She was known thereafter as the Lindbergh Nanny. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 11, 2019 The Flavia de Luce Mystery Series Alan Bradley This book introduced the intrepid 11-year-old protagonist, Flavia de Luce, who lives in an enormous manor house in England, with her widowed father and two sisters. It’s 1950, and England is still rebuilding itself after WWII. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 4, 2019 The Best of Crimes K. C. Maher Later, as his marriage crumbles and his wife takes their daughter with her to Maine, Walter finds himself more and more drawn to his young neighbor. This is a novel about family dynamics, growing older, struggling with loneliness, and forbidden love. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 15, 2019 The Forgetting Flower Karen Hugg Renia has built a secret nook to store an unusual plant whose blossoms make people forget just about everything. The plant belonged to her twin sister, still in Crakow, and it turns out that there are lots of people interested in getting their hands on it - questionable people with guns, and drugs to sell. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 8, 2022 Under a Veiled Moon Karen Odden When the Princess Alice pleasure boat collides with a huge iron-hulled cargo ship on the Thames River, it’s split in half, and only 130 of the 650 passengers and crew members survive. It’s 1878, and clues point to sabotage by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which has already used violence in hopes of restoring Home Rule. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 17, 2020 The Anglophile's Notebook Sunday Taylor Californian Claire Easton, who writes a magazine column called “The Anglophile’s Notebook,” travels to England to do research for a book about Charlotte Brontë. She’s already in love with England, where her late mother grew up and where she plans to find some healing now that her marriage of twenty years is imploding. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 10, 2020 The Botticelli Caper Sarah Wisseman Flora, an art conservator, is working to clean Sondro Botticelli’s world-famous Birth of Venus. She realizes that there are no notes from the previous cleaning and begins to get suspicious as she removes the frame and looks at the paint’s sheen. Then she sees a smiley-face. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 27, 2020 Death of the Chinese Field Hands Anne Louise Bannon When Anne Louise Bannon heard her husband, then archivist for the City of Los Angeles, speak about the how early Angelenos dug a large ditch (a zanja) to cull water from the Porciuncula River (now known as the Los Angeles River), her first thought was that the Zanja would be an interesting place to find a dead body. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 22, 2020 What You Don't See Tracy Clark Cass Raines left the Chicago Police force after a morally bankrupt cop nearly got her killed. Now she runs her own Private Detective agency. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 8, 2020 Saving Ruby King Catherine Adel West Two south side Chicago families are bound together by a violence-infused past. Ruby’s mother, Alice King, has been murdered. Her father, Lebanon King, is an abusive man who endured a terrible childhood. Listen to Episode Buy Book August 28, 2020 The Black Cage Jack Fredrickson In this well-written mystery, The Black Cage: A Milo Rigg Mystery (Severn House Publishers), it’s bitter winter in Chicago, and disgraced crime reporter Milo Rigg wakes up every night dreaming that his wife is calling to him from a black cage. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Dystopian Fiction October 31, 2019 Pigs Johanna Stoberock In her new novel Pigs, Johanna Stoberock has written a lyrical fable about an island that receives all the world’s garbage. That garbage, both physical and psychological in the forms of dreams and memories, is consumed by six enormous, voracious pigs. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 19, 2022 This Place That Place Nandita Dinesh A nameless young woman from This Place, and a nameless young man from That Place are stuck together when That Place, the occupying force, imposes another curfew on This Place. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

< Back The Stark Beauty of Last Things Céline Keating March 19, 2024 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. Everyone in town has a stake in the outcome, among them Julienne, an environmentalist and painter fighting to save the landscape that inspires her art; Theresa, a bartender whose trailer park home is jeopardized by coastal erosion; and Molly and Billy, who are struggling to hold onto their property against pressure to sell. When a forest fire breaks out, Clancy comes under suspicion for arson, complicating his efforts to navigate competing agendas for the best uses of the land and to find the healing and home he has always longed for. Told from multiple points of view, The Stark Beauty of Last Things explores our connection to nature—and what we stand to lose when that connection is severed. Céline Keating is an award-winning writer and author of two novels: Layla (2011), a Huffington Post featured title, and Play for Me (2015), a finalist in the International Book Awards, the Indie Excellence Awards, and the USA Book Awards. Her short fiction and articles have been published in many literary journals and magazines. For many years a resident of Montauk, NY, Céline continues to serve on the board of environmental organization Concerned Citizens of Montauk. She is the coeditor of the anthology On Montauk: A Literary Celebration . She lives in Bristol, Rhode Island, and New York City. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Inside the Mirror Parul Kapur March 5, 2024 INSIDE THE MIRROR (Parul Kapur, University of Nebraska Press 2024) 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. One sister is supposed to study medicine, but she is a talented painter, and other studies education, but she is highly trained in a classical Hindu dance form called Bharata Natyam. They live in a Bengali community in which parents choose their daughters’ husbands and society demands conformity. Jaya’s paintings and Kamlesh’s dancing could destroy their chances of finding a good husband, ruin their father’s career, and affect the family’s standing in their community. Jaya moves out of the house, an aberration not only affects her medical schooling, but also disturbs the bond she has with her twin. This is a beautifully written novel about family, art, British colonialism, and coming of age in a time and place in which women could not easily choose their own paths. Parul Kapur was born in Assam, India and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven. She received a BA in English Literature from Wesleyan University and an MFA from Columbia University. Returning to India, she worked for a year as a reporter for the city magazine Bombay, covering social issues, and culture and the arts. A journalist, literary critic and fiction writer, Parul was a press officer at the United Nations in New York and a freelance arts writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, New York Newsday, ARTnews, and Art in America during a decade spent in Germany, France, and England. Her articles and reviews have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Esquire, GQ, Slate, Guernica , and Los Angeles Review of Books . Her short stories appear in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Prime Number, Midway Journal, Wascana Review , and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct . In 2010, she founded the Books page at ArtsATL, Atlanta’s leading online arts review, covering the literary scene for four years. She was also a co-founder of the global voices program, showcasing a diversity of authors, at the Decatur Book Festival, formerly the nation’s largest indie book festival. She created programs such as visits to collectors’ homes and artist studio visits for members of the High Museum in Atlanta. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next