Discover fascinating magical realism author interviews with G. P. Gottlieb. Dive into NBN Podcast Episodes for magical realism insights today! NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Magical Realism December 3, 2024 Mirror Me Lisa Williamson Rosenberg Today I talked to Lisa Williamson Rosenberg about Mirror Me (Little a, 2024) Listen to Episode Buy Book November 26, 2024 Dazzling Chikodili Emelumadu Today I talked to Chikodili Emelumadu about Dazzling (Harry N. Abrams, 2023). 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 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 Load More

It’s the late 1990’s and Alice Stein is a grad student in New York City. As she struggles to study, write, teach, take care of the little girl from downstairs, and figure out her grandmother’s secrets, Alice Stein uncovers layers of secrets about herself, her family, and everyone around her. < Back A Joy to Be Hidden Ariela Freedman June 6, 2019 It’s the late 1990’s and Alice Stein is a grad student in New York City. Her father died the previous year, leaving her mother with 8-year-old twins to raise. Alice is in charge of looking in on her dying grandmother, and then is first, after the thieving caregiver, to sort through her grandmother’s apartment after her death. There, Alice discovers a purse with a hidden compartment. As she struggles to study, write, teach, take care of the little girl from downstairs, and figure out her grandmother’s secrets, Alice uncovers layers of secrets about herself, her family, and everyone around her. Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. Her reviews and poems have appeared in Vallum, carte blanche, The Cincinnati Review and other publications, and she was selected to participate in the Quebec Writers' Federation's 2014 Mentorship Program. She has a PhD from New York University and has published articles on Mary Borden, James Joyce, First World war literature, and postcolonial theory. Freedman’s book Death, Men, and Modernism appeared in 2003. Her first novel, Arabic for Beginners (LLP, 2017), was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and is the Winner of the 2018 J. I. Segal Prize for Fiction. A Joy to be Hidden (Linda Leith Publishing, 2019) is her second novel. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

M.C. Beaton: Hamish Macbeth Mysteries < Back M.C. Beaton Author of The Hamish Macbeth Mysteries July 16, 2019 Marion Gibbons (1936 – 2019) was born in Scotland and wrote several historical romances under her maiden name, Marion Chesney, and other pseudonyms (Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward, and Sarah Chester). She wrote the Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth mystery series (both adapted for TV) as M.C. Beaton. Although I've read a few Agatha Raisins, I found them less entertaining than the Hamish books. She got the idea for Hamish Macbeth while on a fishing holiday in Scotland. This charming series is set in two fictional villages in the Scottish Highlands, an area known for astounding landscapes, extreme weather, and honorable people. Except for the ones who are busily committing crimes. But in his lackadaisical way, clear-headed Hamish Macbeth always finds them. Sergeant Macbeth prefers to avoid any signs of recognition, including promotion. His only ambition, aside from walking his two dogs (and later a sort of domesticated wildcat that shocks everyone who sees it), seems to be to prevent Chief Inspector Blair from closing the Lochdubh police station. There’s a little bit of romance but nothing long-term, although M.C. Beaton published 34 books in the Hamish Macbeth mysteries. It’s worthwhile to start with the first in the series: Death of a Gossip (most of the titles start with ‘Death of’), which is set up like a classical mystery, but jump in anywhere to read about how Officer Macbeth solves murders while dealing with silly superiors, muddled/lying/confused villagers or visitors, and quick-changing, unforgiving weather. The weather is like an ongoing character in the series, sometimes mild and sunny, other times scary and violent. There are always plenty of possible suspects, and sometimes bad guys try to take out poor Hamish, but he always figures out that the beautiful dame is trying to slip him a mickey, or he manages to sift through the lies to find a kernel of truth. There are an awful lot of gorgeous young women, as is to be expected in a mystery, but M.C. Beaton seems more willing than most writers to let even the most adorable of them get whacked. The author is also willing to show Hamish’s flaws; his laziness, his disregard for higher-ups, and his conviction that he always knows better than everyone around him. His thoughts are sometimes about who is aggravating him or what he’s going to have for dinner, and he’s occasionally guilty of missing signals. Sometimes his missed signals lead to more murder. I love reading a Hamish Macbeth story during the summer, when violent snowstorms and blizzards seem mythical and distant. Previous Next

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. < Back Life Span Molly Giles June 25, 2024 Molly Giles remembers when her father came back after WWII in 1945. Her memoir, Life Span (WTAW Press, 2024) opens when she is three years old, sitting in the front seat of a moving van as her father drives from San Francisco to their new home in Sausalito. Well-known editor and author of four story-collections and two novels, Giles referenced the journals she began writing at age nine to create a memoir filled with moments and thoughts from her eight decades so far. The Bay area is the backdrop for much of her life, although she spent fourteen years teaching in Arkansas. She delves into family relationships, husbands and lovers, siblings and children, teaching and editing, and the struggles of a being a single mother before women were accepted into the work force. In brutally honest prose, Molly dissects her life with a critical eye, never sugar-coating her failures or glorifying her successes, of which there were many. Molly Giles’s first collection of short stories, ROUGH TRANSLATIONS won the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Four subsequent story collections—CREEK WALK, BOTHERED, ALL THE WRONG PLACES and WIFE WITH KNIFE, have also won awards, including the San Francisco Commonwealth Silver Medal for Fiction, the Spokane Short Fiction Award, and the Leapfrog Press Global Fiction Prize. She published her first novel, IRON SHOES, in 2000, and, twenty-three years later, published its sequel, THE HOME FOR UNWED HUSBANDS. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies including the O.Henry and Pushcart Prize (three times), and she has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Marin Arts Council, and the Arkansas Arts Council. Molly Giles has taught fiction writing at San Francisco State University, University of Hawaii in Manoa, San Jose State University, the National University of Ireland at Galway, the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and at numerous writing conferences, including The Community of Writers and Naropa. She has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Book Reviewing, been awarded residences at MacDowell, Yadoo, and The House of Literature in Paros, Greece, and has edited many published writers, including Amy Tan. Molly enjoys cooking, but she doesn’t love it, what she loves is reading cookbooks in bed, licking salt off her fingers after a light supper of Fritos. She also enjoys gardening (the watering part not the weeding) and watching the resident fawns graze what’s left of her lawn. Molly is a passionate reader and though she often forgets both keys and wallet, she never travels without a book in her purse. She lives in Woodacre, CA. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

It’s 1946, and a young army intelligence officer is awakened early by a gruff priest who needs another tenor for his church service. < Back Meeting Mozart Howard Jay Smith August 23, 2022 Today I talked to Howard Jay Smith about his new novel Meeting Mozart (Sager Group, 2020). It’s 1946, and a young army intelligence officer is awakened early by a gruff priest who needs another tenor for his church service. But Corporal Jake Conegliano has been invited to see a performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and his ride is leaving soon. The Abbe Luigi Hudal won’t take no for an answer, and threatens eternal damnation, until Jake says that he’s Jewish, but will be happy to sing in the choir the following week. The priest tells him that having a Jewish heathen in his church would be like bringing Satan himself to his door. As luck would have it, that’s the day Jake meets the love of his love and sets in motion a journey to discover both his own history and the history of a famous ancestor, known to history as the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. He was a Catholic priest who wrote the librettos for three of Mozart’s most beloved operas, and he was also Emmanuel Conegliano, a converso from a Jewish community in Italy. In rich detail, Smith weaves stories from different centuries and countries into the saga of a family that continued to be proud of its Jewishness despite expulsions, antisemitism, royal maneuvering, political intrigue, and wars. And even as the centuries progressed, their love of Mozart’s music is a binding force. Howard Jay Smith is an award-winning writer who recently won a John E. Profant Foundation for the Arts, Literature Division Scholarship, The James Buckley Excellence in Writing Award. Smith is a former Bread Loaf Scholar and Washington, D.C. Commission for the Arts Fellow, who taught for many years in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and has lectured nationally. His articles and photographs have appeared in the Washington Post, the Beethoven Journal, Horizon, the Journal of the Writers Guild of America, and the Ojai Quarterly. While an executive at ABC Television, Embassy TV, and Academy Home Entertainment, he worked on numerous film, television, radio, and commercial projects. He serves on the board of directors of the Santa Barbara Symphony and is a member of the American Beethoven Society. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back The Red Shirt Corey Sobel October 5, 2020 At first, Miles Furling plays football to fit in. By eighth grade he realizes that he is both gay and a football player. After an unsuccessful attempt at honesty, he hides who he is and puts all his energy into being a successful high school linebacker. Now it’s the early 2000’s, and Miles earns a full football scholarship to King College, which is known as having the worst Division One football program and one of the best academic programs In the country. When he arrives for the recruiting visit, Miles is shocked to hear one of the country’s top recruits, the brilliant Reshawn McCoy, taking what looks like an illegal bribe. 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. Corey Sobel is a graduate of Duke University, where he was a scholarship football player and received the Anne Flexner Award for Fiction and the Reynolds Price Award for Scriptwriting. He has reported on human rights abuses in Burma, served as an HIV/AIDS researcher in Kenya, and consulted for the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations. The Red Shirt (UP of Kentucky, 2020), his debut novel, was longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. He has written for numerous publications, including HuffPost, Esquire.com, and Chapel Hill News . He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, his cat, and his dog, and works at writing research reports for humanitarian organizations. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Lindsey Davis: Marcus Didius Falco and Flavia Albia Mysteries < Back Lindsey Davis Author of The Marcus Didius Falco and Flavia Albia Mysteries December 25, 2021 Lindsey Davi s was born in Birmingham, England, studied at Oxford, and worked as a civil servant for 13 years. After a romantic novel she’d written was runner-up for the 1985 Georgette Heyer Historical Novel Prize, she became a full-time writer. She wrote twenty delightful novels about an informer and all-around solver of problems (Marcus Didius Falco Mysteries). Set in ancient Rome, her protagonist is delightfully human, happy when his hair looks good and disappointed in himself when he screws up. I loved his courtship of Helena Justina, the senator’s daughter who becomes his wife and the mother of his children. Now Ms. Davis is writing about Marcus and Helena’s British-born adopted daughter, Flavia Alvia, who solves murders when she isn’t taking care of her busy household, supervising slaves and planning family gatherings. These are action packed stories set in a violent society, but I loved spending cold winter afternoons back in Davis’s Ancient Rome. Ms. Davis won the 2011 Cartier Diamond Dagger for her outstanding contribution to the mystery genre. She was honorary president of the Classical Association and is a lifetime member of the Council of the Society of Authors. Previous Next

A widow in 17th century Spain discovers that her beloved niece, Juliana, has suddenly disappeared. Juliana records her forced journey in the diary she received from Tia Ana. Years later, when she feels herself to be nearing the end of her life, she writes to Ana, explains why she fled, and tells her that she is a nun in the new world. < Back The Lines Between Us Rebecca D'Harlingue May 18, 2021 Today I talked to Rebecca D’Harlingue about her novel The Lines Between Us (She Writes Press, 2020). A widow in 17th century Spain discovers that her beloved niece, Juliana, has suddenly disappeared. Juliana records her forced journey in the diary she received from Tia Ana. Years later, when she feels herself to be nearing the end of her life, she writes to Ana, explains why she fled, and tells her that she is a nun in the new world. Ana’s response provokes Juliana into sharing her life story and demanding that Mercedes, a nun who hasn’t yet taken her vows, leave the convent. The years pass, and Mercedes, near the end of her own life, passes Juliana’s packet to her granddaughter with a demand that the mothers among her descendants keep the secret of this packet from their own daughters, only passing it to one granddaughter in each generation. Three hundred years later and we’re in 20th century America, when a college Spanish professor finds the packet while cleaning out her mother’s closet after her mother’s untimely death. She wonders if the secret is still worth keeping. Rebecca D’Harlingue was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and never got used to the humidity. Growing up, her mother read every spare moment, and her father often just had to read out loud some new passage from a book he was immersed in. Her high school English teacher inspired her to read on a deeper level, with some unexpected choices like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, and T.H. White’s The Once and Future King , which fed into D’Harlingue’s enchantment with all things Arthurian. She also loves languages, having studied Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, and even taking an ill-fated stab at Mandarin. She had completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in Spanish language and literature when she had her first child, felt reality strike, and went back to school to get an MBA in health services administration. After working in that field for a number of years, she quit her job to start her novel, but abandoned it, only to pick it up twenty years later, after having taught English as a Second Language to adults for many years. She lives in Oakland, California, with her husband, Arthur. D’Harlingue’s debut novel, The Lines Between Us , won in New Fiction in the 2021 Independent Press Awards, and was a finalist in Best New Fiction in both the 2020 International Book Awards and the 2020 Best Book Awards. It was also a finalist in the 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in Historical Fiction. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

It’s 1968 and 13-year-old Zach is about to become a bar mitzvah. That’s when his sister changes his life by switching his radio from AM to FM. < Back Escape Route Elan Barnehama June 21, 2022 In Elan Barnehama’s new novel, Escape Route (Running Wild Press 2022), it’s 1968 and 13-year-old Zach is about to become a bar mitzvah. That’s when his sister changes his life by switching his radio from AM to FM. Zach’s family lives in Queens, and he’s comfortable roaming the New York City subways, heading to the public library, the Metropolitan Museum, and all kinds of diners. Zach is in accelerated classes, smart but confused. He worries about his older sister at Columbia, the war in Vietnam, his grandparents, and how his parents escaped Europe during the Holocaust. He meets a cute girl and is beyond relieved to have his first girlfriend, his first kiss. He thinks about music, math, religion, drugs, and more than anything else, baseball. He doesn’t know when to stop asking annoying questions or irritating the people around him with his goofiness. And just in case there’s another Holocaust and they have to leave the country; he joins the AAA auto club and figures out an “Escape Route.” Elan Barnehama grew up in Queens, NYC, has lived in several places on both coasts, and currently lives in Boston. He earned an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a BA from Binghamton University. He writes literary fiction, flash fiction, and creative non-fiction, which has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Entropy, Rough Cut Press, Boston Accent, Jewish Fiction, RedFez, HuffPost, the New York Journal of Books, Public Radio, and elsewhere. Barnehama was a Writer-In-Residence at Wildacres NC, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts in Fairhope, AL. He’s the fiction editor at Forth Magazine LA, and at different times has taught college writing-currently at American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, worked with at-risk youth, had a gig as a radio news guy, coached high school baseball, and did a mediocre job as a short-order cook. When he’s not reading or writing, Barnehama likes running and walking urban landscapes, travelling to see friends, seeing new places, coffee shops, diners, libraries, and public spaces. He remains a Mets fan. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. < Back Lucky Boy Shanthi Sekaran January 14, 2019 An optimistic young Mexican woman gets pregnant while trying to cross the border into the states. An Indian-American woman struggles with infertility. When undocumented Solimar is detained by the state, Kavya and her husband foster and then fall in love with her little boy. They’re good people, the law is on their side, and it’s hard not to root for them, but we’re forced to ask ourselves - what defines parenthood? Is it the biological connection or is it the daily grind of feeding, changing diapers, and tending to all their needs? In addition to a mother’s love, Lucky Boy (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2017) deals with immigration, undocumented workers, the struggle between haves and the have-nots, infertility, survival, and love. Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Lucky Boy was named an IndieNext Great Read and an NPR Best Book of 2017. It won the Housatonic Book Award and was a finalist for Stanford University's Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her essays and stories have also appeared in The New York Times , Salon.com, and the LA Review of Books . Sekaran is a member of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, an AWP mentor, and she teaches writing at Mills College. She was born in Sacramento, is the daughter of immigrants from India, and has two older brothers, a husband, two young sons, and a cat. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back The Pain of Pleasure Amy Grace Loyd July 25, 2023 In Amy Grace Loyd’s new novel, The Pain of Pleasure (Roundabout Press 2023), nearly everyone suffers some kind of intense pain. Some find their way to the Doctor, formerly a respected neurologist but now director of a headache clinic in the basement of what was once a Brooklyn church. He experiments with different treatments for a wide variety of migraine sufferers but can’t stop obsessing over Sarah, the patient who suddenly broke off contact with the clinic and disappeared, leaving only a journal that describes her affair with a married man. The Doctor’s salary and the clinic’s costs are underwritten by a wealthy patron, Adele Watson, who, because she believes the doctor was in love with Sarah, is also obsessed. Mrs. Watson hires Ruth, a nurse with her own troubled back story, to spy on the Doctor. And the fragile balance between patient health and trust in The Doctor starts to crumble when a hurricane sweeps through New York, upending or destroying whatever is in its path. Amy Grace Loyd is an editor, teacher, and author of the novels The Affairs of Others , a BEA Buzz Book and Indie Next selection, and The Pain of Pleasure . She began her career at independent book publisher W.W. Norton & Company and The New Yorker , in the magazine’s fiction and literary department. She was the associate editor on the New York Review Books Classics series and the fiction and literary editor at Playboy magazine and later at Esquire . She’s also worked in digital publishing, as an executive editor at e-singles publisher Byliner and as an acquiring editor and content creator for Scribd Originals. She has been an adjunct professor at the Columbia University MFA writing program and a MacDowell and Yaddo fellow. She lives between New York and New Hampshire. Amy loves to get lost in music, dance wildly to wild music, walk long distances, often with NO PHONE on hand, just the sounds of the world around her as she moves, especially the sounds of trees (she’s made for trees). She is passionate about silence and solitude and kindness in an unkind world. We all have a lot of healing to do these days and she keeps searching for ways to achieve that for herself and others. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back Watershed Mark Barr January 15, 2020 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. Nathan is an engineer with a shameful secret who changes his name to get work at the dam. Everyone in this colorful cast of dog-fighting neighbors, beer-guzzling ex-husbands, and power-hungry employers is trying to survive in the mosquito-infested heat of a southern summer. Mark Barr has been awarded fellowships from Blue Mountain Center, I-Park Artists Enclave, Jentel Arts, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. Favorably reviewed by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist, his debut novel, Watershed (Hub City, 2019), was featured in the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance’s fall Okra list and Deep South Magazine's Fall/Winter Reading List, and named as one of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's "12 Southern Books You'll Want to Read This Fall" and one of Nashville Lifestyles Magazine’s "Four Fall Reads." Mark holds undergraduate degrees from Hendrix College and University of Iowa, and an M.F.A. from Texas State University. He lives with his wife and sons in Arkansas, where he develops software and bakes bread. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and would like to discuss it further with me and other New Books Network listeners, please join us on Shuffle. Shuffle is an ad-free, invite-only network focused on the creativity community. As NBN listeners, you can get special access to conversations with a dynamic community of writers and literary enthusiasts. Sign up by going to www.shuffle.do/NBN/join Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next