Contact mystery author and recipe creator, G. P. Gottlieb and follow her on social media. NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Women's Fiction April 15, 2025 Discipline Debra Spark Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The novel twists and turns through the lives of an artist and his wife, a teenager forced to attend a horrifying boarding school, the artist and his wife’s lonely daughter after their deaths, and a divorced art appraiser studying the works of the dead artist. Listen to Episode Buy Book March 11, 2025 The Immortal Woman Su Chang Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 25, 2025 Fine, I'm a Terrible Person Lisa F. Rosenberg The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 11, 2025 We Would Never Tova Mirvis Hailey Gelman just learned that her soon-to-be ex-husband was murdered in his home. Listen to Episode Buy Book December 24, 2024 The Case of the Missing Maid Rob Osler Set in 1898, Harriet Morrow is 21, supports her 16-year-old brother, and has been accepted as the first female detective at the Prescott Agency. 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 November 5, 2024 The Causative Factor Megan Staffel Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 29, 2024 The Waters Bonnie Jo Campbell Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 8, 2024 Blood on the Brain Esinam Bediako Today I talked to Esinam Bediako about here novel Blood on the Brain (Red Hen Press, 2024). Listen to Episode Buy Book October 1, 2024 Anyone But Her Cynthia Swanson In 1979 during her freshman year at Denver East High School in 1979, Suzanne’s mother was murdered by an armed robber while working in her record store. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 24, 2024 Down Here We Come Up Sara Johnson Allen In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 10, 2024 Songs for the Brokenhearted Ayelet Tsabari A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 4, 2024 Displaced Persons: Stories Joan Leegant Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 7, 2024 The Blameless Ryan Kenedy Virginia is a single mother of an autistic child with a disinterested ex-husband and a demeaning, dead ended job as an adjunct professor on three different college campuses. She struggles, barely able to get by with no end in sight. Then she learns that the man who murdered her father when she was a little girl, has just gotten paroled despite his life sentence. Virginia remembers the day her life changed because of Travis Hilliard and decides to confront him. She brings her gun. 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 Load More

Contact mystery author and recipe creator, G. P. Gottlieb and follow her on social media. NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Memoir May 20, 2025 The Murmur of Everything Moving Maureen Stanton Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. Listen to Episode Buy Book March 4, 2025 Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell Paul Lisicky Paul Lisicky remembers when he first heard Joni Mitchell on the radio, and when he found one of her records in a bin at Korvettes. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 22, 2024 The Adventures of Cancer Bitch S.L. Wisenberg It’s 2006, and S. L. Wisenberg is teaching writing at one of Chicago’s great universities and living a busy life when she’s gobsmacked by a sudden cancer diagnosis. In small but powerful journal entries, she bemoans friends who’ve died, expresses disdain for her body, worries about her future, recalls previous adventures, and jokes about the seriousness of her illness. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 25, 2024 Life Span Molly Giles 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. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 20, 2024 Secrets of the Sun Mako Yoshikawa Mako Yoshikawa's Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir (Mad Creek Books 2024) contains a host of essays about her difficult, brilliant father. Shoichi Yoshikawa grew up in a wealthy family in 1930s Japan, but his mother died when he was five, and he died alone on the eve of Mako’s wedding. 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 June 27, 2023 Set Adrift: A Mystery and A Memoir Sarah Conover When racing yacht “The Revonoc” went down in the Bermuda Triangle’s Sargasso Sea during a freakish storm in January of 1958, the sailing world was dumbfounded. The boat and five people on board, all well-known in the sailing world, completely vanished. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 6, 2023 Dreaming in Spanish Sara Alvarado Sara Alvarado tells the story of growing up in Madison, studying Spanish, and escaping alcoholism, substance abuse, men, and sexual assault by moving to Puerto Vallarta in Mexico. Listen to Episode Buy Book March 21, 2023 The Field Victoria Garza Victoria Garza begins her poetic memoir with her ten-year-old self learning that her little sister and cousin have died in a car accident. She painstakingly recalls lovely moments with her sister as they faced their parents’ divorce, their new lives surrounded by family members, their Mexican American culture and celebrations. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 4, 2023 The Wandering Womb: Essays in Search of Home S.L. Wisenberg As a child, S. L. Wisenberg worried about being outside, not being able to breathe, and Nazis coming through the window of her Houston home. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 22, 2022 Hysterical Elissa Bassist For two years author Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical specialists for pain that none of them managed to diagnose or resolve. Some of their treatments led to other medical problems but never relief. Then an acupuncturist suggested that she simply needed to take control of her voice, and Bassist was shocked when it worked. Listen to Episode Buy Book November 1, 2022 Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman Eileen Pollack Eileen Pollack covers her life in snippets or by delving into history, but the overall picture is of an extremely talented writer, a brilliant woman with a degree in physics and a long list of respected publications who is still somewhat bewildered to find herself alone. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 27, 2021 The Thin Ledge Daniel Shapiro Daniel Shapiro was a successful attorney in his early forties when his wife, Susan, suffered a brain bleed and a diagnosis that her future was uncertain. Stunned, and with three young children, the couple made the most of the few years that followed, before a massive second hemorrhage changed everything. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

Contact mystery author and recipe creator, G. P. Gottlieb and follow her on social media. NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Global Fiction March 11, 2025 The Immortal Woman Su Chang Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 25, 2025 Fine, I'm a Terrible Person Lisa F. Rosenberg The pain of 73-year-old Aurora’s divorce over thirty years before continues to reverberate – she’s eccentric, filled with schemes, and only able to function with help from her daughter. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 4, 2025 Isola Allegra Goodman Based on the true story of a 16th century heiress who is left to die on a deserted island off the coast of what was then called New France (now Canada). Listen to Episode Buy Book January 14, 2025 The Anatomy of Exile Zeeva Bukai The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. Listen to Episode Buy Book January 1, 2025 The Drowning Game Barbara Nickless Sisters Nadia and Cass are heirs to a company that builds yachts for the super wealthy, and both are excited about a commission that will introduce them to the huge Asian market. 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 15, 2024 The Last Whaler Cynthia Reeves After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 10, 2024 Songs for the Brokenhearted Ayelet Tsabari A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself. Listen to Episode Buy Book July 30, 2024 In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist Ruchama Feuerman Mustafa was born with a twisted neck and treated with disdain throughout his life. He works long hours as a janitor on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Isaac is a religiously observant new immigrant from New York who stumbles into a position as assistant to a famous rabbi known for curing the uncurable. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 11, 2024 The Maiden of Florence Katherine Mezzacappa At the end of the 16th century, the powerful Medici family demanded that before marrying into the family, Vincenzo I Gonzaga, the Duke of Mantua, had to show his prowess by deflowering a virgin. This is her story. Listen to Episode Buy Book June 4, 2024 Displaced Persons: Stories Joan Leegant Set around the globe in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, Leegant’s characters face loneliness, illness, difficult relationships, horrible memories, unfaithful husbands, and uncaring or dying parents. These are moving stories about recognizable people, all facing displacement in one way or another, trying to live their lives. Listen to Episode Buy Book May 28, 2024 Your Presence is Mandatory Sasha Vasilyuk In 2007 Ukraine, following the death of her husband, Yefim Shulman, Nina finds a letter he wrote to the KGB confessing the secret he’d kept for over 50 years. If it came out that his unit was wiped out and he was taken as a prisoner of Germany during WWII, he would have been considered a traitor to the USSR. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 9, 2024 No More Empty Spaces D.J. Green No More Empty Spaces (She Writes Press, 2024) opens with Will Ross, an engineering geologist, who shares custody of his three children with his ex-wife, taking his 1953 Cessna up for a spin. It’s 1973, and he’s decided to take his children to a remote area of Turkey where he’s been hired to analyze the site of a damn. 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 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 Load More

Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. < Back The Murmur of Everything Moving Maureen Stanton May 20, 2025 Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. She meets and falls for Steve, an electrician who at 27 is the father of three children going through a divorce. They are deeply in love, now back in Michigan close to Steve’s children, when he’s diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that has metastasized throughout his body. In beautiful prose, Stanton describes the medical challenges, Steve’s physical and psychological pain, and the heartache they face knowing that his time is limited while trying to defy the odds. This is a moving story of human fragility, resilience, and the different forms love can take. Maureen Stanton is also the author of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, winner of a Maine Literary Award and a People Magazine "Best Books Pick"; and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting, winner of a Massachusetts Book Award and a Parade Magazine "12 Great Summer Books" selection. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times , Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Longreads, New England Review and elsewhere, and has been recognized with the Iowa Review prize, the Sewanee Review prize, and Pushcart Prizes. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maine Arts Commission, and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and lives in Maine. When she’s not reading, writing, or teaching, she enjoys swimming (ponds, tidal rivers, lakes, and the ocean), foraging for wild mushrooms, baking, and haunting flea markets. www.maureenstantonwriter.com . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Murder, suspense, and recipes: anything but cozy. G. P. Gottlieb is a Chicago-based author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series and a host for New Books in Literature, a podcast of the New Books Network. The Whipped and Sipped Mysteries Charred is available and the series is now a trilogy! Wonder what's going to happen to Alene Baron and the gang in Book #4: POUNDED (2024?) Buy it now! Charred A Whipped and Sipped Mystery Even a worldwide pandemic can’t keep a woman like Alene Baron down... nor from finding herself in the middle of a murder investigation. While she has to get creative to keep the Whipped and Sipped Café going during the COVID lockdown, that is nothing compared to figuring out the real story about a dead body found in a burnt-out building in her neighborhood. Red herring might not be vegan, but it does seem to be the order of the day. Available Now! Praise & Reviews To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key. Latest New Books Network Podcasts Click on the Book Cover to listen to the episode. May 20, 2025 Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. . . . April 29, 2025 Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus Crime 2025) was selected as a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year. . . . April 15, 2025 Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The no . . . April 1, 2025 Memory Feather, who was born with a misshapen hand and was able to communicate with animals, looks back to when she was a child living with her newly divorced mother in a dilapidated hotel far from ho . . . March 11, 2025 Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. . . . About G. P. Gottlieb Chicago-based author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series I earned degrees in piano and voice during the past century (Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and New England Conservatory of Music), and over the years, have performed, taught, composed and administrated while writing stories, songs, and several unwieldy manuscripts. I also fed my family and developed lots of healthful recipes. After recovering from breast cancer in 2015, I turned to writing in earnest, melding my two passions; nourishment for mind and body and recipe-laced murder mysteries. I continue to host New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, and have interviewed over 250 authors. Also, I’m a graduate of The French Pastry School’s Bread Boot Camp and Chocolate Boot Camp. Battered, Smothered, and Charred (the first three Whipped & Sipped Msyteries) will be re-released by Anamcara Press in the summer and fall of 2025. Pounded: A Whipped and Sipped Mystery Book #4 will launch in February of 2026! Get Monthly Updates Be the first to find out about new recipes, podcast updates, and my latest writing! Email Sign Up Thanks for submitting!

Contact mystery author and recipe creator, G. P. Gottlieb and follow her on social media. NBN Podcast Episodes Hosted by G. P. Gottlieb Literary Fiction April 15, 2025 Discipline Debra Spark Debra Spark’s latest novel was inspired by the life of Walt Kuhn, who introduced Americans to modern art, and also by an infamous east coast boarding school that was forcibly shut down in 2014. The novel twists and turns through the lives of an artist and his wife, a teenager forced to attend a horrifying boarding school, the artist and his wife’s lonely daughter after their deaths, and a divorced art appraiser studying the works of the dead artist. Listen to Episode Buy Book April 1, 2025 Beautiful Dreamers Minrose Gwin Memory Feather, who was born with a misshapen hand and was able to communicate with animals, looks back to when she was a child living with her newly divorced mother in a dilapidated hotel far from home. Listen to Episode Buy Book March 11, 2025 The Immortal Woman Su Chang Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 18, 2025 Naked Girl Janna Brooke Wallack After their mother dies, Jackson Jones is too busy selling drugs and bedding young women to pay attention to his two motherless children. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 11, 2025 We Would Never Tova Mirvis Hailey Gelman just learned that her soon-to-be ex-husband was murdered in his home. Listen to Episode Buy Book February 4, 2025 Isola Allegra Goodman Based on the true story of a 16th century heiress who is left to die on a deserted island off the coast of what was then called New France (now Canada). Listen to Episode Buy Book January 14, 2025 The Anatomy of Exile Zeeva Bukai The Anatomy of Exile by Zeeva Bukai (Delphinium Books 2025) opens in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, when Tamar Abadi’s sister-in-law is killed by what looks like a terrorist attack but turns out to be the tragic end of Hadas’s love affair with a Palestinian poet. Listen to Episode Buy Book 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 12, 2024 Next Stop Benjamin Resnick Today I talked to Benjamin Resnick about his novel Next Stop (Simon and Schuster, 2024) Listen to Episode Buy Book November 5, 2024 The Causative Factor Megan Staffel Sparks fly in Megan Staffel’s novel, The Causative Factor (Regal House 2024), when Rachel is randomly paired with Rubiat, a fellow student, for an assignment in their college art class. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 29, 2024 The Waters Bonnie Jo Campbell Hermine “Herself” Zook is a healer who rules over an island in a swampy area of Michigan known as “The Waters.” People, including her three grown daughters, fear her, but her powerful herbal and plant-based medicines have cured the townspeople for decades of viruses, pains, and unwanted pregnancies. Listen to Episode Buy Book October 15, 2024 The Last Whaler Cynthia Reeves After losing their young son in a tragic accident, Astrid, a Norwegian botanist specializing in Arctic flora, decides to join her husband, Tor, at a remote whaling station in the Arctic, where he spends every whaling season hunting belugas. In heartfelt journal entries, Astrid describes being stranded in a whaling hut through the dark season of 1937-38. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 24, 2024 Down Here We Come Up Sara Johnson Allen In Sara Johnson Allen's novel Down Here We Come Up (Black Lawrence Press 2023), Kate Jessup’s mother lures her back home to North Carolina. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 17, 2024 Trust Me Scott Nadelson Set mostly in a remote cabin in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, Trust Me is about a divorced dad who drives forty-five minutes to work and back each day. Listen to Episode Buy Book September 10, 2024 Songs for the Brokenhearted Ayelet Tsabari A beautiful dual-timeline novel about the Yemenite community struggling in overcrowded immigrant camps in 1950’s Israel, family bonds, mother-daughter relationships, political realities in 1995 Israel, and a young woman learning to be honest with herself. Listen to Episode Buy Book Load More

Contact mystery author and recipe creator, G. P. Gottlieb and follow her on social media. 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

Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus Crime 2025) was selected as a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year. < Back Hall of Mirrors John Copenhaver April 29, 2025 Hall of Mirrors (Pegasus Crime 2025) was selected as a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year. It opens with a fire – it’s May 1954 and Lionel Kane is watching his apartment go up in flames with Roger Raymond, his lover and writing partner trapped inside. The police are sure that it’s a suicide. A couple of months earlier, Judy and Philippa attend a lecture by Ray Kane, one of their favorite mystery authors, and help him when he starts to look unwell. He’s a little off, newly fired from his State Department job because of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s purge of communists and homosexuals. A few months earlier, with hopes that he’d write about it, Judy and Philippa sent Ray Kane an anonymous packet of details about Adrian Bogdan, the spy and serial killer they’d been hunting for years, but they don’t know that Adrian was responsible for Ray Kane’s firing. After the lecture, they learn that “Ray Kane” is the pen name for Roger and Lionel, and Roger is the author’s public face because Lionel is Black. Lionel has two strikes against him; gay and Black, and Judy also has a few challenges; she’s mixed race, also gay, she has a personal connection to the serial killer, and the FBI is trying to stop her from learning the truth. John Copenhaver’s debut novel, Dodging and Burning , won the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, and The Savage Kind earned the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. A passionate advocate for queer voices in crime fiction, Copenhaver is a founding member of Queer Crime Writers and currently serves on the board of International Thriller Writers. He mentors aspiring writers in the Low-Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska and teaches creative writing and literature at Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his husband, artist Jeffery Paul Herrity. When he's not writing or teaching, he's watching movies—and listening to them. Copenhaver has a passion for film scores and a collection of rare scores he's been curating since high school. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. < Back The Immortal Woman Su Chang March 11, 2025 Lemai never forgets the humiliation of her teachers and the burning of books during the Cultural Revolution. She uses her position as a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai to find books, has one friend she can trust, and is tormented by her older brother. After being involved in the violence of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, she loses hope in China and raises Lin, her daughter, to pursue a life in the West. Both Lemai and Lin suffer from unnamed mental anguish at various points in their life and are both haunted by the past. In Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Toronto, they grapple with people from their former lives, and Lin’s attempts at erasing her Chinese identity nearly make her go mad. This is a passionate debut novel about the mother-daughter bond, Chinese cultural identity, and the struggles of being a foreigner in America. SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer, born and raised in Shanghai. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest. Her plays have been performed in various festivals and theatres across Canada. More essays and fiction are forthcoming in the Toronto Star, Electric Literature, Hamilton Review of Books, Ex-Puritan, Open-Book, 49th Shelf, etc. Su is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Canadian Authors Association. She devotes her interstices of time between writing and a full-time job to reading, playing the piano, nature walks, and wrestling with her children. Connect with her at https://www.instagram.com/suchangwrites/ . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown Annie Dawid November 14, 2023 Paradise Undone: A Novel of Jonestown by Annie Dawid, (Inkspot Publishing 2023), opens long after 917 people died by drinking cyanide or by lethal injection on November 18, 1978. It’s 2008, and one of the survivors, who made it out earlier that day, is speaking to a reporter on the 30th anniversary of the “Jonestown Massacre.” When Jim Jones and his wife Marceline found Peoples Temple in the 1950s, they wanted to give hope to the poor and disenfranchised of all colors. They wanted to live honest lives earning their bread from the earth. They dreamt of their followers coming together as equals, loving each other as sisters and brothers, and building a commune in the British Guyana jungle. As the years passed, Jim Jones became more autocratic, he bedded his followers and sired children, and although Marceline hated what their marriage had become, she still loved him. Even unto death. Annie Dawid writes and teaches online in very rural Colorado, where she also makes rugs and assemblages as well as plays tennis and Scrabble. For the last 7 years, she’s taught in the master’s creative writing program for University College, University of Denver. She received her Ph.D. in 1989 from the University of Denver’s English Dept. in Creative Writing. For 15 years, she was professor of English and Creative Writing director at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR. Her last book, Put Off My Sackcloth: Essays, came out from The Humble Essayist Press in 2021. Her first book, York Ferry: A Novel , Cane Hill Press, 1993, second printing, was positively reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and the Los Angeles Times . It won the 2016 International Rubery Award in Fiction. Her second book was Lily in the Desert: Stories , Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2001, followed by And Darkness Was Under His Feet: Stories of a Family , Litchfield Review Press, 2009, winner of their inaugural short story collection prize. In 2017, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook, Anatomie of the World: Poems . Along the way, her 10-minute drama, Gun Play, won the New Rocky Mountain Voices Contest and was performed in Westcliffe, Colorado. But most of the last 19 years have been devoted to researching, writing, revising, and searching for a publisher for her Jonestown novel, rewarded, at last, by Inkspot Publishing of the UK and published on the 45th anniversary of the Jonestown massacre. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

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. < Back Swimming with Ghosts Michelle Brafman August 8, 2023 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. Her best friend Kristy learns the truth about her own hidden addictions, which surface in a dangerous way and require the support of a former mentor. It’s the summer of 2012, and after the ghosts of family addictions appear, and a real derecho destroys the clubhouse and destroys the power grid for several days, both Gillian and Kristy need to come to terms with their past trauma. Michelle Brafman is the author of Bertrand Court: Stories and the novel Washing the Dead. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Oprah Daily , Slate, LitHub, The Forward, Tablet , and elsewhere. She teaches fiction writing in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. She’s worked as a coffee barista, radio advertising salesperson, and television producer, among other jobs. She got hooked on writing fiction while she was producing television because she craved another outlet to tell the stories she was gathering. Brafman grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, earned an MA in Fiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and in addition to writing, her grand passion is helping others find and tune their narrative voices. A former swim mom and NCAA All-American freestyler, Michelle has never lived more than a mile away from a lake, ocean, or river. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white. < Back What Passes as Love Trisha R. Thomas August 31, 2021 Today I talked to Trisha R. Thomas about her new novel What Passes as Love (Lake Union Publishing, 2021). In 1850, at age six, Dahlia Holt is taken from the only home she knows and moved into the big house to serve her two older sisters. They share a father, who owns the house and its slaves. On her sixteenth birthday, Dahlia gets to dress up in one of the sister’s discarded dresses for a trip to the city. There, she gets separated from her family, and meets a young Englishman who thinks she’s white. She introduces herself as an orphan without a family. It starts out as a lark, but her adventures could destroy those she left behind. Especially after her father puts a high bounty on her head, because she is, after all, a runaway slave. TRISHA R. THOMAS won the Literary Lion Award from the King County Library Foundation. Her first book, Nappily Ever After, was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature as well as being featured in O Magazine’s Books That Make a Difference. Her work has been reviewed in the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Her debut novel is now adapted to a feature film on Netflix. She’s had 11 novels published and continues to write from her home in California. When she’s not writing, she’s tending to her mini farm where she grows tomatoes, avocados, and lemons, all the perfect ingredients for guacamole and avocado toast. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next