< Back Indigo Field Marjorie Hudson October 24, 2023 Indigo Field by Marjorie Hudson (Regal House Publishing 2023) paints a sweeping picture of multigenerational family trauma, Native American and Black history, and the earth’s vengeance on human pettiness. A retired colonel is stunned when his wife dies, leaving him stranded in the fancy, rural North Carolina retirement community he’d hated from the start. The community is located next to an abandoned field that hides centuries of crimes. The only person who remembers is Reba, an elderly Black woman who speaks to the ghosts of her entire family. Reba takes in the white child whose evil father killed her beloved niece, whom she doesn’t want to disappoint. The colonel mistakenly causes damage to Reba’s old car and unleashes a torrent of spirits, while the colonel’s son guards bones that have been unearthed in what was once “Indian Field.” This is a stunning debut in which North Carolina race relations, land use and ancient trees, farming and development, history and memory are all uprooted during a massive storm. Marjorie Hudson was born in a small town in Illinois, raised in Washington, D.C., and now lives in rural North Carolina. Her new novel Indigo Field explores the untold stories of the people and history of the rural South, hidden under the surface of an abandoned field. Her story collection Accidental Birds of the Carolinas was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Novello Fiction Award. Her creative nonfiction book Searching for Virginia Dare explores the fate of the first English child born in America. Hudson’s stories, essays, and poems have appeared in six anthologies, including Idol Talk: Women Writers on the Teenage Infatuations That Changed Their Lives , and What Doesn’t Kill You (stories) as well as in many magazines and journals, including Story , West Branch, Yankee , American Land Forum , and National Parks Magazine . She writes on topics ranging from pond fishing to Sufi dancing, from extraordinary dogs to English explorers, from Indigenous history to the life of the monarch butterfly. Her work has won support from the Hemingway Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers, and the North Carolina Arts Council, as well as earning the Blumenthal Award, a North Carolina Fiction Syndicate Award, and two Pushcart Special Mentions. A community-builder in Chatham County, NC, she has created two ambitious community reads, run a coffeehouse for artists and writers, been a mentor for at-risk children, served on the board of her local arts council, the board of the Black Historical Society, and the Board of the Haw River Assembly, serving as volunteer crew for an ambitious river festival. In addition, Hudson is known for educating her community about the life and work of enslaved poet George Moses Horton. She teaches creative writing through conferences, universities, and her own Kitchen Table Workshops, ongoing since 2009.Hudson lives on a family farm in Chatham County, North Carolina, with her husband, Sam, her small feisty terrier DJ Calhoun, and a community of wild birds. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Proof of Life Sheila Lowe June 28, 2022 Proof of Life (Write Choice Ink 2021) is the second book in author Sheila Lowe’s Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series. In the first book (What she Saw 2013), a woman wakes up on a train with no idea about who she is or where she’s going. When the train stops, she gets off and starts walking, and someone recognizes her and gives her a ride home. She’s shocked to learn that she has two sets of identification, two completely different identities, neither of which seem familiar. Three hundred pages of character building, plot twists, extreme bravery, and scary science gone mad lead to startling revelations. The second book in the series, Proof of Life, is a gripping tale that centers on Jessica Mack, a character who hears the voices of dead people. It’s affecting her both mentally and physically and she needs to figure out how to handle it before she gets hurt. The story includes a disappointed FBI agent, a passing bicyclist with important information, a minister who understands the five “clairs ,” and a possible love interest. Jessica learns how to manage her new talent, and now she’s praying that the voices she hears can help her locate a missing child. One who is hopefully still alive. Sheila Lowe writes psychological suspense mysteries that place regular people into extraordinary circumstances. Like the fictional character Claudia Rose from her award-winning Forensic Handwriting series, Sheila is a real-life forensic handwriting expert who testifies in court cases and has written several widely sold books like Handwriting of the Famous and Infamous (2001). She’s also known for serious books such as Advanced Studies in Handwriting Psychology (2018) and Succeeding in the Business of Handwriting Analysis (2019). In her Beyond the Veil paranormal suspense series (What She Saw 2019, Proof of Life 2021), her character Claudia Rose shows up as a side character. Sheila writes that she began researching what happens after death when her daughter was killed by a boyfriend in 2000. She was comforted to learn that there was life after earth, and three different mediums told her that her daughter, Jennifer, would channel the book through her. When she isn’t writing, Sheila teaches handwriting analysis to students around the world, and she lives in Ventura, California. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The House of Marvellous Books Fiona Vigo Marshall May 24, 2022 The House of Marvellous Books by Fiona Vigo Marshall (Fairlight Books 2022) describes a publishing house called The House of Marvelous Books that houses an old library in the center of London and hovers on the brink of financial disaster. Told in journal entries over the course of a year by Junior editor Mortimer Blakely-Smith, the publishing house seems to stumble into one disaster after another. The publisher focuses on safety issues, his assistant has cataracts and is nearly blind, and the chief editor is obsessed with finding a famous missing manuscript buried somewhere in the building. Mortimer grapples with his elderly uncle, annoying co-workers, a close friend who is in prison for stealing precious books from libraries all over the world, and hearsay about mysterious Russian buyers. Along the way, he attends fabulous concerts, reads Proust, and works on his own novel, about the patron saint of navigation. Fiona Vigo Marshall was born in London and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Her debut novel Find Me Falling , published by Fairlight Books in 2019, was shortlisted for the Paul Torday Memorial Prize 2020. The House of Marvellous Books is her second novel. Her short stories and poems have been nominated for numerous awards, including the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize, which she won in 2016 with her short story ‘The Street of Baths’. Her work has appeared in Prospect, Ambit, The Royal Society of Literature Review, Orbis International Literary Journal , and The London Journal of Fiction. When not writing or reading, Fiona enjoys walking, swimming in the sea, and attending to her allotment or garden. She has a lifelong love of classical music. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Love Among the Recipes Carol M. Cram April 20, 2021 Today I talked to Carol Cram about her new book Love Among the Recipes (New Arcadia Publishing, 2020). After Genna’s husband betrays her, she finds a way to spend six months writing a cookbook based on the city of Paris. In this lighthearted women’s fiction, Cram’s protagonist pairs both famous and lesser-known Parisian landmarks with often mouth-watering sounding recipes. Genna shops and cooks, sometimes for friends, sometimes for her landlord, but always for herself. Each chapter starts with a description of a different kind of macaron in varying colors and flavors that often describe the mood of the chapter that follows. In addition to exploring Paris, making friends with people she meets in her French class, and meeting a charming widower, Genna begins to understand that she has it in her power to create her own happiness. Carol M. Cram loves the arts, food, travel, and writing novels about people who follow their passions. Three previous novels of historical fiction, The Towers of Tuscany (Lake Union Publishing, 2014) and A Woman of Note (Lake Union Publishing, 2015), and Muse on Fire (New Arcadia Publishing 2018) are also about women in the arts, and she matches her travel-inspired vignettes with pastel drawings created by her husband, Canadian artist Gregg Simpson in Pastel & Pen: Travels in Europe (New Arcadia Publishing, 2018). Carol expresses her enthusiasm for the written word, the arts, and her love of travel on Artsy Traveler ( www.artsytraveler.com ) and Art In Fiction ( www.artinfiction.com ), and on the Art In Fiction Podcast in her chats with authors who write novels inspired by the arts. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Lea Ariela Freedman May 10, 2022 Lea Roback was a feminist and labor activist who was raised in a large Jewish family in Quebec, Canada. In the novel Lea (Linda Leith Publishing, 2022), Ariela Freedman describes a strong, vibrant woman whose life spanned the 20th century. Lea Roback spoke four languages, and wherever she was in the world, she fought for workers’ rights, votes for women, access to contraception and abortion, pay equity, social housing and free education. She was often in the center of world history—in Berlin during the rise of Nazism and Moscow during Stalin’s reign of terror. She was intelligent, passionate about equality, and ultimately worked in factories as a union organizer. The real Lea is remembered by the work of the Lea Roback Foundation, which offers scholarships to women, the Lea Roback Research Centre, which focuses on inequality and public health; and the Maison Parent-Roback, which links community organizations that advance women's rights and social justice causes. Ariela Freedman was born in Brooklyn and has lived in Jerusalem, New York, Calgary, London, and Montreal. She has a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches literature at Concordia's Liberal Arts College in Montreal, where she lives with her family. Her debut novel, Arabic for Beginners (LLP, 2017), was shortlisted for the QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and won the 2018 J. I. Segal Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, A Joy to be Hidden (LLP, 2019), was shortlisted for the Segal Prize in 2020, and was a finalist for the The Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. When she isn’t reading, writing or teaching, Freedman loves riding her bike, hiking in the countryside, and wandering through the city. For the last two years, she has deeply missed travelling. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Degrees of Difficulty Julie Justicz October 21, 2019 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. Ben’s mother, Caroline, a lit professor at Emory, is barely holding herself together with mind-numbing drugs. His father, Percy, a successful contractor in Atlanta, keeps hoping to find an institution that will provide the kind of care Ben needs. His sister, Ivy angrily longs to escape after graduation, and his brother, Hugo gives up his own dreams to take care of Ben. Degrees of Difficulty (Fomite Press, 2019) follows the family over several decades as they each come to an understanding of how Ben affected their lives. Born and raised in England, Julie Justicz moved to the Bahamas when she was ten, and then to the United States as a teenager. Julie comes from a family of Olympians: Her father George Justicz rowed for Great Britain in the 1960 Rome Olympics; her brother Robert competed in the Special Olympics as a swimmer; and Julie has been a proud participant as a triathlete in the Gay Games (formerly known as the Gay Olympics). She earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and received an MFA in creative writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. As an attorney and advocate, Julie currently works on civil rights issues in Chicago. She lives in Oak Park, Illinois with her spouse, Mary, and their two children. When she’s not trying to read, Julie likes to run - physical motion seems to result in creative composting. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Burnt House Lowell Mick White January 28, 2020 After her parents' divorce, Jackie Stalnaker is sent to her grandmother’s dilapidated house in a tiny town in West Virginia. It’s a hot, mid 1970’s summer in Burnt House, where the only thing to look forward to is a weekly old movie shown at the library. But Jackie is grateful to be away from her squabbling parents and delighted with the crazy characters she meets in Burnt House (Buffalo Times Press, 2018). In these charming short stories, White creates a world of complex characters, some lazy, cranky or perfectly satisfied, others lonely and lost, but all connected by history and their shared geography. Lowell Mick White is the author of six books and his work has been published in many literary journals, including Callaloo , Iron Horse Literary Review , and Short Story . A winner of the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, awarded by the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, White lived in Austin, Texas, for 25 years, at various times making his living working as a cab driver, a shade tree salesman, and an Internal Revenue Service bureaucrat. He is Editor of Alamo Bay Press and has been the National Endowment for the Arts Artist-in-Residence at the federal prison in Bryan, Texas. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, White is an Instructional Associate Professor at Texas A&M University, where he earned his PhD. When not reading or writing, White enjoys drinking beer, eating turkey legs, and taking long drives in the Texas countryside. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< 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

< Back Father Guards the Sheep Sari Rosenblatt March 30, 2021 In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, Father Guards the Sheep (University of Iowa Press, 2020), by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them. Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh. Sari Rosenblatt earned an MFA (1984) from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has won awards for her stories from Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry , Glimmer Train, New Millenium Writings, and Ms Magazine . She has been published in the Iowa Review and has taught fiction writing at several schools, most recently the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. Her first book of short stories, Father Guards the Sheep, was winner of the 2020 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Sari has also completed a novel, "Daughter of Retail", based on the first short story in Father Guards the Sheep . Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< 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

< Back Sunflowers Beneath the Snow Teri M. Brown February 15, 2022 Teri M. Brown's novel Sunflowers Beneath the Snow (Atmosphere Press 2022) opens in 1973 with a Ukrainian man being spirited out of the USSR. He’s part of the resistance and his cover was blown. Ivanna, his wife is told that he died in another woman’s bed, and she never wants to hear his name again. Loyal to the Soviet Union, Ivanna manages to raise her daughter Yevtsye, who grows up, falls in love, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter, Ionna. Then Gorbachev comes to power and the Soviet Union collapses, leaving Ivanna in shock but offering hope to Yevtsye, Danya, and their daughter. The years pass, and Ionna wants to learn languages and see the world. She takes a job at an American summer camp and slowly overcomes the prejudices of the rest of the staff. Then the Soviet army invades Crimea, and she can’t get home, so she heads to New York City in hopes of blending into the large Ukrainian population. This is a story of resilience and courage. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Cry of the Hangman Susanna Calkins November 16, 2021 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. She once worked as a maid for the judge, but she learned how to read and now works as a sort of printer’s apprentice. It turns out that a stash of the judge’s papers has been stolen. Then, while Lucy is working, trying to interest buyers in the books she has helped print, a rival storyteller poaches the crowd she has convened, and it becomes clear that his tales are directly connected to the judge’s stolen papers. When she hears someone being murdered, and that too is connected to the judge’s papers, Lucy is determined to figure out who is trying to destroy his name. In The Cry of the Hangman (Severn House, 2021), the historian Susanna Calkins also manages to convey 17th century British views about order and justice, crime and punishment, legal and illegal marriages, the possibility of moving out of the social order to which one is born, and enthusiasm for the accessibility of printed materials. Susanna Calkins writes the award-winning Lucy Campion historical mysteries set in 17th century London and the Speakeasy Murders set in 1920s Chicago. Her books have been nominated for the Anthony, Agatha, Mary Higgins Clark, the Lefty awards, and her third mystery received the Macavity. Holding a doctorate in history, she is currently an educator at Northwestern University. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and two sons. When she’s not writing or working--or maybe when she is--she enjoys interesting wines, beers and cocktails. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next