New Books in Literature Marshall Poe

In this evocative, insightful memoir, a leading voice in Middle Eastern Studies revisits his childhood in war-torn Lebanon and his family’s fascinating history, coming to terms with trauma and desire. Water on Fire: A Memoir of War (Other Press, 2024) tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence. Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary “interpretation of dreams” dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.
Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College and was a Guggenheim Fellow (2021–22). Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies at the American University of Beirut, the University of Rochester, and Cornell University, he is the author of Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political and Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age, and editor of the MLA anthology The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda.
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Inspired by the legends of Amazon women warriors told by ancient Greek historian Herodotus and evidenced by recent archaeological discoveries in Central Asia, Akmaral (Regal House Publishing, 2024) is the latest historical fiction novel by author Judith Lindbergh. Through the story of its eponymous main character, a nomadic warrior woman living in the Central Asian steppe in the 5th century BCE, Akmaral vividly brings to life the histories, cultures, and lifestyles of the ancient Sauromatae. In this episode, Judith joins me to talk about the Sauromatae, conducting historical research as a fiction writer, and what contemporary readers can learn about our current world through stories of the past.
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A stunning debut collection of fiction and creative nonfiction-- irreverent and unglorified; loving and tender; uncomfortable and inconvenient--by a Ukrainian writer currently fighting for his country in Kyiv.
Includes the celebrated title story "The Ukraine," which was published in the New Yorker in 2022.
The Ukraine (Seven Stories Press, 2024; translated by Zenia Tompkins) is a collection of 26 pieces that deliberately blur the line between nonfiction and fiction, conjuring the essence of a beloved country through its tastes, smells, and sounds, its small towns and big cities, its people and their compassion and indifference, simplicities and complications.

In the title story, Chapeye facetiously plays with the English misuse of the article "the" in reference to Ukraine, capturing a country as perceived from the outside, by foreigners. That pseudo-kitsch, often historically shallow, and not-quite-real Ukraine resonates because of its highly engaging and brutally candid snapshots of ordinary lives and typical places.

In "One Soul per Home" an elderly woman laments that the men are dying and the young are leaving for the cities, changing the face of her small town;

In "The Unscrupulous Spirit of the Provinces," a couple of unspecified gender get stoned and go to church; and in "False Premises," a man romanticizes his younger years working for a Soviet fishing fleet only to reconstruct his nostalgia in the face of Putin's Russia.


The Ukraine conveys to readers a place that Chapeye and his countrymen are currently fighting for with their lives. The book features a preface by the author, which he composed on his phone from the front lines.
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Stella St. Vincent, a thirty-something copy editor in 1980s New York, has survived a relationship with her mother, Celia, so complicated that even the words “my daughter” give Stella pause. Celia lived life to the fullest, reinventing herself and discarding anything that no longer pleased her, including Stella’s father, whom Celia refused even to name. And when Stella rebelled by becoming the exact opposite of her mother—disciplined, buttoned-down, reliant on schedules to guarantee safety—Celia did her best to push her daughter out of that comfort zone before distancing herself from Stella as well. So the bequest in Celia’s will is no accident: Stella inherits $8,000, a ticket to Paris, and instructions to spend all the money before returning home.
Stella resists until her employer forces her to take a leave of absence. Even then, Stella spends weeks in Paris scheduling every meal and sightseeing tour—until a strange shopkeeper intent on selling a beautiful dress designed by Yves St. Laurent sends Stella on a journey that will expose her to a lost nineteenth-century painting, the artist who created it, her own past, and the sensory experiences that she has denied herself for so long.
Captivating and beautifully written, The Paris Novel (Random House, 2024) contrasts the eternal story of a young woman finding herself with a historical mystery involving a nineteenth-century artists’ model whose own quest to chart a new course for her life challenged the conventions of her time.
Ruth Reichl—author of numerous books about food, former restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, and editor in chief of Gourmet Magazine from 1999 to 2009—has also written two novels: Delicious! (2014) and The Paris Novel (2024).
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels. Her latest book—The Merchant’s Tale, cowritten with P.K. Adams—appeared in November 2023.
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Today’s book is: The Things We Didn’t Know (Gallery Books, 2024), by Dr. Elba Iris Pérez’s. A cross-cultural coming-of-age story, The Things We Didn’t Know is inspired by the author’s own experiences growing up between Woronoco, Massachusetts, and Puerto Rico. It explores Andrea Rodríguez’s childhood between Puerto Rico and a small Massachusetts factory town. Andrea Rodríguez is nine years old when her mother whisks her and her brother, Pablo, away from Woronoco, the tiny Massachusetts factory town that is the only home they’ve known. With no plan and no money, she leaves them with family in the mountainside villages of Puerto Rico and promises to return. Months later, when Andrea and Pablo are brought back to Massachusetts, they find their hometown significantly changed. As they navigate the rifts between their family’s values and all-American culture, and face the harsh realities of growing up, they must embrace both the triumphs and heartache that mark the journey to adulthood. An evocative portrait of another side of life in 1950s and 1960s America, The Things We Didn’t Know is Dr. Elba Iris Pérez debut novel.
Our guest is: Dr. Elba Iris Pérez, who is from Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, and spent her early childhood in Woronoco, Massachusetts. She taught theatre and history at the University of Puerto Rico in Arecibo, and now lives in Houston. Her semi-autobiographical debut novel, The Things We Didn’t Know, was an instant USA TODAY bestseller and the inaugural winner of Simon & Schuster’s Books Like Us First Novel Contest. She is also the author of El teatro como bandera, a history of street theater in Puerto Rico.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and show host of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.
Listeners may also be interested in:

Secret Harvests

Whiskey Tender

I Kick and I Fly

Becoming the Writer You Already Are

Night of the Living Rez


Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Please support the show by downloading and sharing episodes.
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In Greg Sarris' book The Forgetters (Heyday Books, 2024), Answer Woman, a crow, cannot come up with a story until she is asked by Question Woman, her sister. But they both want to remember those who forgot the stories – because only by retelling the stories can they learn lessons of the past. From the time before creation to the near future, Answer Woman knows stories about clouds and sky, people who might be animals, storytelling contests of the past, and lessons learned from mistakes. Greg Sarris’s creation stories represent age old Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native American storytelling traditions, whose goals are to comfort and inspire while understand human frailty and striving.
Greg Sarris is an accomplished author, university professor, and tribal leader serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He is the current board chair of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. In 1992, he co-authored the Graton Rancheria Restoration Act which restored federal recognition and associated rights to the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Native Americans of California, including the right to reestablish tribal lands.
Sarris graduated summa cum laude with a degree in English from the University of California, Los Angeles and received his Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford. He has taught American and American Indian Literature, and Creative Writing at UCLA, Stanford, Loyola Marymount University, and Sonoma State University. Currently, he serves as a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He is also a producer, playwright, and the author of several books, including the award-winning How a Mountain Was Made (2017), starred Kirkus review Becoming Story (2022), and Grand Avenue (1995), which he adapted for an HBO film, and co-produced with Robert Redford. He is co-executive producer of Joan Baez: I Am A Noise (2023) and a recent short story, Citizen (2023), was adapted by San Francisco’s Word for Word theater. He is passionate about riding his horse and remembering to connect with the landscape around him.
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