New Books in Literature Marshall Poe

What’s the truth and what’s a lie? What’s a memoir, what’s a novel, and what if both are just a series of “prose blocks”? This conversation between Sarah Manguso and Tess McNulty takes up questions of writing and veracity, trauma and memory. Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, including three memoirs. Her first novel, Very Cold People, was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and her second novel, Liars, is forthcoming. Tess and Sarah discuss how the threshold between truth and fiction is often used to minimize writing by women and how characters can achieve escape velocity against the pull of violence and abuse. We learn that Sarah doesn’t imagine an audience when she writes—instead, writing articulates something felt in the body, something that remains “uncomfortable until it is so articulated.” From the Yankee thrift of book design and the writing of front matter, acknowledgements, and Sarah’s brilliant titles, we move to 70s-era typography and wordplay with the answer to Season 7’s signature question.
Mentions:

By Sarah Manguso: Very Cold People, 300 Arguments, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Two Kinds of Decay and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape in One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in A Small Box by Deb Olin Unferth, Sarah Manguso, and Dave Eggers

Hilary Mantel

Lord Byron, “If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad,” from an 1821 letter published in Volume 8 of Byron’s Letters and Journals, edited by Leslie A. Marchand.

Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game



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Joanna Lowell is known for her witty historical romances set in late Victorian England, a period both undergoing and resisting dramatic social change. Her previous novels in this series pair a young artist from the East End with her tortured muse, a duke; a runaway duchess with an admirably calm young man convinced she is a plant lover like himself; and a reluctant, poverty-stricken art forger with an art critic who is alienated from his aristocratic family. A Shore Thing (Berkley Books, 2024) follows the romantic fortunes of Kit Griffith, a former painter who now makes his living selling bicycles, and Muriel Pendrake—the intrepid, intelligent, world-traveling botanist impersonated in book 2.
Muriel has traveled to St. Ives, Cornwall, to collect seaweed—not because that is her own preference, beautiful as some of it is, but because the stodgy male chauvinist in charge of a forthcoming talk that Muriel has agreed to present in New York has declared that no other topic is acceptable for a woman. She travels in the company of her old friend James, a doctor with a secret, and they are returning to their hotel when a near-accident involving a bicycle leads to Muriel’s dramatic encounter with a semi-conscious Kit.
It’s 1888, and most of the bicycles in town are the old-fashioned penny farthings, with a huge front wheel and a tiny back one. One thing leads to another, and soon Muriel—who has never mounted a bicycle in her life, not even the kind that Kit rides, which we would now consider standard—agrees to accompany this devastatingly handsome young rake (or so she thinks) on a cycling trip around the Cornwellian coast.
Joanna Lowell lives among the fig trees in North Carolina, where she teaches in the English department at Wake Forest University. She is the author of four interconnected historical romances set in late Victorian England—most recently, A Shore Thing. She writes in other genres as Joanna Ruocco.
C. P. Lesley is the author of two historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible and four other novels—including The Merchant’s Tale, co-written with P.K. Adams. Her next novel, Song of the Steadfast, will appear early in 2025.
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Real Americans (Knopf, 2024) begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when twenty-two-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster, and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao's Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love.
In 2021, fifteen-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.
In immersive, moving prose, Rachel Khong weaves a profound tale of class and striving, race and visibility, and family and inheritance--a story of trust, forgiveness, and finally coming home.
Exuberant and explosive, Real Americans is a social novel par excellence that asks: Are we destined, or made? And if we are made, who gets to do the making? Can our genetic past be overcome?
Rachel’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist for First Fiction. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. With Lucky Peach, she also edited a cookbook about eggs, called All About Eggs. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district; she retired from that role in 2021.
Recommended Books:
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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Award winning author and short fiction writer, C. J. Spataro's debut novel, More Strange Than True (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2024) takes us in to a world of faeries and what happens when wishes do come true. After an epically shitty day, Jewell Jamieson unknowingly eats a magic-spiked meal and happens also to make a certain wish-and that's why she awakes the next morning to discover her beloved dog Oberon has been transformed into a beautiful naked man in her bed. Conflict ensues when Titania, the impulsive Queen of the Faeries, decides she wants Oberon for herself. Is Oberon simply a man who used to be a dog, or is he somehow something more? When Jewell discovers the answer, she will be faced with a devastating choice. Will she choose to save the man she's grown to love by giving him up, or will she honor his wishes and watch him die?
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Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children’s book author. A professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine. In 2020, he published The Forger’s Daughter, which the New York Times named a “Ten Best Crime Novels of 2020 selection.” His tenth novel, The Forger’s Requiem, will be released early next year.
Three essays from the Ways of Water issue are discussed today: Kristin Posehn’s “The Wave Readers” about Marshall Island natives using their intuitive, sensory skillset to navigate far-flung islands that sit only about seven feet above water; Ryan Habermeyer’s “A North American Field Guide to Glaciers,” a futuristic short story with the inklings of being a work of speculative nonfiction; and Heather Altfeld,’s “With Their Feet in the Water and Their Heads in the Fire” about dealing with intense heat, scorpions, and more, in Morocco. In each case, the climate poses unique challenges and lyrical narrative prose responses in kind with often poignant insights. A final essay covered here is Alyssa Pelish’s “The Four Notes,” a narrative discourse that displays a profound knowledge of classical music.
Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit this site.
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The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and--most heartbreaking of all--her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.
When she returns home to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle in to her routine--long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in--and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?
Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe (Knopf, 2024) is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction--a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take.
Kimberly King Parsons is the author of We Were the Universe, a novel the New York Times calls “a profound, gutsy tale of grief’s dismantling power,” and the short story collection Black Light, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and Columbia University, Parsons won the 2020 National Magazine Award for “Foxes,” a story published in The Paris Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and children.
Recommended Books:

Chelsea Bieker, Mad Woman


Ryan Chapman, The Audacity


Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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