New Books in Language and Translation

Marshall Poe

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  1. 1日前

    Huang Chongkai, "The Formosa Exchange" (Honford Star, 2026)

    In this episode of the New Books Network, we talk with Jeremy Tiang about his English translation of The Formosa Exchange (Honford Star, 2026)—which will be released on September 18, 2026 (but is available for preorder).Tiang is a novelist, playwright, and translator based in New York. He has translated more than thirty books from Chinese to English—including Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building, longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize—and has served as a judge for the National Book Award for translated literature. Beyond translation, his novel State of Emergency won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, and his play Salesman之死 won a Obie Award for Outstanding New Play in 2023. Originally published in Mandarin in 2021 as 新寶島 and winner of that year's Taiwan Literature Award, The Formosa Exchange is a work of speculative fiction by Taiwanese novelist Huang Chongkai (黃崇凱). The novel kicks off with a fantastical occurrence: one night, the entire populations of Taiwan and Cuba swap places, with Taiwanese people ending up on the island of Cuba and Cuban people on the island of Taiwan. This “Great Exchange” becomes a lens for examining national identity, indigeneity, and colonialism, especially with reference to Taiwan’s and Cuba's shared position in the shadow of their much larger neighbors of China and the United States. Scholars and learners across history, political science, anthropology, literature, and beyond will find much food for thought in The Formosa Exchange. The novel is dense with allusions—it nods to Western thinkers like John Mearsheimer and Claude Lévi-Strauss, while also weaving in references to Taiwanese and Cuban literature, art, and film. Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  2. 1日前

    Michael R. Griffiths, "The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

    The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) promises to transform a decades old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death of the author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies, Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said, this book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew both critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial and Global South background from both before 1967 and Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This book provides a focused account of the early history of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and occasionally adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishized and also reviled of figures: the author. Matthis Frickhoeffer is a scholar of critical theory and French thought with a background in literature studies, linguistics and art theory. His work focuses on questions of form, semiotics, and intertextuality. He teaches at the University of Texas at Dallas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  3. 3日前

    Tsering Döndrup, "The Red Wind Howls" (Columbia UP, 2025)

    The Red Wind Howls (Columbia UP, 2025) is an unsettling, gripping, and darkly funny novel by Tsering Döndrup, one of modern Tibet’s most celebrated writers. First self-published in 2006 after no publisher was willing to take the political risk, the novel traces Tibetan experiences under Mao Zedong’s rule, from the 1958 Amdo uprising and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. Through a nonsequential narrative that moves back and forth between characters and events, The Red Wind Howls weaves together experiences of labor camps, unrelenting hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of language into a powerful exploration of twentieth-century Tibetan history. In this episode, I speak with the novel’s translator, Christopher Peacock, about the challenges of translating a work that weaves together oral storytelling and history. We discuss the recurring character Alak Drong, the novel’s striking use of dark humor, the ways its characters navigate famine, labor camps, political campaigns, and shifting systems of survival, and above all the importance of reading literature by Tibetan authors. Listeners should also seek out Chris’s translation of Tsering Döndrup’s short story collection, The Handsome Monk and Other Stories, and his article on the use of language in Tsering Döndrup’s fiction, here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  4. 8月1日

    Abdelwahab Meddeb, "Returns to Marrakesh / Retour à Marrakech" (Syracuse UP, 2026)

    Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Returns to Marrakesh, co-translated by Claudia Esposito and Laura Reeck and published by Syracuse University Press in 2026, chronicles Meddeb’s successive visits to the Red City from 1968 through the 1990s, tracing both his personal journey and Marrakesh’s transformation across three pivotal decades. Through his distinctive blend of poetic prose and attentive observation, Meddeb portrays the city as a historical crossroads shaped by Jewish and Muslim communities, different social classes, Sufi mystics, merchants, and travelers—a richly layered urban space in which cultures, histories, and spiritual traditions continually intersect. Presented in a bilingual edition featuring the original French alongside the English translation, the book introduces a wider readership to the work of one of North Africa’s most significant literary and intellectual voices. In this episode, Ibrahim Fawzy sat down with Esposito and Reeck to discuss Meddeb’s distinctive literary and intellectual presence, his movement across languages, cultures, and spiritual traditions, and his intimate portrayal of Marrakesh. They also explore the collaborative process of translating his multilingual, layered prose and consider how translation can extend—and even renew—a writer’s literary afterlife. Claudia Esposito is associate professor of French at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is author of The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the Maghreb.Laura Reeck is an independent translator and scholar. She is the author of Writerly Identities in Beur Fiction and Beyond and coeditor of Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France. Ibrahim Fawzy is an Egyptian literary translator and writer. He is the translator of Hassan Akram’s A Plan to Save the World (Sandorf Passage, 2026). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  5. 7月25日

    Galina Bogatova, "Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026)

    Casting War As Love: Russian Colonialism in Familial Terms (Palgrave Macillan, 2026) by Dr. Galina Bogatova unpacks the hidden imperial logic behind Russia’s dominance over its neighbors, revealing how the Kremlin weaponizes "familial system" myths to justify control, including its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. From the Tsarist empire to Putin’s digital propaganda, Dr. Bogatova examines how Russia portrays itself as a disciplining “father,” a self-sacrificing “mother,” or an “elder brother” to post-Soviet states, protecting, subjugating, and manipulating them in the name of unity.  Blending psychology, discourse analysis, and historical inquiry, this groundbreaking book exposes how language sanitizes oppression, legitimizes conquest, and sustains imperial ambitions. A thought-provoking exploration of power, ideology, and resistance, it offers a fresh perspective on Russia’s enduring influence over its former empire. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

  6. 7月20日

    Marie Léticée, "Camille's Lakou" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)

    Camille’s Lakou (Vanderbilt UP, 2025), a novel by Guadeloupean writer and educator Marie Léticée, tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single‑parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe‑à‑Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming‑of‑age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz‑Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well‑represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromanefrom the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakoushifts location to an impoverished urban environment. “Lakou” is translated as “courtyard” or, more colloquially, “yard.” The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood.In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée’s Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

評価とレビュー

5
5段階評価中
2件の評価

番組について

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/language

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