New Books in Literature Marshall Poe

The Truth Against the World (Square Tire Books, 2023) is a brilliant literary fantasy about a divided, dystopian America on the verge of war. Shane, a former Irish combat soldier with a murky past, wants to save his young friend Georgie O’Halloran, who turned his stories of Celtic history and folklore into a beautifully illustrated book. She gave the book to her professor, who published it under his name and earned millions. It became a wildly popular video game that continues to inspire a violent transformation of America by roaming gangs of murderers. Shane, already trying to free Georgie from the psychiatric institution where she’s been hidden by her money-grubbing stepmother, is devoted to finding the deceitful professor. They embark on a cross-country journey, tracked by those in power and pursued by murderers.
David Corbett is the author of seven novels, which have been nominated for numerous awards, including The Edgar. His short fiction has twice been selected for Best American Mystery Stories, and a collaborative novel for which he contributed a chapter—Culprits—was adapted for TV by the producers of Killing Eve and will appear on Hulu in December 2023. His writing guides The Art of Character and The Compass of Character have been widely praised and used by both aspiring and established authors, and he is a monthly contributor to Writer Unboxed, an award-winning blog dedicated to the craft and business of fiction.
Prior to his career as a novelist, Corbett was a senior operative with the private investigation firm of Palladino & Sutherland in San Francisco, where he worked on a number of high-profile criminal and civil litigations, including the Cotton Club Murder Case, the People’s Temple Trial, Jordan Chandler v. Michael Jackson, a RICO litigation brought by the Teamsters membership against union leaders associated with organized crime, and a number of marijuana prosecutions linked to the Coronado Company out of San Diego. In his spare time, Corbett enjoys reading history, taking hikes in the Catskills with his wife and Wheaten terrier, Fergus, and tending to the sprawling garden on their property.
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Holes splices forms of fiction and nonfiction. The narrator, a researcher of limits at an unidentified university, figures her entanglement with an unobtainable love object as the descent into a black hole. Everything she reads seems to shed light on the non-events that comprise their relationship, and study collapses into life as she struggles to separate events and forms, reality and ideation. Holes is a study in thematic fixation, engaging a range of ‘obsessional artists’ (including Yayoi Kusama, from whom the term is borrowed, Lee Bontecou, and Carolee Schneemann) for whom holes—as idea, imagery, philosophy—have proved evocative, inviting, and occasionally obliterative. In this NBN interview, Holes is exlored and discussed as an experimental biography of holes.
Hilary White is a writer and researcher, currently an IRC postdoc at Maynooth University, Ireland, working on a project entitled Forms of Sleep. She co-ran the experimental poetry reading and commission series, No Matter, in Manchester, and co-edited the zine series, Academics Against Networking. Her writing appears in MAP, Banshee, zarf, and The Stinging Fly. Holes is her first novel.
Rachel Pafe is a writer and researcher interested in modern Jewish thought, critical theories of mourning, and the boundaries of biographical writing.
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Eliza Chan’s debut novel Fathomfolk (Orbit, 2024) takes place in the semi-submerged city of Tiankawi, where humans and fathomfolk - a collection of peoples including sirens, seawitches, kelpies, and kappas - navigate an increasingly tense political situation. The novel follows half-siren Mira, the recently promoted captain of the border guard and Nami, a young exiled royal from a neighboring city as they push for political change and grapple with the city’s growing violence and social unrest.
In this interview, Chan discusses setting-as-character and the depiction of pollution and climate catastrophe in fantasy. She describes her love of folklore, the importance of depicting supportive male partners, and the role of class and poverty in the book. We also chat about creating fictional diseases and the role of motherhood in the novel.
Fathomfolk is a unique and imaginative story and it was a joy to discuss it with the author.
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In Ryan Kenedy’s debut novel, The Blameless (University of Wisconsin Press 2023 ) we meet Virginia, an exhausted adjunct professor and divorced mother of an autistic five-year-old, whose father only takes him for one weekend a month. Virginia is lonely and struggling to make a living as an adjunct professor of English. When she learns that the man who murdered her father has been released from prison despite a life sentence, she decides to confront him and mete out his just punishment. She traces Travis Hilliard to a remote place in the Mojave Desert. He’s inherited his uncle’s trailer on an isolated strip of land and is trying to rebuild his life outside of prison. Because Virginia doesn’t have anyone to care for her little boy, she brings him along for the confrontation.
Ryan Kenedy was born and raised in the working-class neighborhoods of California's Central Valley. He holds an MFA in fiction writing from California State University, Fresno, and has taught writing and literature for over twenty-five years, both as an adjunct instructor and as a tenured faculty member. He currently teaches at Moorpark College. His short fiction is forthcoming in the North Dakota Quarterly and has appeared in North American Review, The Greensboro Review, Sou'wester, and The San Joaquin Review. His debut collection of short fiction, Don’t Let Them Fall, will be published in 2025 by Johns Hopkins University Press. When he’s not teaching or writing, Ryan likes strumming his Gibson guitar and watching the Dodgers on television, biking and kayaking with his wife of twenty-eight years, visiting his son in the heart of New York City, and hiking the forest trails of Washington State. As a volunteer with Alpha USA, Ryan creates opportunities for community members to engage in honest conversations about some of life's biggest questions.
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Inspired by Virgil’s exquisitely ambivalent phrase “sunt lacrimae rerum” (there are tears of/for/in things), Andriy Sodomora, the Ukrainian “voice” of classical antiquity, has produced a series of original vignettes and essays about things: the big things in our lives (like happiness, loneliness, and aging); the small things we do or see daily, rarely paying attention to them (like a tree’s shadow or the kernels on an ear of corn); and the things (i.e., objects) to which we form connections. The selected stories presented here are the first English translations of Sodomora’s profoundly intellectual and intertextual prose. Through his nostalgic memories and recollections, Sodomora takes readers on a journey through western Ukraine, as well as through world literature, from ancient Greece and Rome to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Federico García Lorca.
The Tears and Smiles of Things: Stories, Sketches, Meditations (Academic Studies Press, 2024) has been published with the support of the Translate Ukraine Translation Program. The book was translated by Roman Ivashkiv and Sabrina Jassi.
Garima Garg is a New Delhi based journalist and author.
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Today I talked to Gretchen Felker-Martin about Cuckoo (Tor Nightfire, 2024).
From Gretchen Felker-Martin, the acclaimed author of Manhunt, comes a vicious new novel about a group of teens who must stay true to themselves while in a conversion camp from hell. Something evil is buried deep in the desert. It wants your body. It wears your skin. In the summer of 1995, seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp came face to face with it. They survived--but at Camp Resolution, everybody leaves a different person. Sixteen years later, only the scarred and broken survivors of that terrible summer can put an end to the horror before it's too late. The fate of the world depends on it. 
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