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A multimedia collection dedicated to John D. Smith on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, edited by Wendy J. Phillips Rodríguez and Simon Brodbeck. Open Access here Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, novelist Imbolo Mbue and critic Sarah Dimick dive into the literary ecosystem from an author’s perspective. Imbolo recalls her formative experiences in public libraries when she first emigrated from Cameroon to the United States, and how her encounters with American literature, especially Oprah’s Book Club picks, shaped her sense of literary possibility. Imbolo’s first novel, Behold the Dreamers, was itself an Oprah’s Book Club selection. In a conversation that moves across Imbolo’s career, from Behold the Dreamers to How Beautiful We Were to the newly released Every Story Is a Love Story, Imbolo and Sarah probe multiple dimensions of the literary ecosystem. They take up networks of literary production: how Imbolo writes both with and against readers’ expectations and desires; how her reading shapes her writing, particularly the memoirs of forgiveness (or the lack thereof) that informed Every Story Is a Love Story; the editorial pressures against which she has been glad to stand her ground, and the ones that have shaped her work for (in her assessment) the better, including a critical intervention from Random House’s Andy Ward that moved Every Story is a Love Story away from punishment and toward the urgent if unsexy problem of forgiveness. They also address what Sarah suggests is another unity across Imbolo’s fiction, in addition to a formal and thematic interest in aftermath: namely, the energy infrastructures—oil, transit, cars—that allow characters to move forward through the world even as they enact extractive harm.  Mentions: Oprah's Book ClubNgũgĩ wa Thiong'oChinua AchebeToni MorrisonJonathan FranzenJunot DíazSalman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted MurderMichelle Obama's BecomingYiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely GrowRoxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"Random House's Andy WardVerdi’s AidaArundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Be the main character in the story that is your life – that is the ambition of eight remarkable women featured in Anne Fernald’s collective biography, Her Own Voice, guided by Virginia Woolf. We talk about Margaret Wise Brown, groundbreaking author of Goodnight Moon, addressed to young children and inspired by Gertrude Stein and Woolf, Jessie Redmon Fauset, prolific novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Dorothy Arzner, the only woman director to make both silent and sound films, inventor of the boom mic, and five other remarkable women who ignite our ability to change within the contingencies of our lives. Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Romantic Media and Wartime Networks (Stanford UP, 2026) by Dr. Deven Parker tells the story of how Britain revolutionized its state communication networks on an unprecedented scale during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, setting the stage for our modern infrastructure state where connectivity and surveillance go hand in hand. Dr. Parker argues that Romantic literary representations of this state communications network managed to reveal—and, on occasion, to resist—its ideological functions. In a wide-ranging study drawing upon an archive of military surveys, spy reports, trial records, and even ladies' hand fans, Dr. Parker reveals the scope and impact of the British government's investments in shutter telegraphs, mapping projects, and postal routes across two decades of war with France. The writers of the Romantic period, meanwhile, were cognizant of the political motivations undergirding the state's overhauled networks, which were designed to facilitate and speed up but also to more easily control communications. Taking up familiar writers including Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Charlotte Smith, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey—as well as lesser-known figures such as radical playwright John Dent, inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and the proto-science fiction novelist Jane Loudon—Dr. Parker reads Romantic literature for its astute chronicling and interrogation of the material hardware of the state's media ecology. 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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Irina Shevelenko's Russian Archaism: Nationalism and the Quest for a Modernist Aesthetic (Cornell University Press, 2024) discusses the late-19th and early 20th century search for an archaic Russian folk tradition that could ground Russian art in an idiom independent of “The West.” While the [re]discovery of 14th and 15th century icon painting partially achieved this goal, Russian Modernists most often ended up creating art that was entirely new and which owed little to Russian folk tradition; the audience for this art was, after all, that same Western and Westernized elite.    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Chekhov liked to joke that he was a doctor by profession and merely did literary work in his spare time. Behind the joke lies an intriguing truth. We remember Chekhov as a towering literary figure, but medicine and humanitarian work occupied much of his life and profoundly shaped the way he encountered human suffering. Nowhere is this more striking than in his remarkable journey across Siberia to Sakhalin Island. Travelling through an immense and unforgiving landscape to investigate conditions in the penal colony, Chekhov undertook an expedition that he would remember as one of the defining experiences of his life. Written by a neuroscientist and practising clinician, Chekhov’s Sakhalin Journey: Doctor, Humanitarian, Writer (Bloomsbury, 2023) follows Chekhov along this extraordinary route, drawing on his own account to reveal the doctor, humanitarian and observer behind the celebrated author. The result is a richer portrait of Chekhov, one that asks us to see his medicine and literature not as competing lives, but as different expressions of the same searching attention to human experience and the determination to not ‘do nothing’ to improve human lives. Professor Jonathan Cole (MA, MSc, DM, FRCP, FTPS), is a British consultant clinical neurophysiologist, author, and researcher known for combining neuroscience with first-person patient narratives. He serves as a consultant at the University Hospital in Dorset, a visiting professor at Bournemouth University, and has served as the President of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Inspired by his mentor and friend Oliver Sacks, Cole’s work heavily emphasizes the subjective, lived experience of individuals surviving rare or severe neurological conditions. Jonathan is one of those rare scientists who combines both the rigor of scientific investigations with literary endeavours and even theatre.  I will include both Jonathan’s personal website and his website for his collaborations in theatrical productions. Dr. Anya Daly is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics in the School of Arts and Society, University of Tasmania. Interdisciplinary collaborations are at the core of Anya’s research interests. She investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, the philosophy of perception, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, ethics, aesthetics and Buddhist Philosophy.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is the place of poetry in the modern world? In Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025), Keegan Cook Finberg, an Associate Professor of English at University of Maryland, Baltimore County narrates the contemporary history of poetry as the emergence of a public literary form. The book shows poets' engagement with social and economic changes, such as the rise of bureaucracy and office jobs, suburbanisation, feminism, and neoliberalism, alongside changes in literary forms and literary practices In doing so, the analysis demonstrates both the importance of poetry to reflect social and economic change, as well as its potential as a critical force in our moment of social and economic crisis. Ranging widely across individual poets, artistic collectives, and performance activities, the book will be of interest across the humanities, as well as anyone interested in why poetry matters today.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Protestant Air: Gide, Sartre, Barthes, and the Religion of Literary Modernity (Cornell UP, 2026) focuses on the Protestant connection linking three intellectual giants of twentieth-century French thought. All three came from a Protestant background and thus shared a common marginality in a nation culturally marked by Catholicism, one that profoundly shaped their personalities, thinking, and literary careers. When Gide received the Nobel Prize in 1947, he declared that if he had represented anything as a writer, it was the "spirit of protestation." Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche explores the filiation that this spirit weaves between Gide, Sartre, and Barthes. She shows how their Protestant difference, confronted with France's Catholicity, informed their posture as writers, their conceptualization of literature, and their elaboration of the figure of the French intellectual as a counterauthority, with a distinctive positioning vis-à-vis the individual and the institution. As such, A Protestant Air examines the religious underpinnings of twentieth-century letters and politics, their interaction with the secularization of French society, and, more broadly, the historical and philosophical relationship between the Protestant ethos and modernity itself. Guest Clémentine Fauré-Bellaïche is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brandeis University; she is currently at work on two projects. The first one, tentatively titled Transnational Theologies — Religious Networks and The Making of French Thought, is centered on the reconfiguration of French thought between the wars, informed by transnational circulations, exchanges of ideas across cultural spaces, and intellectual transfers between the religious and the secular spheres. The second one is a French literary history of the notion of conspiracy, both as form and as imaginary, from Balzac and Marcel Proust to Paul Nizan and Michel Houellebecq. Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama, with research concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean. Their monograph Posthumanist Ecology in Global French Surrealism is forthcoming in 2027 from Northwestern University Press. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our second episode on “The Literary Ecosystem” features scholars of contemporary literary culture Dan Sinykin and Sarah Brouillette in conversation with host Aarthi Vadde. Like the good close readers we all are, we begin by thinking about how the metaphor of the “literary ecosystem” works. Sarah values the way it brings relationships between cultural institutions to the foreground but prefers the base-superstructure model of Marxian critique. Dan, too, moves away from “naturalizing” metaphors although he sees the ecosystem’s potential for pithily naming the interplay of literary production, circulation, and reception.From here the conversation ranges widely as we consider the economic and social forces shaping contemporary literature – be they the conglomeration of publishing houses (see Dan’s Big Fiction) or the impact of platform capitalism upon authorial labor (see Sarah’s Content Machinesand Aarthi’s We the Platform).  We acknowledge the hollowing out of institutions meant to cultivate appreciation for literature and ponder the viability of platforms like Substack for reconstituting a literary sphere. Finally, what would a discussion of the literary ecosystem be without addressing the elephant in the room: AI. We bracket the author scandals to address the supporting players under threat: the translators, the audiobook narrators, the humans who bring books to readers across languages and formats. Come for the literary sociology; stay for the inside scoop on “prompting” a dark romance novel. Mentions Marx – base-superstructure modelBruno Latour – actor-network theorySophie Bishop – Influencer CreepAndrew de Waard -  Derivative MediaPierre Bourdieu – The Rules of Art Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Agnes Heller loved being part of the Budapest School--and she hated being part of any school. In his 2019 In Memoriam piece, John explored her ambivalence about intellectual camaraderie, its virtues and its vices. This experiment in reading Public Books articles aloud--akin to Books in Dark Times and Recall This Story and Recall This B-Side--follows on from JP's earlier Hannah Arendt articles and 2026 article about the Pope and AI. You can consult the footnotes on Agnes Heller and read a transcript by heading back to the article in its original 2019 form here. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Syracuse UP, 2026). Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive sense of rootedness, sustained and nurtured by a deep care for land stewardship and embedded in a spatialized history. In Rooted Movements, Amanda Batarseh examines the epistemology of Palestinian Indigeneity based in a radical relationship to place. Against a colonial logic that often centers displacement as the chief lens through which to understand Palestinian connection to place and spatialized existence, Batarseh argues that Palestinian literature poses Indigeneity as a dialectic relying as much upon rootedness as on ideas of movement. In elaborating this tension, Batarseh develops a methodology of reading Palestinian literature that foregrounds how Palestinians negotiate space and removal through liberatory mobilization and not as a symptom of zionist, colonial violence. Reading the poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, novels, and films of writers in Palestine and in exile—from Ghassan Kanafani to Naomi Shihab Nye, Hussein Barghouthi, Raja Shehadeh, Ibtisam Azem, and Randa Jarrar—she exposes the limitations of focusing on the geopolitical borders of a modern nation-state and offers alternative imaginaries not bound by colonial spatial control. Instead, the Palestinian poetics of space Batarseh articulates engage rooted movement as an Indigenous expression of deep-seated and enduring connections to place. Palestine, this place, is not static, enclosed by military boundaries, or frozen in time before or after the Nakba, but generative and looking toward a Palestinian future.  Books and Artists mentioned in the Podcast:  Leila El-Haddad: here Dana Barqawi: here Amanda Batarseh is an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where her research and teaching focus on Palestinian literature with a broader focus on Arab cultural production in and outside of Arabic, Indigenous studies, and Mediterranean studies. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Islamic Ethics and Spiritual Sovereignty: Genres of Tradition in Muslim South Asia (U Notre Dame 2026) explores the rich vast textual archive of Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanavi, a South Asian Muslim theologian and Sufi. Mian’s deep and careful reading of Thanavi’s diverse genres of texts, such as letters, and those composed by his disciples, such as hagiographies and councils, captures the complex colonial era in which Thanavi and his students lived, but more importantly highlights how Thanavi’s Sufi community inhabited realities counter to their modern context, namely those of ethical practices and matters of the soul and heart. In traversing Thanavi's genres of writings, and using a psychoanalytical lens, Mian reflects on how spiritual sovereignty was negotiated in this one modern South Asian thinkers’ worldview, and how formulations of political to metaphysical concepts model the construction of Islamic tradition as a discursive one. This book will be of interest to those who think about South Asian Islam and Sufism. Ali Altaf Mian is the Izzat Hasan Sheikh Fellow in Islamic Studies and assistant professor of religion at the University of Florida. Shobhana Xavier is a Professor of Religious Studies at Queen’s University. More details about her research and scholarship may be found here. She may be reached at [email protected]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Wednesday, Oct. 7—Over in the blink of an eye, the best flash fiction lingers long after we finish reading it. The incandescent works collected in Library of America’s American Flash Fiction: An Anthology showcase the vitality of this literary form with a rich history and dazzling present. Join celebrated flash authors Lynne Tillman, Venita Blackburn, and Ben Loory, along with volume editor David L. Ulin, for a dive into these miniature masterpieces of deceptive depth and power. Hosted by Max Rudin Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

On July 5, 1828, more than a century before Superman arrived on Earth, a superhero took flight in Philadelphia’s night sky. Buried on page three of a small local newspaper, the announcement of his arrival appeared under the title “The Night-Hawk, No. 1” with a cryptic epigraph from Romeo and Juliet: “I’ll be a candleholder and look on.” Who and what was the Night Hawk? As Dr. Matthew Warner Osborn reveals in Night Hawk: A Nineteenth-Century Superhero and the Dawn of American Mass Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), this was the sobriquet of a mysterious columnist for the weekly Mechanics’ Free Press, the first radical socialist newspaper in America. Dressed in a mysterious cloak, the Night Hawk soared over Philadelphia, revealing the evil crimes of prominent gentlemen, fighting murderous criminals, and calling out fraudulent moral authorities.  The Night Hawk was the ingenious invention of an impoverished actor, Cornelius A. Logan, who created the character as a public champion of Philadelphia’s Working Men’s movement, the first successful American labor party. The Night Hawk’s nocturnal adventures transformed their socialist ideology into an entertaining fantasy that dramatized the struggle against industrial exploitation and the degradation of working people. The success of the character made Logan into a celebrity, and he went on to become a popular and innovative comedian on the antebellum stage. A harbinger of the superheroes we know today, the Night Hawk promises to illuminate dark secrets from the past, but he can also shed light on our present. He ignites our need to see corrupt elites unmasked and held accountable for their actions, all while protecting the innocent and oppressed. Americans have always loved to fantasize about powerful superheroes who hide behind masks while chasing bad guys, and Dr. Osborn shows in this entertaining history how the Night Hawk was perhaps the first standard bearer for that enduring mystique.  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. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Lise Shapiro Sanders is the author of Reading for Pleasure: Working Women and the Popular Romance in Early 20c Britain, published in October 2026 by Bloomsbury Academic Press.  Reading for Pleasure analyzes the early 20th-century British romance as a genre directed at young working women, including those employed in factories, shops and department stores, and the service industry. It explores a range of popular romances in the form of novels, films, and periodicals, and thinks about how these texts provided a form of affective pleasure and virtual sensory experience that indulged the sensuality of sexual desire and as well as the glamor of fashionable garments and settings. It suggests that even as popular romance foregrounded the pleasure of fantasy, it was also invested in working women’s social, sexual, and political agency. The first three chapters examine discourses of beauty, fashion, and fantasy that circulated in romance, whereas the last two chapters and the conclusion explore how these discourses came into conflict with working women’s material reality – including the need for access to contraception, sexual knowledge, and control over reproduction. Ultimately, Reading for Pleasure offers important insights into the politics of reading for pleasure, how gender, sexuality, and class shape these politics, and why there are many reasons to not only take pleasure in romance but to also take it seriously. Lise Shapiro Sanders was employed as a professor of literature and cultural studies at Hampshire College for 27 years. Her previous books include Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920 (Ohio State University Press, 2006); Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female, co-authored with Pamela K. Stone (Routledge, 2020); Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis, co-edited with Amy Bingaman and Rebecca Zorach (Routledge, 2002); and a critical edition of Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s 1875 novel Janet Doncaster (Victorian Secrets, 2017).  Jane Hwang Degenhardt is a professor English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Globalizing Fortune on the Early Modern Stage (Oxford UP, 2022) and Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP, 2012). She is also a co-editor of the academic journal English Literary Renaissance. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.