New Books Network

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with award-winning poet Stephanie Bolster about her new book, Long Exposure (Palimpsest Press, 2025). After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster's fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through. Stephanie Bolster has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth, appeared with Brick Books in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pat Lowther Award. Her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems (Véhicule Press, 1998) won the Governor General's and the Gerald Lampert Awards, and her second, Two Bowls of Milk (McClelland & Stewart, 1999), won the Archibald Lampman Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Award. Her work has been translated into French (Pierre Blanche: poèmes d'Alice, Les Éditions du Noroît, 2007), Spanish, German, and Serbo-Croatian. She edited The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 (Tightrope), the inaugural volume in that ongoing series; and co-edited Penned: Zoo Poems (Signal/Véhicule, 2009). Born in Vancouver, she grew up in Burnaby, BC, now lives in Pointe-Claire, Québec on the Mohawk (Kanien'kehá:ka) territory of Skaniatará:ti, and has taught creative writing at Concordia University in Montréal since 2000. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Histories of Black-Jewish cultural interaction often focus on how Jews adopted and adapted Black vernacular music—ragtime, jazz, swing, R&B, blues—as performers, promoters, managers, club owners, and record labels. The phenomenon of African American musicians who performed Yiddish and cantorial music in and for the Jewish community in theaters, on record, on radio, and in concert between the World Wars deserves such scholarly inquiry. This talk will honor the memory of now forgotten Black cantors – Mendele der Shvartser Khazn, Reb Dovid Kalistrita, Abraham Ben Benjamin Franklin, Thomas LaRue Jones, and Goldye di Shvartse Khaznte, the first known Black woman cantor. This talk by award winning producer, author, and ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik will feature dozens of historic graphics, translations of period Yiddish newspaper previews, ads, and reviews, and the playing of the one known 1923 Yiddish and Hebrew recording of Thomas Jones LaRue. This lecture originally took place on June 15, 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson famously argued that Shakespeare is enduringly popular because he “is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Johnson’s view largely prevailed until the late twentieth century, when it was challenged by a growing scepticism about the existence of a general human nature. In Thinking Through Shakespeare (Princeton UP, 2026), eminent literary critic David Womersley pushes back against this change by exploring how Shakespeare’s plays think through—and invite us to think through—deep human questions of lasting importance.Thinking Through Shakespeare explores four perennial human problems: personal identity, the distinction between civilization and barbarism, the relation between political power and religious authority and the tension between means and ends. It examines the history of these problems, from antiquity to today, and traces how Shakespeare engages with them in the great tragedies—Othello, Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear—but also in his other plays. Without arguing that human nature is universal or unchanging, or that Shakespeare has some special access to timeless wisdom, the book makes the case that his drama is powerful because it serves as a forensic tool, probing rival perspectives on questions that have preoccupied many people in many societies over many centuries.By revealing in new ways how Shakespeare’s plays are animated and driven by central human problems, and why he should again be viewed as the great poet of human nature, Thinking Through Shakespeare opens up a richer understanding and appreciation of his work. David Womersley is the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. His books include Divinity and State, Gibbon and the “Watchmen of the Holy City” and The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He is also the editor of many books, including the Penguin Classics editions of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and David Hume’s complete essays. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

As detailed in Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay (Penguin, 2026) by Mary Lisa Gavenas, as the only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that reads like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel. Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at sixteen, she is a grandmother at thirty-four. When she is not cooking or cleaning or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. The work has no salary and no security but she sticks with it, sure that direct selling will make her dreams come true. In 1963, after she has been divorced three times and widowed twice, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman in the world. Maybe the most famous ever. Based on fifteen years of research, Selling Opportunity gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory. Here, for the first time, is the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream. 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/new-books-network

How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers. The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding places are intrinsic to human affairs, while reconsidering the possibilities of relating ethnographically to what appears to be the extraneous. Francisco Martínez highlights how basements, garages, bunkers, holes, and cottages favor alternative forms of sociality, allowing local residents to redesign the terms of their public selves. Shadow spaces in this liminal region, at the border with Russia, are created against the institutional demand to be knowable. People engage in ordinary forms of ambivalence and refusal to negotiate a sense of loss and the consequences of a century of extractive activities. The Future of Hiding invites cross-disciplinary dialogue on topics like mining, transparency, belonging and cultural landscapes, offering insights into infrastructure's reproduction and destruction, recolonizations, and the ecological memory of a sacrificed area. Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. He was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists and currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. His email address is [email protected]. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network