New Books in Literary Studies

Join Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Daniel Mahoney, and Carter Sneed as they discuss the second part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s memoirs of exile in the West, Between Two Millstones, Book 2: Exile in America, 1978-1994 (U Notre Dame Press, 2023) and the importance of Solzhenitsyn's work today.

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A glass slipper, a fairy godmother, a transformed pumpkin, lizard footmen and seamstress mice: these familiar images evoke a very particular story, one where hopes and dreams for a new life might come true. Adaptations of Cinderella branch out through history and across the world, from early illustrated books to modern children’s and young adult novels, and contemporary films. Cinderella: A Cultural History (Bodleian Library Publishing, 2026) by Dr. Michelle Anya Anjirbag aims to answer the question, why does Cinderella still inspire so many of us with her story?
Beginning with the literary versions of the tale that were popularized by collectors and writers such as Basile, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, this book looks back at the folktales that informed them, out to the various countries and cultures that share similar stories, and then forwards to what writers, illustrators, filmmakers and other storytellers continue to do with the Cinderella narrative. Instead of taking a strictly historical approach, it explores the ways heroes, villains, helpers and symbols appear in different interpretations, illustrations and adaptations. It draws connections between the historical and contemporary preoccupations, concerns and hopes that the Cinderella story still addresses in the 21st century, and celebrates our enduring desire for enchantment and transformation.
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.

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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

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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 Club
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Chinua Achebe
Toni Morrison
Jonathan Franzen
Junot Díaz
Salman Rushdie's Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Michelle Obama's Becoming
Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow
Roxane Gay, "Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof"
Random House's Andy Ward
Verdi’s Aida
Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me

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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.

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