Burned By Books

Kashana is the author of the novel The Survivalists, which was published in January 2023 by Soft Skull Press. She’s also a TV writer who has written for The Great North and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and a former contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. She has also written for The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Rolling Stone, among other publications.

Recommended Books:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations--about her parents' hollow marriage, her father's double life and tortured sexual identity--fundamentally changed Priscilla's perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him.

A wrenching story about what it means to be the daughter of a demanding parent, a revelatory window into the impact of divorce, and a searching reflection on the nature of art and criticism, The Critic's Daughter is an unflinching account of loss and grief--and a radiant testament of forgiveness and love.

Priscilla Gilman is the author of the previous memoir The Anti-Romantic Child and a former professor at Yale and Vassar. Her other writings have appeared in the New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

-Guest Hosted with Professor Corey McEleney, Fordham University

Recommended Books:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Today I talked to Deepti Kapoor about her new novel Age of Vice (Riverhead, 2023).

Deepti Kapoor grew up in northern India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. The author of the novel Bad Character, she now lives in Portugal with her husband.

Recommended Books:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Today I talked to Daisy Alpert Florin about her new novel My Last Innocent Year (Henry Holt, 2023).

Daisy Alpert Florin attended Dartmouth College and received graduate degrees from Columbia University and Bank Street Graduate School of Education. She is a recipient of the 2016 Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship at Sarah Lawrence College and was a 2019–20 fellow in the BookEnds novel revision fellowship, where she worked with founding director Susan Scarf Merrell. A native New Yorker, Daisy lives in Connecticut with her family.

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Christopher M. Hood is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the Dalton School in New York City and lives nearby with his wife and daughter. He received an MFA in Poetry from UC Irvine. The Revivalists (Harper, 2022) is his debut novel.

Book Recommendations:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Sanaë Lemoine is the author of The Margot Affair and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. She was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia, and now live in New York. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University.

Book Recommendations:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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MATTHEW SALESSES is the author of eight books, including The Sense of Wonder, which comes out in January 2023 from Little, Brown. Most recent are the national bestseller Craft in the Real World (a Best Book of 2021 at NPR, Esquire, Library Journal, Independent Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, and others) and the PEN/Faulkner Finalist and Dublin Literary Award longlisted novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear. He also wrote The Hundred-Year Flood; I’m Not Saying, I’m Just Saying; Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity; The Last Repatriate; and Our Island of Epidemics (out of print). Also forthcoming is a memoir-in-essays, To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time.

Book Recommendations:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Dan Kois is the author of three nonfiction books: How to Be A Family, a memoir; The World Only Spins Foward, an oral history of Tony Kushner's Angels in America (with Isaac Butler); and Facing Future, part of the 33 1/3 series of music criticism. He's a longtime writer, editor, and Podcaster at Slate. He lives in Arlington, Virginia, with his family.

Book Recommendations:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Vanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer with a freelancing habit. Primarily interested in inequality, corporate power, the American Left, and Washington D.C. She also loves a good meandering essay.

Book Recommendations:



Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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Lisa Swayze is the General Manager and Buyer at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca’s cooperatively owned independent bookstore. You’ve heard me mention Buffalo Street Books on all episodes—and it is Lisa who has really transformed the store into a community space for all of our community, where anyone can find themselves represented in the books, events, and atmosphere of the bookstore.

Hillary Smith is Southern Pomo and Coastal Miwok and originally from Northern California. She has been a bookseller on and off since 2009. In December 2021 she left her job as an indie bookstore manager in California and moved to Glens Falls, New York. She started Black Walnut Books as a queer and Native pop-up and online bookstore focusing on Indigenous, BIPOC and queer authors. In January Black Walnut Books will become a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the Shirt Factory in Glens Falls.

Hannah Oliver Depp is the owner of Loyalty Bookstores in Petworth, DC and Silver Spring, MD. Loyalty serves all readers as a diverse, intersectional feminist bookstore and programming space. Oliver Depp is a founding member of the American Bookselling Association Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and serves on the boards of Bookshop.org and as The President of the New Atlantic Independent Bookseller’s Association (NAIBA).

Books Recommended:

All the recommended books from our three booksellers can be found at the website, burnedbybooks.com

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.

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