Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises.

Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work.

Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade.

Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media.

In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Tamara Jong about her memoir, Worldly Girls (Book*hug Press, 2025).

Tamara Jong’s powerful memoir documents the slow unravelling of her connection to her faith and the tragic history of her fractured family, shining a light into the dark corners of memory that have haunted her well into adulthood.

With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

About Tamara Jong: 

TAMARA JONG is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, ON). Worldly Girls is her first book.

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Simone Lerrante is a Belgian orphan whose memory is damaged by the trauma of her father being shot by Nazis and her subsequent escape to England. From 1940 to 2000, we see 9-year-old Simone standing through the long voyage and later through various perspectives of those whose lives she touches. From Sussex, she reaches New York and ends up across the states, married, divorced, and alone. She falls in love with literature, experiences new traumas, but cannot remember her early years. Over the years, she recalls snippets of the parents she loved, the life she escaped, and the people who saved her along the way. Janet Burroway’s beautiful novel is a remarkable portrait of a fascinating woman.

Janet Burroway is the author of poems, plays, essays, children’s books, a memoir and nine novels, including The Buzzards; Raw Silk; Opening Nights; Cutting Stone (all Notable Books of NYTBR); and Simone in Pieces (Nov. 2025). Her Writing Fiction, the most widely used creative writing text in America, is now in a tenth edition; her four-genre text Imaginative Writing is in its fifth. Her plays have been produced and read in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and London. Her stories and poems appear in many literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Narrative Magazine, and Five Points. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University and winner of the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Brian Evenson is the author of over a dozen books of fiction, most recently Good Night Sleep Tight (Coffeehouse Press 2024). His novel Last Days won the American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press) was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He has translated work by Christian Gailly, Jean Frémon, Claro, Jacques Jouet, Eric Chevillard, Antoine Volodine, Manuela Draeger, and David B. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the Critical Studies Program at CalArts.

Brian Evenson’s Reports (2018) and Further Reports (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2024) are interrogations. Relationships real and imagined—with bygone chairs, vanished kitchen implements, friends of yore—and the linguistic positioning that defines such interactions are subject to particular scrutiny. In turns intimate and speculative, paranoid and expository, disparate and amalgamated, Evenson’s observations and inquiries into the nature of connection, description, and signification will permit you, too, to question the meanings that make your life.

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Marcy Dermansky is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Hurricane Girl, Very Nice, The Red Car, Bad Marie, and Twins. She has received fellowships from McDowell and the Edward F Albee Foundation. She lives with her daughter in Montclair, NJ. Today we are discussing Hot Air (Knopf, 2025)

Recommended Books:

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published 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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Archivum (Pavillion Poetry at Liverpool UP, 2025) by Dr. Theresa Muñoz is a book – wise, funny and inventive by turn – that explores what it means to look at artefacts in an archive, and how these objects resonate with events in our lives. Imagined as a walk across Edinburgh, landmarks such as the Balmoral clock, National Library of Scotland, Meadows, Canongate Kirkyard and Water of Leith provide a meditative backdrop to the poems.

The archives - in particular the archive of the writer Muriel Spark – are used to create a space to come to terms with the complexities of a life and how we in turn tell stories about ourselves: the depths of our familial relationships, relationship breakdowns and the death of a parent. What’s found in the archive’s boxes -- including recipes, telegrams, letters -- stirs and amplifies feelings of belonging, disorientation, triumph and grief.

With a focus on women writers and interracial relationships, the book explores objects belonging to significant figures in the poet’s imaginary: along with Spark, the actor Maggie Smith, poet Elizabeth Bishop, the 19th century slave owner’s daughter Eliza Junor and psychotherapist Marie Battle Singer.

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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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Governor General Award-winning author Sadiqa de Meijer about her new essay collection, In the Field (Palimpsest Press, 2025). 

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

In The Field, Sadiqa de Meijer's follow up to the Governor General's Award winning alfabet/alphabet, brings us essays that move searchingly through their central questions. What meaning does a birthplace hold? What drives us to make contact with a work of art? How do we honour the remains of the dead? This writing constitutes a form of fieldwork grounded in intimate observation. In The Field is an extraordinary book, one that invites readers to bring renewed attention to their own lives and to embrace the subjectivity in the experiences of others.

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Howard Lovy is a journalist, book editor, and author with forty years of experience covering everything from Jewish issues and the Mideast conflict to nanotechnology and the auto industry. His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Longreads, The Jerusalem Post, The Jewish Daily Forward, and other publications.

Howard’s debut novel, Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story, follows two musicians who reconnect in middle age when their 40-year-old song goes viral. The book explores themes of music, faith, aging, and second chances.

In addition to writing and editing, Howard produces and hosts podcasts for the Alliance of Independent Authors. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, Heidi, and their dog, Henry.

About Found and Lost: "In 1985, they met by chance.
As a young guitarist and violinist, Jake and Cait created something transcendent each time they locked eyes and finished each other’s musical phrases.... until the music stopped.
Forty years later, the song that started it all brings them back together. But time changes everything."

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In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Aamir Hussain about his debut novel, Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn, 2025).

In a battle of words and beliefs, a young woman must defend her city against zealotry during the Islamic Golden Age.
After his long-time scribe retires, Khadija’s father, the city’s leading jurist, offers his introverted daughter the opportunity to take on the role of his assistant. In accepting, Khadija is thrust into her community, the medieval hilltop city of Medina’tul-Agham, where she, as a motherless young woman, has spent little time. Led by Imam Fatima and guided by the Circle of Mothers, it is a matriarchy — the only one in the empire. Though forced to set aside her quiet life among the books and parchments of her family home, Khadija thrives, finding her power and place in the world with the support of her new friends and strong female mentors.
Yet Khadija’s idyllic new life is shattered when fanatical forces weaponize Sharia law to threaten the very fabric of the society. Using only the power of her parchment and quill, Khadija must win the support of the people and write fatwas to fight against injustice, or the peace and prosperity of her city will be nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history.

About Aamir Hussain:

Aamir Hussain was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario.

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One woman's deadly obsession with a haunted archival film precipitates her undoing in Black Flame (Tor Nightfire, 2025) from the USA Today bestselling author of Manhunt, Gretchen Felker-Martin. A cursed film. A haunted past. A deadly secret. The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her. As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control. Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind. Do you want it? More than anything? Also by Gretchen Felker-Martin: Manhunt Cuckoo

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